Being Nixon: A Man Divided (37 page)
Read Being Nixon: A Man Divided Online
Authors: Evan Thomas
Kissinger later recalled that the participants in a drawn-out diplomatic process rarely know when history is being made, but this time he had no doubt. The national security adviser’s initial skepticism that Nixon could open Red China was fast disappearing. Nixon’s feelers to Beijing, delivered through Pakistan’s Yahya Kahn, had teased out a surprising, enticing response. The world order was about to change, thanks to the farsightedness of a lower-middle-class boy who had once lain awake listening to trains in the night. The moment the Pakistani ambassador left his office, Kissinger hurried down the hall to the Oval Office to tell Nixon.
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The president betrayed no emotion—no excitement, no joy. Watching him react, or rather not react, Kissinger thought that Nixon had been so often stung by defeat that he would not let himself savor victory. He could not reveal his hopes because they might be snatched away. “He always believed his enemies would prevail,” Kissinger told Richard Reeves. “He was conditioned for rejection or failure, confused by success.”
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Or, possibly, he was worried that Kissinger would leak the news.
Nonetheless, it is odd that Nixon would greet such a triumph with silence. Nixon could exult wildly over victories, from ball games to moon shots, at which he was a mere spectator. Perhaps he needed to show Kissinger his Mr. Cool affect, as a way of reminding him whose idea the opening to China really was.
Just before Christmas,
on December 21, Nixon was visited by an ambassador from a strange land close to home. That morning at 8:45, appointments secretary Dwight Chapin, known by his White House buddies as “Slick” for his patent-leather hair and movie-star smile, excitedly reported that Elvis Presley had left a handwritten letter with one of the guards at the Northwest Gate. The rock-and-roll star wanted to see President Nixon. Chapin quickly wrote a memo arguing that “if the President wants to meet some bright young people outside the government, Presley might be the perfect one to start with.” In his prim script, Haldeman wrote in the margin, “You must be kidding.”
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But Nixon knew better: Presley was Southern, blue-collar, patriotic. He had not avoided the draft, serving in the army as a private. “Elvis the Pelvis” may have been, by 1970, an over-the-hill pop idol, but here he was, just outside the White House gate, offering himself as an Emissary to Youth. On American Airlines stationery, Presley had written, “The drug culture, The Hippie Elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc. do
not
consider me as their enemy or as they call it The Establishment.
I call it America and I
love it.” By lunchtime Presley, dressed in tight dark velvet pants, gold medallion, and cape, was shaking hands with Nixon in the Oval Office. (The Secret Service had relieved him of a loaded nickel-plated gun, intended as a gift for the president.)
The conversation between Presley and the president took a few odd turns. At one point, Presley opined, “The Beatles, I think, are kind of anti-American. They came over here. Made a lot of money. And then went back to England. And they said some anti-American stuff when they got back.” Nixon looked a little surprised when Presley (who would later die of his drug habit) offered to help with the War on Drugs and asked for a drug enforcement agent’s badge. “I’ve been studying Communist brainwashing for over ten years, and now the drug culture, too,” said Presley. The logical leaps were no matter. Nixon seemed glad to meet the King and didn’t even flinch when Presley hugged him. The two men fished around in the president’s desk drawer where he kept tie clasps and golf balls and other gifts for visitors. Typically, Nixon would hand a guest a tie clip or cuff links with the presidential seal and clumsily joke, “Give this to your wife. Or your girlfriend. We won’t tell.” Now he loaded the King and two of his friends up with knickknacks and waved farewell with a cheery, “Thank you very much, fellas.” Bud Krogh, the young White House aide who had accompanied Presley to the Oval Office, noticed that Nixon seemed unusually relaxed around the faded rock star, who appeared at once forward and shy. The louche, flamboyant Presley, who had once recorded a song called “Poison Ivy League” (“Poison Ivy League, Poison the Ivy League / Gives me an itch, sons of the rich”), and the buttoned-up Nixon understood each other.
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*
1
The IRS generally resisted being used as a political tool. In 1971, IRS Commissioner John Walters reached out to Nixon’s Treasury secretary, George Shultz. Walters had been given a list of names by John Dean (from the “enemies list”) to be audited. “What do I tell Dean?” he asked. “Tell him you report to me,” responded Shultz. “That was the end of it,” Schultz told the author in an interview in 2013.
