Being Nixon: A Man Divided (23 page)

For decades after,
historians argued. The colorful Mrs. Chennault bragged about playing the role of spy in her memoirs, but was she
exaggerating?
*
²
The FBI wiretaps strongly suggest that the Nixon campaign was signaling Saigon to go slow, but they are not conclusive. The image of Nixon as a dark trickster, paranoid about Johnson stealing the election from him, skirting if not breaking the law to stop the plot, perhaps fits the familiar Nixon narrative a little too neatly. In 1991, asked about the “myth” of the Chennault Affair by his friendly biographer, Jonathan Aitken, Nixon did not deny a role for Mrs. Chennault, but he downplayed it. She would “bend John Mitchell’s ear as to what was going on and what our position should be,” Nixon wrote Aitken in 1991. “Mitchell would puff on his pipe, listen respectfully, and pass on any information only when he thought it might involve important facts which I did not have from other sources.” In other words, Mitchell’s role was entirely passive. So was Nixon’s. Furthermore, “Thieu didn’t need to hear what Chennault claims she told him,” Nixon said. “Thieu knew I was hardline….Thieu didn’t need to be told by Mrs. Chennault that his interests would be better served by having me in the White House than Humphrey.”
⁴³

What is the truth? The most credible account may come from a Nixon loyalist. After the election, at Nixon’s behest, Haldeman assigned a young aide, Tom Charles Huston, to investigate LBJ’s role in the “October Surprise.” On his own initiative, Huston decided to look into Nixon’s role as well. He found “no smoking gun,” he told Nixon Library chief archivist Tim Naftali in an oral history that was declassified in 2014. But, he added, “there was no doubt that the
Nixon campaign was aggressively trying to keep President Thieu from agreeing….In typical Nixonian fashion, he wasn’t going to leave anything to chance.” The phlegmatic Mitchell was not just smoking his pipe and listening. “Mitchell was directly involved,” Huston found and concluded, “It’s inconceivable to me that John Mitchell would be running around, you know, passing messages to the South Vietnamese government, et cetera, on his own initiative.”
⁴⁴
The whole truth will never be known, but the evidence suggests that Nixon, through layers of deniability, took measures to make sure that Thieu would not agree to the peace talks in time to swing the 1968 election to Humphrey. Johnson did declare a bombing halt, and the Paris negotiations did (fruitlessly) commence, so no permanent harm was done to the peace process, which was not likely to go anywhere. The effect on Nixon was more long-lasting. He continued to believe that LBJ had tried to steal the election from him.

N
ixon wanted to be alone on election night. He put Pat, Tricia, and Julie in a separate suite on the thirty-fifth floor of the Waldorf Towers because, he wrote in his memoirs, “I did not want to make them feel that they had to keep up a cheerful front for my sake.”
¹
On the plane from Los Angeles to New York, he had brought his daughters up front to prepare them for not winning. “Actually,” Dwight Chapin said to Bill Safire, “that’s the way he prepares himself.”
²
His family memories from the last two election nights were painful. He wanted to be alone, reflected Henry Cashen, an advance man, “because he couldn’t bear to see the girls cry.”
³

There was no TV in his room. He thought network anchors and commentators were all blather and no substance. Bringing in totals from election officials around the country, Chapin found the candidate, wearing slacks, undershirt, and a bathrobe, propped up on pillows, working out of his briefcase. On yellow pads, he jotted columns of numbers, adding and subtracting electoral votes, looking for the path to victory.
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The race seesawed through the night. After midnight, it appeared—to the dismay of the Nixons—that the outcome might be decided, once again, in Illinois. Nixon had already organized Operation Eagle Eye, a team of lawyers to go to Chicago to watch the polls on election night.
⁵
Now he led in Illinois by a hundred thousand votes—but a number of Cook County precincts were still unreported. Nixon told
Bryce Harlow to get Larry O’Brien, Humphrey’s campaign manager and an old Kennedy hand, on the line: “Tell O’Brien to tell Hubert to quit playing games. We won Illinois, so let’s get this thing over with.” O’Brien was either out or refused to take the call.
⁶

By 4
A.M
., Nixon, smoking his fifth cigar of the night, was almost, but not quite, letting himself believe he had won.
⁷
His advisers kept telling him, “Don’t worry…we’re almost there,” recalled Nixon. “
Almost
. I had been
almost
there in 1960.” Haldeman and Mitchell told Nixon to take a nap, but he couldn’t sleep.

At 6
A.M
., the network commentators reported that Mayor Daley was holding back precincts in Cook County. In the suite where Pat, Julie, and Tricia sat watching the TV, Pat “got up from the couch without a word and went into the bathroom. We could hear that she was sick to her stomach,” recalled Julie.
⁸
Mitchell, sitting in the half-darkened suite down the hall with the men, called CBS News reporter Mike Wallace and cajoled him into challenging Mayor Daley to release the votes: “You tell the Mayor for every ballot box they bring in, we will bring in one. This”—he meant the 1960 election—“isn’t going to happen again.”

