Being Nixon: A Man Divided (35 page)

On June 5, Nixon summoned the intelligence agency heads to the Oval Office and “chewed our butts,” as one participant recalled.
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Sitting at the table, along with the likes of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA’s Richard Helms, was a gaunt, fierce, twenty-eight-year-old named Tom Charles Huston. A former conservative student activist who had served briefly as an analyst in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Huston was a figure of fascination and some mild mockery among his fellow White House staffers, who referred to him as “Secret Agent X-5.” Huston signed some of his memos “Cato the Younger,” after an incorruptible Roman statesman, and hung a portrait of John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina Nullifier, on his wall.
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Nixon was impressed by young Huston, whom he approvingly referred to as a “bomb thrower.”
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The president told Huston to write a report and make recommendations, a task enthusiastically undertaken and completed in three weeks’ time. “The Special Report, Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc),” better known as the Huston Plan, would cause a stir when it surfaced three years later during the Senate Watergate hearings. It called for illegal mail-opening and surreptitious “black bag jobs”—break-ins to install taps and bugs on dangerous radicals. The plan was full of lurid rhetoric about the subversive threat, though its tools were not new. Hoover’s FBI had for many years conducted black bag jobs and the CIA was already illegally opening mail (Operation Chaos).
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Nixon did not trust the CIA or its director, Helms, but he was deeply invested in the FBI’s Hoover. “Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar,” Lyndon Johnson had told Nixon as he handed over the Oval Office. “He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”
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Nixon almost always turned down invitations to socialize outside of the White House, but in September of his first year in office he had gone to dinner at Hoover’s home in a quiet residential neighborhood in northwest
Washington. Ehrlichman, who accompanied the president, recalled the “dingy, almost seedy” living room covered (“every square inch”) with faded brown photos of Hoover standing with celebrities and presidents. At dinner, Hoover regaled Nixon with tales of FBI black bag jobs and other derring-do. Ehrlichman could see that the crafty Hoover was testing Nixon, seeing how he would react to FBI activities that skirted, if they did not erase, the boundaries of the law. Nixon seemed to lap it all up. After dinner, Hoover took the president down to “the recreation room” for a drink. The walls were covered with girlie pinups, which Hoover made a point of showing off. After one drink, Nixon beat a quick retreat.
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Hoover had dutifully supplied Nixon with snippets of political gossip and tapped some phones, but he was no fan of young Tom Huston’s “Special Report, Interagency Committee in Intelligence (Ad Hoc).” In early July, the FBI director summoned Huston to his office and, looking down from his elevated desk and referring to Huston as “Mr. Hoffman” and “Mr. Hutchinson,” made clear that the FBI was not about to go along with the plan’s recommendations.
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In part, Hoover was wary of sharing with the CIA, the FBI’s longtime bureaucratic rival, but he was also showing his political savvy. At age 75, Hoover was ever alert to any threat to the Bureau’s legacy, which was to say his own. The 1960s were a time of consciousness raising in the realm of civil liberties. Lawsuits and liberal stirrings in Congress had threatened to expose longtime FBI practices of electronic surveillance. Hoover had already cut back on black bag jobs. Now, he insisted that the FBI would conduct illegal surveillance only under written orders from the president. Hoover knew he was offering a poison pill; Nixon had an expansive view of presidential power, but he also wanted to hide behind a cloak of deniability.
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Tom Huston was indignant at Hoover’s
lèse-majesté
. “At some point Hoover has to be told who is president,” Huston spluttered. Hoover “wanted to ride out of the FBI on a white horse,” he grumbled.
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Ignoring “Mr. Hoffman,” Hoover went to see John
Mitchell to get the answer he wanted. The attorney general was smart enough to see that Hoover was an enemy the White House could not afford to make. Through leaks and the threat of leaks—implicit blackmail—Hoover had outlasted six presidents. Mitchell agreed with Hoover that the Huston Plan “was not something we in the Justice Department would certainly want to participate in….I called Mr. Haldeman and the president and objected to it,” Mitchell later testified.

“Once Mitchell got to him [Nixon], that was pretty much the end of it,” recalled the CIA’s Richard Helms.
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But not quite. Nixon was not happy. He had quietly signed off on the Huston Plan; he wanted to use the broad powers of the presidency to win the war at home. Haldeman dutifully looked for another way to spy on dissidents.

He settled on a newcomer to the White House, the president’s brand-new counsel, John Dean. Haldeman explained to Dean that Hoover would no longer deal with Huston, but that Dean should look for a way to get the intelligence agencies on board to step up the fight against the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers.