7
The White House did not stop trying, however, and Shultz’s response to Walters was not quite “the end of it.” Ehrlichman’s files show a transcript of a phone call between Ehrlichman and Shultz on August 29, 1972. Shultz tells Ehrlichman that he has looked into Larry O’Brien’s tax records and found nothing wrong. Ehrlichman is still pushing, accusing Shultz of “foot-dragging,” and he says to Walters, who is also on the telephone line, “Johnnie, I would just like to feel that the IRS was really with us on this.”
8
*
2
“Swamp Yankees” were white Protestants who had been left behind in the “swamp” of Catholic and Jewish immigrants in late-nineteenth-century Boston when the rich WASPs withdrew to their mansions on Beacon Hill.
*
3
Nixon had been having some interesting conversations about permissiveness with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman’s notes from an after-dinner discussion between the three men in “the library in San Clemente” on September 1 are cryptic but suggestive enough:
“Sex and marijuana—Rock festivals
Midi
Mini
Porno—dulls mystery”
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Father of the Bride
“
I
hate exercise,” the president told John Ehrlichman on January 9, his fifty-eighth birthday, “but I do it to be better at the job.” In addition to his lonely nighttime bowling, Nixon would do “300 or 400 jogs before a press conference to get alert—to get the wind up,” Nixon told his aide. He complained that the First Lady was after him for his poor posture. She wanted him to sit in a straight-back chair instead of reclining in his favorite easy chair.
Sitting up a little straighter in his study in San Clemente, the president began to muse on the recreational habits of his predecessors. “LBJ liked his booze,” said Nixon. For JFK, entertainment came from “having a few people around with beautiful dolls.” Nixon did not begrudge Kennedy his amusements (though he probably did not know that JFK had cavorted with girls in the White House pool). “That was his right,” he told Ehrlichman.
1
That same day, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, dutifully trying to display “Nixon the Man,” allowed reporters and photographers to watch the president walk on the beach below the cliffs at the Casa Pacifica. Nixon loved the beach and often walked it, but on this chilly day he was wearing dress pants and, it was widely reported, black wing-tip shoes. (In fact, a close examination of the photo shows Nixon wearing more casual, Hush Puppies–type shoes.) Unflattering comparison with a barefooted JFK, tossing a football with his khakis rolled up, was irresistible.
2
On the beach.
Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
JFK remained a
haunting presence in the White House. Among Secret Service personnel, the assassination of the late president was referred to in hushed tones as “the Tragedy.”
3
Pat Nixon had been roundly criticized in the press for removing a plaque in her bedroom that read, “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline during the two years, ten months, and two days he was President of the United States.” The criticism was unwarranted. The plaque had been on a mantle, which the Committee for the Preservation of the White House had removed. Mrs. Nixon played no role in the decision.
4
In her way, Pat showed no resentment and, in early February, graciously invited Jackie, now Mrs. Aristotle Onassis, and her children, Caroline and John Jr., back to the White House for a private showing of the Kennedys’ formal White House portraits. John Jr., who was ten years old, spilled a glass of milk onto the table and into Nixon’s lap, and his mother was quiet about the portraits, which she felt were unflattering.
5
Nixon was gentle and warm with her. The president and the former First Lady talked about the vicissitudes of traveling—how hotels routinely painted their “presidential suites” in anticipation of the arrival of the real thing. Nixon and Jackie agreed that it was hard enough to sleep on the road, but the smell of fresh paint made it impossible.
“Of course, I was determined to keep the conversation away from anything that would distress her or make the visit sad. At one point, she looked at me and said, ‘I always live in a dream world,’ ” Nixon recalled in his memoirs. Nixon wrote that “Pat gave explicit orders that the visit be kept secret until it was over so that no reporters or cameramen would intrude on their privacy.”
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Mrs. Nixon’s discretion was considerate, but it was not the whole story. In his diary two days after the Kennedy visit, Haldeman wrote that Pat “was disturbed about no TV coverage of the Jackie Onassis dinner the other night, which was a real coup.” (Pat wanted to keep cameras away during the visit, but she wanted credit afterward.) Again and again during
the winter of 1971, Haldeman recorded Nixon’s complaints that his troops were doing a poor job of generating positive coverage of the First Family. On February 5, Haldeman wrote, “On the PR front, he got going again on the fact that we’ve done so much and gotten so little credit.” Haldeman added, “He’s also having a problem with Mrs. Nixon,” who was upset that her own efforts were so rarely praised in the press.
