Being Nixon: A Man Divided (39 page)

O
n June 13, the morning after the wedding, Nixon picked up
The New York Times
and saw in the top left-hand corner a photograph of the proud father standing with his radiant daughter in the Rose Garden. “Tricia Nixon Takes Vows” was the headline. Nixon noticed on the front page of the newspaper another headline, “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement,” but he did not pay much attention.
¹
Shortly after noon, Kissinger’s assistant Al Haig called to check in, and Nixon asked him about the week’s casualties in Vietnam. “Quite low,” answered Haig. “Yeah. Should be less than twenty, I would think…,” said Nixon. “Nothing else of interest in the world today?”

HAIG:
Yes, sir. Very significant. This goddamn
New York Times
exposé of the most highly classified documents of the war.

NIXON:
Oh, that! I see. I didn’t read the story. But, uh, do you mean that was leaked out of the Pentagon?

HAIG:
Sir, the whole study that was done for McNamara, and then carried on after McNamara left by Clifford and the peaceniks over there. This is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I’ve ever seen.
²

The secret seven-thousand-page history of United States involvement in the Vietnam War, soon to be known as the Pentagon Papers,
did not mention Richard Nixon’s name. The study had been commissioned by JFK and LBJ’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, and completed under his successor, Clark Clifford. “It’s a tough attack on Kennedy,” Haig told Nixon. “And it’s brutal on President Johnson.” At first glance, this was hardly bad news for the Nixon team. “The key now for us to keep out of it,” Haldeman dictated to his diary that evening, “and let the people that are affected cut each other up.”
³

Al Haig offered the same advice to his boss, Henry Kissinger.
⁴
But the next morning, Kissinger refused to leave it alone. Compact, bristly, his eyes large behind thick black glasses, the national security adviser bustled into the 8
A.M
. meeting, “as angry as I had ever seen him,” recalled Chuck Colson. He paced around the Roosevelt Room, threw his papers down, and “pounded his hand on an antique Chippendale table, rattling the pencils and coffee cups,” wrote Colson. “There can be no foreign policy in this government. No foreign policy, I tell you!” stormed Kissinger. “Leaks are destroying us.”
⁵

Kissinger had reason to be anxious about security breaches. He was, at that moment, engaged in the most secret diplomacy with the Soviets and the Chinese. Nixon’s dream of “the big play”—an arms control treaty with Russia and opening up China—was close to coming true. An untimely leak could be disastrous.

Even so, Haldeman was suspicious. By now an amateur authority on the Kissingerian psyche, Haldeman detected a whiff of guilty anxiety in the professor’s remonstrations. He guessed that Kissinger was worried that the leaker of the Pentagon Papers might be one of his own “boys,” the liberal, Harvard-type aides who, from time to time, leaked dissenting opinions to the press or quit in opposition to the administration’s war policy.
⁶

Nixon was also eyeing Kissinger’s rebellious aides as potential culprits. “As to staff leakage, etc., the P is especially concerned about Henry’s staff,” Haldeman recorded that evening.
⁷
Based on rumors and guesswork, Nixon speculated that the leaker of the Pentagon Papers was Les Gelb, an ex–Defense Department official who was close to former Kissinger aide Morton Halperin. Nixon had already
ordered a wiretap on Halperin for suspected leaking, and Gelb and Halperin both now worked at the Brookings Institution, a think tank Nixon regarded as a government-in-exile for Democrats. Nixon was irked at Kissinger for having even darkened the door at Brookings. “Chrissakes, he went over and talked to Brookings people himself,” Nixon fumed. “I warned him about it. I said, ‘Henry, don’t go over there.’ You know, I said, ‘Those people—that’s the Democratic National Committee.’ ”

“That’s right,” said Haldeman.

“They are a bunch of bastards,” said Nixon, getting cranked up. “They’ll lie, cheat, anything—and then squeal when somebody else does.”
⁸

When Nixon was in his enemy-bashing mode, he looked for ways to turn the tables. The president’s mind began to contemplate ways to take advantage of the Pentagon Papers, to use them as a weapon against the Democrats. Late in the afternoon on June 17, as he sat with Haldeman and Kissinger in his Executive Office Building hideaway, he let his imagination run. Goaded by him, his aides alternately ducked and goaded back.

As he often did in crisis situations, Nixon thought back to the Alger Hiss case. Hiss was a traitor who had leaked government secrets to the Soviets. Nixon told his staff that he had won the Hiss case partly by judiciously leaking information to the press. The way to deal with the leaker of the Pentagon Papers was to do him one better and leak
more
damaging information about Kennedy and Johnson.
⁹

Nixon was sure that—somewhere—there were secrets about the Vietnam War that Kennedy and Johnson had wanted to remain hidden forever. He had long suspected, for example, that Kennedy had ordered the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in a coup in November 1963.
*
¹
Revving himself up in his Executive Office Building
hideaway, Nixon pressed a clearly uncomfortable Kissinger to dig up evidence of Kennedy’s role in the fatal coup. (When Kissinger hesitated, Nixon turned to the more reliably can-do Colson. “We’re going to put it out,” he ordered.)
¹¹

