The Wars of Watergate (21 page)

President Nixon and his men also considered direct action, less subtle and including physical force, against “enemies.” During antiwar demonstrations in Washington in May 1971, Haldeman told the President that Charles Colson would use his connections with the Teamsters’ Union and hire some “thugs” to attack the protesters. Haldeman’s enthusiasm was unmistakable: “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do. Like … the regular strikebusters-type and all that … and then they’re gonna beat the [obscenity] out of some of these people. And, uh, and hope they really hurt ’em.” Nixon enthusiastically chimed in: those “guys” would “go in and knock their [the demonstrators’] heads off.” His contempt was obvious: “These people try something, bust ’em,” he added. Haldeman also emphasized the public-relations concern, noting that the television networks had shown some “good footage” of the unruly mobs. Nixon was anxious that the demonstrators be caught attacking the flag or carrying one upside down. Haldeman was pleased that the convicted ringleaders of the 1968 Chicago demonstrations had been involved in the current protests. “Aren’t the Chicago Seven all Jews?” the President asked. (They were not.)

The two men had a wide-ranging discussion of political “dirty tricks” that various aides had organized. Haldeman mentioned that Dwight Chapin, the President’s appointments secretary, had been in touch with “a guy that … we’re going to use … for the campaign next year.” The man—undoubtedly Donald Segretti—already had worked against Senator Muskie, then considered to be Nixon’s most likely opponent in 1972. Nixon and Haldeman were particularly pleased and amused by Colson’s attempts to disrupt Muskie’s campaign. Haldeman, with obvious relish, reported that Colson had “got a lot done that he hasn’t been caught at.” Nixon and Haldeman laughed throughout the exchange. But in that compartmentalized White House world, Haldeman was equally glad to report that “we got some stuff that he [Colson] doesn’t know anything about, too.”
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Walter Bagehot, the astute nineteenth-century British commentator on
government and constitutionalism, said that there are arguments for having a royal court and there are arguments for having a splendid court, but there could be no argument for having a mean court.

Richard Nixon knew how Vietnam policy leaks had plagued the last years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Nixon recalled Johnson as first “frustrated, then angered, and, finally, nearly obsessed by the need to stop them.” The description aptly describes Nixon’s own subsequent behavior: “I soon learned that his concerns were fully justified,” Nixon wrote. Within five months of taking office, Nixon recalled, he counted at least twenty-one major news stories apparently derived from National Security Council leaks. The subject of leaks infuriated the President, especially after the publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. “You’re going to be my Lord High Executioner from now on,” Nixon told Haldeman then. The President instructed his aide to order a loyalty test for every State Department employee, an instruction that Haldeman immediately placed on the “no-action-ever” list he kept in his mind. Charles Colson reported the President as saying: “I don’t give a damn how it is done, do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further unauthorized disclosures; I don’t want to be told why it can’t be done. This government cannot survive, it cannot function, if anyone can run out and leak whatever documents he wants to.… I want to know who is behind this and I want the most complete investigation that can be conducted.… I don’t want excuses. I want results. I want it done, whatever the cost.”
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Haldeman assigned Caulfield to find the source of leaks to columnist Jack Anderson. Caulfield uncovered possible links to Anderson from Senator Hugh Scott, the Republican leader, and his staff, as well as from some people in the Office of Management and Budget. When OMB Director George Shultz complained about the investigations, they stopped. Caulfield recommended to Haldeman that “an overt firing” of a person responsible for leaks would be a valuable deterrent.
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The President’s concerns had some validity, of course. Leaks pertaining to bargaining positions in negotiations with foreign countries certainly could weaken the government’s posture. Not all leaks are dangerous, however: what is inimical to the concern of the powerholders is not necessarily inimical to or inconsistent with the national interest. The revelations of the “secret bombing” of Cambodia were a case in point. But the Nixon Administration betrayed a concern for secrecy that transcended immediate issues of policy. In and out of office, Richard Nixon consistently was preoccupied with his place in history. To him, the control of information and documents was then—and continued to be—essential for ensuring a satisfactory standing at the bar of history. Perhaps nothing illustrated this better
than the 1971 episode involving the White House’s response to the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

On Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, the
New York Times
carried a front-page photograph of the President and his daughter Tricia, standing together in the Rose Garden following her wedding ceremony. The other side of the page carried the first installment of the “Pentagon Papers,” a 7,000-page document commissioned by Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary under Kennedy and Johnson. The study traced the origins of the American involvement in Vietnam and offered significant insight into decision-making processes in the foreign-policy and military establishments. Nothing better revealed how secrecy had served the cause of deception than the revelations in these papers. Melvin Laird, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, told the President that 98 percent of the Pentagon Papers could be declassified. But Nixon responded that “the era of negotiations can’t succeed w/o secrecy.”

Some Nixon staffers thought the publication harmless to their own interests and embarrassing only for the previous administration. Charles Colson immediately assigned his friend Howard Hunt the task of going through the papers to find unfavorable material on leading Democrats. Colson hoped that the papers would offer an opportunity to tie “our political opposition into the enemy camp.” A few days earlier, HUD Secretary George Romney made a public statement that he thought the government had a tendency to overclassify documents. Colson was infuriated and complained to Ehrlichman, demanding that Romney be reprimanded at a Cabinet meeting.
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The President later agreed with Colson. In September, he told Haldeman that the opposition had an interest in forgetting the papers, but “ours is to play it up.” Apparently, Colson had convinced him by then that the papers could be used to inflict political damage on the opposition. But when the newspapers first published the Pentagon Papers, Nixon (and Kissinger) knew better. They were aware that the publication of such secrets imperiled their own operations and created a precedent that could come back to haunt the protection of their own secrets. However tempting the political advantage of exposing chicanery in the opposition, Nixon realized that he ran the risk of exposing such deceptions as he also believed necessary for the pursuit of his own policies. Certainly, a major issue raised in the Pentagon Papers concerned deception and what one of their authors described as “the crucial question of governmental credibility.” Credibility was crucial for the current Administration at this moment especially: for the first time, a Gallup poll revealed that Americans wanted the war over “even at the risk of an eventual Communist takeover of South Vietnam.”
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Credibility was indeed at stake, since Nixon, as President, had increased the country’s investment in the war.

The
Washington Post
soon joined in publishing the Pentagon Papers. Shortly afterward, Daniel Ellsberg, a former National Security Council operative with links to the CIA, was revealed as the source of the massive leak.
Ellsberg, once a hawk in the Kennedy and Johnson years, had turned against the war. Two weeks after publication of the papers, he acknowledged his complicity in their release. That admission put the issue of the war—its necessity, its wisdom, as well as its morality—squarely at the center of public attention.

John Ehrlichman later contended that Henry Kissinger fanned the President’s passion on the Pentagon Papers issue. For Nixon, Ellsberg was a liberal antiwar intellectual who had leaked secrets; Kissinger, to be sure, shared those perceptions. But certainly, the President needed little guidance from Henry Kissinger. Nixon told Ehrlichman at one point that he would go “an extra mile to defend the security system to reassure China and friendly governments.” Both Nixon and Kissinger realized the personal danger if any president lost control over classified documents and allowed them to be used to smear his predecessors. Moreover, for Nixon the whole incident was personal. “The
Times’s
decision to publish the documents,” he later wrote, “was clearly the product of the paper’s antiwar policy rather than a consistent attachment to principle.”
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The topside of the Administration’s response involved an attempt to obtain a court order enjoining the newspapers from continued publication of the Pentagon Papers. The strategy succeeded for a few weeks, as a lower court granted a temporary order and the Supreme Court sustained it pending further arguments. The Court immediately heard lawyers from both sides, however, and in a nearly unanimous opinion lifted the injunction and allowed the newspapers to proceed with publication. Significantly, the Court decisively rejected Solicitor General Erwin Griswold’s argument that the release of the papers would affect lives, the recovery of Vietnam prisoners of war, and the peace process. Those considerations, he argued, had “such an effect on the security of the United States that [they] ought to be the basis of an injunction in this case.” The Justices thought not, but their surface unanimity masked deep feelings. Some, like Justice Hugo Black, in what proved to be his final judicial opinion, bitterly assailed the Administration and the courts for permitting even a temporary injunction. Chief Justice Warren Burger dutifully defended the Administration, however, and Justice Byron White expressed biting contempt for Ellsberg’s action and urged that the government prosecute him under the ordinary criminal statutes.