The thirty-one-year-old Dean, who had practiced law for all of six months and had come to the White House from brief stints as a congressional and Justice Department staffer, was not sure what to do. He was, in a manner of speaking, the president’s lawyer, but his job responsibilities were a little vague, except that he would be taking orders from Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Dean was friendly with John Mitchell (who had wisely warned him
against
taking the White House job). So on September 17, Dean went to the office of the attorney general at the Justice Department to see Mitchell. Puffing on his pipe, Mitchell relieved Dean of his anxiety. “He was going to kill the plan, somehow,” Dean recorded in a memoir. “John,” said the attorney general, speaking slowly, “the President loves all this stuff. But it just isn’t necessary.” Mitchell and Dean set up an interagency Intelligence Evaluation Committee to at least make a show of sharing intelligence within the government.
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It seemed like a bland, toothless compromise, a skillful finesse by Mitchell to save his old friend the president from a rash program of secret break-ins and buggings or a war with Hoover or both. But the plates were shifting under the government. As Hoover gradually took the FBI out of the domestic spying business, the White House would begin to look for ways to fill the void.
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With Elvis.

National Archives and Records Administration

J
ohn Dean drove a Porsche, liked cocktails and attractive women—he once used the White House switchboard to track down a woman who had refused to give him her phone number—and was quick-witted and eager to please. In his memoir
Blind Ambition
, Dean recalled his job interview with H. R. Haldeman: “I watched as he checked me out and saw a reflection of his own taste in clothes. I was wearing black wing-tip shoes; he was wearing brown wing-tips. He had on a white button-down collar shirt; mine was blue. My suit was as conservative as his. Later I discovered that he and I shopped at the same men’s store in Washington.”
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Nixon liked having sharply dressed, alert young men on his staff. He wanted to surround himself with youth and can-do vigor. He had seen the way President Eisenhower brought along promising young men, including himself, readying them for greater responsibility. Eisenhower had kept watch on his young charges, and if they failed to live up to his expectations, he had them removed. But Nixon lacked Ike’s cold-blooded adroitness as a manager.

Though he periodically threatened to cut federal agencies in half, Nixon did not like to fire anyone. He kept around old hangers-on. One was Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s tutor in “rock ’em, sock ’em” politics, who was tainted by an influence peddling scandal in the mid-1950s but still gave Nixon behind-the-scenes political advice.

The brand-new White House counsel ran into Chotiner on his first visit to the White House Mess in July 1970. Still uncertain about his duties, Dean was puzzling over what to do about an “action memorandum” that had landed on his desk. The subject was: “Request that you rebut the recent attack on the Vice President.” An attached “confidential memo” explained that a new muckraking magazine called
Scanlan’s Monthly
had published a bogus memo linking Spiro Agnew with a secret plan to cancel the 1972 election and repeal the Bill of Rights. Dean had inquired about the “action memo” directive in Haldeman’s office and learned that it had come straight from President Nixon. Reading his morning news summary, the president was often inspired to write notes in the margin demanding action.
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But what action? The word came back from the president: “It was requested that as part of this inquiry you should have the Internal Revenue Service conduct a field investigation on the tax front.”

In his memoirs, Dean claimed that he was troubled about opening a tax audit of a publication just because it had published a scurrilous article. So, as he ate lunch at the White House Mess, he asked his new acquaintance Murray Chotiner, an old hand at this sort of thing, what he should do. Bemused, Chotiner responded, “I tell you this, if Richard Nixon thinks it’s necessary you’d better think it’s necessary. If you don’t, he’ll find someone who does.”
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Dean was learning from an old hand, but the wrong lesson. Eager to get ahead, Dean did not realize that when the president gave an outrageous order, he often expected it to be ignored.