7
Nixon faithfully tried to build up the First Lady’s image. He dictated notes to Rose Woods about his wife and asked Bill Safire to polish them up and feed them to a woman’s magazine. Nixon’s tone was proud but defensive. “They criticize her because she happens to have the virtues that are no longer ‘fashionable’—that is, she was an orphan at an early age and worked her way through school; she has great character and determination and is not the type of person who makes a fool of herself in public in order to get attention,” Nixon dictated. He was “bothered by the criticism that she doesn’t have warmth and that, of course, is easily answered by anybody who knows her at all.” Nixon went on to protest too much on his own behalf: “Mrs. Nixon, of course, as most women do, takes much harder the criticism of her husband than her husband himself does. The critics don’t bother me, even though I have the most unfriendly press in history, it has never bothered me, but it deeply bothers Pat and my daughters.”
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Cabinet members were instructed to spread the word about the president’s unsung achievements. “The President should become known next year as ‘Mr. Peace,’ ” Haldeman had told Kissinger before Christmas. Kissinger’s aide, Al Haig wrote his boss, “Here we go again. I suppose our best bet is to play along, but I must say some of the rhetoric is a little sickening.”
9
Nixon counted on
his national security adviser to be loyal, but at the same time the president was wary and worn out by Kissinger, who could be temperamental. In March, Nixon told Haldeman that Kissinger would fall on his sword for the president. “I agree,” replied
Haldeman. “But he would do it with loud kicking and screaming and make sure the blood spurted all over the place so he would get full credit.”
10
Kissinger’s celebrity was growing. At first, Nixon and his top aides were amused by Kissinger’s highly publicized flirtations with movie stars. Ehrlichman had a poster of a scantily clad Jill St. John, Kissinger’s frequent escort, hung on Air Force One. Bawdy Kissinger jokes abounded at the White House. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do tonight, Henry,” Nixon would say, loudly, in front of reporters. (Kissinger’s Secret Service code name was “Woodcutter,” which Kissinger mangled as “Woodchopper”—actually, “Vudchopper”—and Safire twisted into “Woodpecker.” Ehrlichman just called him “Wiener Schnitzel.”) But there was also in Nixon “a little envy” of Kissinger’s glamour, wrote Kissinger’s biographer, Walter Isaacson.
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At a morning meeting on February 8, Nixon strongly complained to Haldeman about Kissinger’s “insistence on flitting around with movie stars. He’s making a fool of himself,” Nixon protested. “Grown men know better. Henry has to stop this. Do something. Do something.” In his diary for that day, Haldeman recorded the basis for a presidential “action memo”: “He wants us at the White House dinners to not put him next to the most glamorous girl anymore, but rather put [Kissinger] near some intelligent and interesting woman instead.”
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White House social secretary Lucy Winchester recalled getting the memo that “Henry was not to sit with pretty girls. I ignored it after a week,” she said.
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Nixon was irked that Kissinger had been spending a lot of time with
New York Times
columnist James Reston. Increasingly, Kissinger was appearing in the newspapers as the architect, not just the executor, of Nixon administration foreign policy. Newspaper articles, uncorrected over time, could harden into history.
*
1
Nixon took steps to protect the record.
Although Nixon had ordered President Johnson’s taping system dismantled and removed, he reversed himself. In mid-February, at just about the time he banned dinnertime starlets for Kissinger, Nixon ordered a secret taping system installed in the White House. Johnson had used the Army Signal Corps to install his listening devices. Fearing that he would be bugged by the Pentagon high command, Nixon used the Secret Service, which he could control. Microphones were installed in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and the Lincoln Sitting Room (later, in the Executive Office Building hideaway and at Camp David). Partly because Nixon was all thumbs, the tapes were voice-activated.
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“Mum’s the whole word,” Nixon told his aide. Alex Butterfield, on February 16, the first day the tapes began to turn. “I will not be transcribed.” Stumbling slightly over his words, he went on to say, “There may be a day when we have to have this for purposes of, maybe we want to put out something that’s positive, maybe we need something just to be sure that we can correct the record.”