As the sun rose in New York, the television networks one by one called the election for Richard Nixon. At 8:30
A.M
., as ABC News rounded out the parade, Dwight Chapin burst into Nixon’s room and shouted, “You won!”

Still in his bathrobe, Nixon joined the others in the living room. He put his hand on John Mitchell’s shoulder. “Well, John,” he said, “we’d better get down to Florida and get this thing planned out.” (Chapin recalled Nixon saying, “We’re going down to Florida to put together a government.”) “Mr. President-elect, I think I’d better go up to be with Martha.” Mitchell’s wife was in a sanatorium in Connecticut, drying out. Nixon was moved, he recalled, by the Mitchells’ struggles but also because this was the first time he had ever been addressed as “Mr. President.” Chapin was watching Mitchell. He saw a teardrop trickle down the cheek of the man Nixon regarded as the Gary Cooper of Wall Street.
⁹

Humphrey called Nixon
to concede. The voice of Minnesota’s “Happy Warrior,” normally so ebullient, was full of fatigue and disappointment. Nixon was gracious and sympathetic. He made an effort to be kind with defeated politicians; he knew how they and their families felt.
¹⁰
Then he went home to his apartment at 810 Fifth Avenue. He went to his study and opened the windows wide. He put a recording of Richard Rodgers’s
Victory at Sea
on the stereo. “I turned the volume up high,” he recalled, “so everybody on Fifth Avenue, five floors below, could hear it,” Nixon recalled. He thought of a long struggle, with many reversals, but, at last, “final victory.”
¹¹

Nixon was president-elect,
by a narrow plurality of 43.4 percent to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent (Wallace picked up 13.5 percent of the vote). He began, right away, to build a government. But first he had to clean up some loose ends. On Friday night, November 8, President Johnson called him, still steaming about Mrs. Chennault. Johnson told Nixon what his intelligence agencies had picked up on the wiretap of South Vietnam Ambassador Diem: “He has just talked to the Nixon people and they say hold out, don’t do anything, we’re going to win and we’ll do better by you. Now, that’s the story, Dick, and it’s a sordid story.” Nixon did not argue. He quickly agreed with LBJ to send word to the South Vietnamese that he wanted the Saigon government to join the peace talks.
¹²

Johnson may have been, not too subtly, threatening to expose Nixon with this “sordid story.” But in this era of American politics, when campaigns stole secrets but still believed in secrecy, there persisted a kind of honor among thieves. Campaigns routinely amassed files on the sexual habits, hidden illnesses, and financial and moral peccadilloes of their opponents—what, in a later era, would be called “opposition research” or simply “oppo.” But campaigns very rarely aired their opponents’ dirty laundry in public, and the press, more passive as well as more discreet in those days, chose not to pry into private lives. Rather, the files were used as deterrents. Roughly speaking,
the unstated understanding was: If you leak my secrets, I’ll leak yours. To borrow a nuclear-arms metaphor from the time, the campaigns were restrained by the threat of mutual assured destruction.

On the eve of the election, Johnson had briefly considered going public with the Chennault Affair, but he knew that Nixon could accuse him of politicizing national security by boosting Humphrey’s chances with a bombing halt. (He also did not wish to reveal that the United States was wiretapping the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and offices in Saigon.) From the LBJ ranch, the president consulted his old comrade and resident sage, Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. Speaking elliptically, in his trademark mellifluous voice, Clifford held forth in a way that was at once orotund and to the point: “I think some of the elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual elected. It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”
¹³
Johnson took the story to his grave—carefully avoiding any suggestion in his memoirs that Nixon was directly to blame in the Chennault Affair.
¹⁴

Despite his menacing phone call on November 8, President Johnson was all grace and goodwill with the Nixons. He provided a plane, “Air Force Five,” to fly them to Florida right after the election. It was a transport plane with a windowless fuselage, Julie recalled, but “even to step aboard one of the presidential aircraft was an exhilarating experience.” Julie watched her parents exit the plane on the dark, cool night. “Once under the shelter of the plane, they turned to each other. Simultaneously, they embraced, and my father swung Mother around in a pirouette.”
¹⁵
This intimacy was not unprecedented; Dwight Chapin recalled the Nixons holding hands when they thought no one was looking.
¹⁶

There was one other high-ranking person who knew a great deal about the Chennault Affair, and Nixon took pains to deal with him
quickly. On November 12, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reported to a job interview of sorts at Nixon transition headquarters at the Pierre Hotel in New York.

Hoover and Nixon had been courting each other, at first warily, then more warmly, for nearly two decades. Over the years, they had exchanged a constant stream of gifts, gossip, political tips, and flattery. The Nixons had stayed at Hoover’s summer cottage at Hotel Del Charro in La Jolla, near Hoover’s favorite race track. During the 1960 election campaign, Hoover had called Nixon to tell him that JFK had fainted on a visit to the governor of New Jersey, so that Nixon’s surrogates could leak it to the press. “Reference should be made to your perfect physical condition,” Hoover instructed, in cloying bureaucrat-ese.
¹⁷
Hoover had worked hard to assure his reappointment in a Nixon administration. Still, he wanted to guarantee his long-term employment.