Nixon kept Chotiner
around partly because he wanted someone who knew how to attack his enemies, and Nixon’s foes never seemed to go away. In the winter of 1970, Larry O’Brien had become head of the Democratic National Committee. O’Brien had run JFK’s campaign in 1960, and Nixon regarded him with the mixture of apprehension and respect he reserved for the Kennedys and their political apparat. On March 4, Haldeman recorded in his diary that the “P” wanted to “move hard on Larry O’Brien now that he is back as DNC chair. P
feels this is clear signal that Teddy is in control…wants Chotiner to manage Plan O’Brien.”
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Five days later, Haldeman jotted in his notebook another presidential command: “Chotiner—get O’Brien’s tax return audited.”
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Nixon believed that the Internal Revenue Service was a legitimate tool to use to strike at his foes. It was, in his view, simply a matter of payback. Nixon believed that Robert Kennedy, acting as his brother’s attorney general and political avenger, had ordered Nixon’s tax returns audited three separate times after the 1960 election. The president also told Haldeman that “many” of his friends—he named Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp—had been the targets of politically inspired tax audits. On February 17, Nixon had ordered Haldeman to “check the income taxes of all our opponents. Harrass them and f[ollow] u[p]—just like they did. Pick [Edmund] Muskie [presumed Democratic front-runner]—check tie-in,” Haldeman scribbled as the president talked. “[Clark] Moll[enhoff, a White House operative]—stay on HHH [Humphrey] stuff—but don’t use it. Continue on Teddy [Kennedy]—any others.”
^6
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Nixon had studied the hardball tactics of his opponents. He focused on Joe Califano, a tart-tongued former LBJ aide and cabinet secretary who had been publicly deriding the administration. “We need an attitude like Califano—he never misses a day of kicking us,” Nixon told Haldeman four days after unleashing the IRS (or trying to) on Muskie, Humphrey, and Kennedy.
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After leaving the Johnson White House, Joe Califano had gone to work at Williams & Connolly, the liberal establishment law firm of Edward Bennett Williams, best friend of Ben Bradlee of
The Washington Post
and an early candidate for the “enemies list.” Nixon wanted young, hard-nosed men
of the Califano type to fight back. On September 27, 1970, as he was flying to Europe on Air Force One, Nixon instructed Haldeman to create a “campaign attack group”—he named the “nutcutters,” including Colson, Buchanan, Huston, and Chotiner.
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Haldeman short-handed a list: “Buch[anan], Huston, Moll[enhoff], [Lyn] Nof[ziger], [Jeb] Mag[ruder], Chot[iner], Colson.

Charles “Chuck” Colson was fast becoming Nixon’s favorite nut-cutter. “Chuck’s got the balls of a brass monkey,” Nixon gleefully told his speechwriter, Ray Price.
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Colson was an ex-Marine, and Nixon liked Marines (Steve Bull, Nixon’s personal assistant, was another one). A swamp Yankee
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from Boston, Colson was proud to have rejected admission at Harvard, an enormous plus in Nixon’s book. (Colson went to Brown instead.) Having closely studied the Kennedy political machine in Massachusetts, Colson was a master of “bloc politics”—he knew how to appeal to ethnic and blue-collar groups. He carefully cultivated labor bosses and the Catholic hierarchy, arranging to have Cardinal John Krol, the archbishop of Philadelphia, invited out on the
Sequoia
with the president. Colson knew how to get things done by, as Nixon approvingly put it, “breaking china.” On a Friday night in late 1970, Nixon told Haldeman and Ehrlichman that he wanted an executive order setting up a federal commission to aid parochial schools. Knowing that his two top aides would put this constitutionally dubious order in the do-nothing file, Nixon turned to Colson and said, “Don’t pay any attention to Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They’re Christian Scientists. They don’t understand this.” Colson had the executive order on Nixon’s desk by Monday morning.