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The record Nixon wanted to correct was the one being made by Kissinger, Haldeman later told Walter Isaacson. “Nixon realized rather early in their relationship that he badly needed a complete record of all they discussed,” recalled Haldeman. “He knew that Henry’s point of view on a particular subject was sometimes subject to change without notice.” Kissinger later remarked, “It was a high price to pay for insurance.”
17
“The first months
of 1971 were the lowest point of my first term as President,” Nixon recalled in his memoirs. “The problems we confronted were so overwhelming and so apparently impervious to anything we could do to change them that it seemed possible I might not even be nominated for re-election in 1972.”
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Nixon took pride in his good health. He claimed never to get headaches and rarely complained of other aches and pains. He did, however, partake in what he called “preventive medicine” for tension, regular treatments from an osteopathic doctor named Kenneth Riland. About once a month, Riland would fly down from New York
to administer massages, although Riland was indignant if anyone compared him to a chiropractor or an ordinary masseur. He called the treatments a “manipulative, muscle-relaxant technique” in which he would obtain “corrections” by deftly realigning bones and knotted muscle. The garrulous Dr. Riland was a show-off, a collector of celebrities whose names he liked to drop—his patients included Jacqueline Onassis and Nelson Rockefeller. But his treatments must have been soothing, because before long he was giving treatments not just to President Nixon but also to Henry Kissinger, Julie Eisenhower, Rose Mary Woods, Murray Chotiner, and a host of others, including Chief Justice Warren Burger and Nixon’s own regular doctor, Walter Tkach. Nixon called Riland “the great miracle man.”
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Riland accompanied Nixon on trips abroad and marveled at his stamina and punishing schedule. “Inhuman—no rest, wash-up time at all—appears Nixon insists on this,” Riland wrote in his diary on Nixon’s first trip to Europe.
20
But he worried about Nixon’s “martyr complex” and found him hard to reach. On February 3, 1971, he wrote in his diary, “The President, as I have said many times before, is really a loner. He doesn’t have any real friends, in spite of what they say about Beebe and the rest of them.”
On that same day, sitting in his underwear during a visit from Dr. Riland, Nixon authorized an invasion of Laos to try, one more time, to cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail. “To hell with other countries. We’re going to do this,” Nixon told Kissinger, according to Riland’s diary.
21
Americans would provide air support and helicopters, but the fighting would be done by ARVN, the army of South Vietnam. Operation Lam Son 719 was a major test of “Vietnamization,” and, at first, Nixon was optimistic. Or wanted to be. “The South Vietnamese are going to fight,” Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18 in one of their first conversations recorded by the new taping system. “They’re going to stand and fight. Aren’t they?” “Oh yeah,” replied Kissinger.
“We can lose an election,” Nixon had declared earlier in the conversation, “but we’re not going to lose this war, Henry. That’s my view. Do you agree with it?”
“I agree, Mr. President.”
“I have a feeling about Laos as well.”
“That’s right,” said Kissinger.
22
A couple of weeks later, Haldeman found the president, sitting in the dark with a fire blazing and his stereo on full blast, still feeling hopeful. “The P clearly has a sort of mystic feeling about the Laotian thing, and says so,” Haldeman recorded.
23
But the South Vietnamese did not stand and fight for long. By late March, they were in full retreat. TV images showed panicked ARVN soldiers forcing their way onto American helicopters or clinging to the helicopters’ skids. Nixon was downcast. “If the South Vietnamese could just win one cheap one….Take a stinking hill….Bring back a prisoner or two. Anything,” he had said to Kissinger in late February. Now he exploded when he was informed that the South Vietnamese air force had failed to attack North Vietnamese trucks just because they were “moving targets.” “Bullshit!” the president exclaimed. “Just, just, just cream the fuckers!”
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The Establishment press treated Operation Lam Son as a humiliating defeat. Nixon was in a funk when he spoke to Kissinger in his Executive Office Building hideaway on April 7. “Do you think if America loses, what this goddamn country is going to be like?” Nixon muttered. “I don’t understand why the intellectuals, they really just—”
KISSINGER:
They don’t mind losing. They don’t like America, and that’s the difference.