To get through security and into Nixon’s private suite at the Pierre, Hoover had to climb a flight of stairs and then step over a mass of telephone and TV cables. At seventy-two, Hoover looked “florid and rumpled,” Haldeman recalled. “His appearance surprised me,” recalled Ehrlichman. “He was florid and fat-faced, ears flat against his head, eyes protruding. He looked unwell to me.”
¹⁸

Hoover “quickly got down to business,” Haldeman wrote. He told Nixon that, on Johnson’s orders, the FBI had bugged Nixon’s plane. The request had been based on “national security.” “This angered Nixon, but he remained still as Hoover poured out more information,” wrote Haldeman, who quoted the FBI director as warning Nixon: “ ‘When you get into the White House, don’t make calls through the switchboard. Johnson has it rigged, and little men you don’t know will be listening.’ ” In fact, said Hoover, LBJ had the whole White House bugged.

Hoover was exaggerating, though not carelessly. LBJ had wired the White House. But it was not true that the FBI had bugged Nixon’s plane. Johnson had not made the request, and even if he had, the FBI
never would have gotten past the Secret Service, according to Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, Hoover’s number three and his official “bagman” to LBJ.
¹⁹

Hoover was playing his great game of bureaucratic blackmail. He was making Nixon
think
that the all-powerful FBI knew his darkest secrets. Nixon would always believe that LBJ had bugged his plane, even after his own aides informed him to the contrary. Not coincidentally, by planting in Nixon’s mind the fear that the FBI director was in a position to know a great deal—about, for instance, how Nixon communicated with his go-betweens to Mrs. Chennault—Hoover effectively created a valuable insurance policy for his own continued employment. Over the next three years, Nixon’s aides would repeatedly try to get Nixon to fire Hoover, who was dangerous and disloyal in addition to being over the hill. The FBI director would die in office late in Nixon’s first term.

Nixon’s most complex
and consequential presidential appointment showed up at the Pierre Hotel at 10
A.M
. on Monday, November 25. Henry Kissinger was led to a large living room and told to wait for the president-elect. When Nixon at last swept in (“always keep them waiting and act like you own the room”), it seemed to Kissinger that Nixon was putting on a “show of jauntiness” to disguise “an extraordinary nervousness.” Like another close Nixon observer, Leonard Garment, Kissinger noticed an odd gap between speech and hand movements, as if Nixon was struggling to synchronize the two and not quite succeeding.

Nixon dispensed with the small talk and announced that he wanted to keep foreign policy under the tight control of the White House. He didn’t trust the State Department or the “Ivy League liberals” at the CIA. Kissinger offered that a strong president would run his own foreign policy. At first Kissinger was struck by Nixon’s “perceptiveness and knowledge,” but then the conversation, as Kissinger put it, “grew less precise.” Nixon rambled on about the goals of diplomacy and Kissinger’s patron, Nelson Rockefeller. Kissinger would
come to understand that Nixon was often elliptical in his speech. “I learned that to Nixon words were like billiard balls; what mattered was not the initial impact but the carom,” he wrote. In time, Kissinger would be able to translate Nixon’s circumlocutions. But at that first formal meeting, Kissinger was left slightly bewildered. What did Nixon want from him?

The next day he was summoned to John Mitchell’s office. He found Mitchell puffing a pipe, “self-confident and taciturn.” Mitchell came straight to the point. “What have you decided about the National Security job?”

“I did not know I had been offered it,” Kissinger replied.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Mitchell, “he has screwed it up again.”
²⁰
A week later, after Kissinger had made a show of asking his friends if he should take the job, Nixon announced that Kissinger was his new national security adviser.

In Nixon’s version of his meeting with Kissinger, the president-elect was seized “by a strong intuition” and “decided on the spot that he should be my National Security Adviser.” Nixon was less intuitive and more methodical than he let on in his memoirs. Among the many contradictions of Richard Nixon is this: The shy loner Nixon was “a great people person,” recalled Donald Rumsfeld, who in 1968 was a young Illinois congressman whom Nixon persuaded to run the Office of Economic Opportunity (mostly to dismantle the less effective parts of LBJ’s War on Poverty). By “people person,” Rumsfeld meant that Nixon was “interested in horse flesh.” He was a great talent scout for up-and-coming politicians and statesmen. “He spotted them, mentored them, urged them along,” recalled Rumsfeld.
²¹
Nixon had identified Kissinger in the late 1950s, when the Harvard professor was a protégé of William Yandell Elliott, the Harvard don who acted as a kind of bridge between the Cambridge groves of academe and the Washington corridors of power. Overlooking his anti-Harvard animus, Nixon took Professor Elliott with him as an adviser on his 1959 Moscow trip. Kissinger sent Nixon his book on nuclear policy, and the two men began exchanging flattering letters. Kissinger only actually
met Nixon for five minutes at a book party thrown by Clare Boothe Luce, but Nixon had been reading Kissinger quite closely for years.
²²