Colson understood right away that he had made enemies of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. “From that day on I was toxic to them,” he recalled. But he also knew that he had scored with Nixon, who, like many presidents, was not above pitting his aides against each other.
“If he couldn’t get them to do what he wanted them to do,” Colson said, “he would give it to me to get it done.”
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Haldeman recalled that, at first, he welcomed Colson “because he absorbed a lot of time with Nixon that I would have to sit through—listening to him rant about somebody who’s got to be done in, or thrown out of an airplane—and did nothing about. Chuck sat and listened, and wrote it down, and went out and did it.” In a reflective, slightly bitter mood after serving a prison sentence for his role in Watergate, Haldeman came to regard Colson as “another of my mistakes.”
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John Mitchell spotted Colson’s danger signs right away. “Look out for Chuck Colson,” he told Richard Moore, a White House aide, in 1970. “If the president ever gets in real trouble, it will be his fault.” Asked by speechwriter Price, “Who is Colson’s constituency, anyway?” Mitchell answered, “The president’s worst instincts.”
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Soon Colson was sharing a Scotch or two in the evenings with the president at his Executive Office Building hideaway; Colson’s office was conveniently next door. “Those who say that I fed the president’s darker instincts are only 50 percent correct,” Colson told Jonathan Aitken, “because 50 percent of the time he was feeding my darker instincts.” One evening, watching a news report on the Democratic front runner, Senator Edmund Muskie, Nixon remarked, “Wouldn’t it be kinda interesting if there was a Committee of Democrats supporting Muskie
and
busing. Couldn’t you arrange that Chuck?” In no time “Democrats for Muskie and Busing” was publishing a hundred thousand leaflets, paid for by Chuck Colson. Nixon was delighted by the false propaganda coup, which sowed confusion in the Muskie campaign and alienated the kind of ethnic Democrats who were ripe for the plucking by Nixon.
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Some members of the “campaign attack group” were awed and a little intimidated by Colson. Jeb Magruder had been brought into the White House by Haldeman to sharpen the dull PR efforts of Herb Klein, the genial communications director.
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Klein regaled Magruder with stories of the bogeyman Dick Tuck and Chotiner’s shenanigans in earlier campaigns and came to regret it. Magruder was weak and impressionable
and got a little too excited about the Department of Dirty Tricks, as some staffers called Colson’s office.
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Handsome and married to a beautiful wife, Magruder was a thoroughly confused young man, spouting sermons from his Williams College chaplain William Sloane Coffin that money isn’t everything while he had shinnied up the corporate pole. He was taken aback when Chotiner—“who for twenty years had been stereotyped as a hatchet man”—protested that Colson’s tactics went too far. Magruder understood that Chotiner was resentful of Colson, who had supplanted him. But he was uneasy when Chotiner objected to the “attack ads” outlined by Colson, which seemed to go beyond the tactics used by Chotiner and Nixon in the infamous “Pink Lady” campaign of 1950. According to Magruder, Colson instructed his dirty tricksters to lay on the innuendo: “You questioned a man’s patriotism, his intelligence, his morality, his manhood, anything you could get away with.”
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Colson was Nixon’s new favorite in part because he knew how to flatter—he rivaled Kissinger in shamelessness—but also because he was upbeat and fun.
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A fair amount of Colson’s boasts, like his quip that he would run over his grandmother for Richard Nixon, was meant in jest.
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Nixon liked to play practical jokes on his more self-serious aides, like the literal-minded spokesman Ron Ziegler and Kissinger, who veered between self-deprecating charm and self-seriousness.

Kissinger was the only Nixon adviser entitled to walk in the door without getting the permission of Nixon’s personal assistant, Steve Bull, but Nixon liked to put him in his place from time to time. Colson was only too happy to help by playing the role of Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Once, when Nixon’s Executive Office Building door swung open to reveal Kissinger, Nixon, who was in the middle of a conversation with Colson, did not miss a beat. “Well, I think you’re right, Chuck, about that,” said Nixon, without looking up at Kissinger. “I think it’s time we used nuclear weapons. Everything else has failed.” Kissinger looked “paralyzed,” Colson later recalled.
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Heavy-handed joking aside,
it’s doubtful that Nixon ever seriously considered using nuclear weapons against North Vietnam, but he wasn’t exaggerating when he said that “everything else has failed.” Kissinger’s secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris were as stymied as ever. Not for the first time, Nixon was harboring the disturbing thought that the war was hopeless, that the North Vietnamese would never accept a peace that was “honorable” or, more precisely as Nixon defined it, one that allowed President Thieu’s government to stand in Saigon. On a flight back from Key Biscayne on October 10, he wrote a query to Kissinger, wondering if they had ever understood the war. “Have we misjudged VC from the beginning,” he jotted on a yellow pad. Various scenarios—“stop U.S. dissent & they’ll talk” and “Give them a jolt & they’ll talk”—seemed fruitless.
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Kissinger had by now begun to consider that the best the Americans could hope for was a decent interval between the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the collapse of the Thieu government. Nixon, however unhappily, appeared to agree.
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Inevitably, there were cynical political calculations at work. If the Americans pulled out too quickly, the Saigon government would fall before the 1972 election—and Nixon would get the blame and presumably pay the political price. Better, then, to keep the Saigon government propped up until after Nixon was reelected. Taken to its logical extension, a “decent interval” strategy could be seen as a willingness to prolong a war that could not be won.
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Nixon and Kissinger could be deeply cynical practitioners of realpolitik. But Nixon never stopped hoping that the war could be turned around and the politburo in Hanoi brought to their knees, if not to their senses—even as he grudgingly came to respect the obduracy of the enemy. Nixon has been condemned in some quarters as a war criminal, but it is more accurate to blame him for wishful thinking, for a too-optimistic faith in American power. Again and again, he suggested that one more massive blow would bring “peace with honor.” Recalling how, on the Herter Committee trip in 1947, he had
stood on a hill looking down at devastated Berlin, he was convinced, or had convinced himself, that overwhelming force was moral and justified in the face of evil, which he believed, with all sincerity, communism to be. “He got quite cranked up on this whole subject, and made the point that he will not go out of Vietnam whimpering,” Haldeman wrote in his diary in early June of 1971.
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