The Solicitor General had no opportunity to see the Pentagon Papers themselves, but after consulting with the State and Defense departments, he knew he had “no possible basis for objecting to the publication of the overwhelming proportion” of them. Griswold thought it a mistake to pursue the injunction proceedings, but he did not push this view hard, for he believed that Mitchell and Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian had strong pressure from Nixon to proceed. “[I]t was plain to them,” Griswold recalled, “that that’s what the top man wanted.… [K]nowing Mr. Mitchell,
I knew that meant Nixon. [Mitchell] wouldn’t take any decision from Ehrlichman or Haldeman or some of those people.” Griswold thought that the case “came out exactly as it should.” Eventually, the Administration brought criminal charges against Ellsberg (against Griswold’s recommendation), but the proceeding ended in a mistrial—ironically, because of the Administration’s own illegal behavior.
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One of the more bizarre by-products of the Pentagon Papers affair was a plan either to raid or to firebomb the Brookings Institution and to pilfer papers there belonging to Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, former National Security Council aides. These papers allegedly represented a Pentagon Papers analogue for the Nixon years. The Brookings plan has been described by three people: Ehrlichman, Dean, and Caulfield. All agreed that Charles Colson pushed the idea, but all asserted that Nixon inspired it. Caulfield testified that he talked to Colson after Colson had discussed the subject with “certain people” in the presidential entourage. Dean claimed that Nixon had demanded he obtain the Gelb-Halperin papers, and he also learned from Egil Krogh that White House people thought Dean had “some little old lady” in him because of his reluctance to go along with the plan. Dean claimed credit for thwarting the plan, but his rival John Ehrlichman insisted that he had blocked it. Only later, Ehrlichman wrote, did he learn that Nixon knew about the plan. Colson and Nixon, he claimed, had few secrets between them, but in his memoirs Colson never mentioned the subject. Meanwhile, John Dean was not so passive. He gave Krogh copies of the Brookings tax returns and proposed to “turn the spigot off” by revoking some of the institution’s government contracts.
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The Pentagon Papers affair had a substantial impact. It energized the press and endowed it with a new confidence and sense of legitimacy, given its clear triumph over governmental secrecy. Claiming almost a co-equal status with governmental institutions, the media managed to identify themselves collectively as the people’s paladin against the impersonal, devious forces of government. This constituted a further weakening of an already precarious popular faith in the efficacy of government and heightened the Administration’s already substantial suspicions of the media. Thus, the Pentagon Papers incident intensified the adversarial relationship between the Administration and the media, a relationship that was to deteriorate still more sharply. These developments, together with a failure of the courts to provide the desired protection and relief demanded by the Administration, led directly to one of the most fateful decisions of the Nixon presidency: the creation of the Plumbers.

The Plumbers synthesized the concern of the White House for controlling and disciplining the bureaucracy, as well as its willingness to utilize illegal
methods and abuses of power for doing so. The President himself left no doubt on this score. After the Pentagon Papers had been leaked in June 1971—almost exactly a year after Hoover had frustrated the grandiose Huston Plan—Nixon “wanted someone to light a fire under the FBI in its investigation of [Daniel] Ellsberg, and to keep the department and agencies active in pursuit of leakers. If a conspiracy existed, I wanted to know,” Nixon wrote, “and I wanted the full resources of the government brought to bear in order to find out. If the FBI was not going to pursue the case, then we would have to do it ourselves.… I wanted a good political operative who could sift through the Pentagon Papers as well as State and Defense Department files and get us all the facts on the Bay of Pigs, the Diem assassination, and Johnson’s bombing halt.… I wanted ammunition against the antiwar critics, many of whom were the same men who, under Kennedy and Johnson, had led us into the Vietnam morass in the first place.” (Apparently Henry Kissinger did not hear the President. He later solemnly stated that “from the beginning Nixon thought it improper to place the blame for the Vietnam war on his predecessors.”)