Haldeman was often a restraint on Nixon’s worst urges, but this time he egged on the president by dredging up another murky chapter from the past, the 1968 bombing halt. “You maybe can blackmail Johnson on this stuff.” “What?” Nixon asked. “You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff and it might be worth doing.”
¹²
The “stuff” Haldeman was referring to was a supposed report on President Johnson’s bombing halt before the 1968 election. Nixon believed that Johnson had tried to time the bombing halt to help Hubert Humphrey at the polls, and after the election Nixon had ordered Haldeman to find out the true facts. At the time, Nixon and Johnson had avoided attacking each other for campaign shenanigans; still, a little intelligence might come in handy down the road. Haldeman had chosen as his investigator Tom Charles Huston, the gung-ho White House aide who had advocated a program of black-bag jobs against antiwar dissenters. Poking around various government agencies, Huston had heard there was a report on Johnson’s bombing halt strategy at the Defense Department.
¹³
Now, in June of 1971, sitting with a riled-up Nixon in the Oval Office, trying to play to the president’s baser instincts, Haldeman was suggesting that the supposed report on the bombing halt could be used to embarrass President Johnson.

There was only one problem. The report was not at the Defense Department. “We can’t find it,” Haldeman said, a little sheepishly. Huston had told Haldeman that he believed that Les Gelb had taken the report with him from the Pentagon and put it in his files at the Brookings Institution. Unbeknownst to Haldeman, Huston was wrong about this; the overzealous aide had mixed up the alleged bombing halt study (which probably never existed) with the Pentagon Papers themselves. But Nixon knew nothing of this tangled background; he only knew that Haldeman was dangling an opportunity to get some leverage on Johnson. The mere prospect of potential blackmail
sitting in the vaults of the enemy camp seemed to inflame Nixon.
¹⁴

Kissinger, sitting with Haldeman and the president, was wary of getting drawn into one of Nixon’s obsessions. The president fumed as the uneasy Kissinger told him, “We have nothing here, Mr. President.” Nixon said: “Well, damn it, I asked for that because I need it.” Haldeman cut in and said, “Huston swears to God there’s a file on it, at Brookings.”

Nixon had a sudden inspiration. Hearing Huston’s name made him recall Huston’s plan to use illegal break-ins against antiwar protesters. “Bob,” he said, “Now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it.”

Kissinger started to protest.

NIXON:
I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.

This statement by the president is the first record of him ordering a break-in. It is an astonishing command, especially since simply requesting the material from Brookings might have sufficed. (In fact, that’s what Haldeman proposed two weeks later.) Nixon often worked through a problem by venting, by letting off steam with imprecations and threats that were not to be taken literally. His aides generally knew when not to carry out his more outlandish instructions, and Haldeman stalled on this one. But it was not the last time Nixon demanded a burglary at Brookings. He did it three more times over the next several weeks, sometimes in the presence of Kissinger and Defense Secretary Laird. Even given Nixon’s penchant for emotional outbursts, his repeated rants about breaking into Brookings, caught on the White House tapes, seem beyond the pale.

June 30, 1971, late afternoon, the Oval Office:

HALDEMAN:
Brookings has a lot of [classified] stuff now. Don’t you want to send a colonel over and pick it up?

NIXON:
The way I want that handled, Bob, is—I want Brookings, I want just to break in, break in, and take it out. Do you understand?

HALDEMAN:
Yeah. But you’ve got to have somebody to do it.

NIXON:
That’s what I’m talking about. Don’t discuss it here. You talk to [E. Howard] Hunt. I want the break in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in.

July 1, 1971, mid-morning, the Oval Office:

NIXON:
Do you think, for Christ sakes, that
The New York Times
is worried about all legal niceties? Those sons of bitches are killing me….I mean, thank God, I leaked to the press [during the Hiss controversy]. This is what we’ve got to get….Now you do it. Shake them up. Get them off their goddamn dead asses and say now that isn’t what you should be talking about. We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They’re using any means.
We are going to use any means
. Is that clear?

        Did they get the Brookings Institute raided last night? No? Get it done. I want it done. I want the Brookings Institute’s safe
cleaned out
and have it cleaned out in a way they make somebody else [unintelligible].
¹⁵

July 2, 1971, mid-morning, the Oval Office:

NIXON:
I really meant it when—I want someone to go in and crack that [Brookings] safe. Walk in and get it. I want Brookings cut. They’ve got to do it. Brookings is the real enemy here….
¹⁶

There is something puzzling about these repeated outbursts. The Pentagon Papers may have seemed like a crisis to Nixon, but it was to some degree a manufactured crisis. Indeed, when the furor started to die down, Nixon instructed his aides to keep it alive.
¹⁷
Yet in the
weeks after the leak of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon seemed almost out of control, making extreme demands, scoffing at aides who wanted to find lawful solutions, and carrying on about the Hiss case.

Nixon’s own explanation in his memoirs of why he wanted to get his hands on the bombing halt file is candid, for Nixon, although he is euphemistic about ordering a break-in:

In the aftershock of the Pentagon Papers leak and all the uncertainty and renewed criticism of the war it produced, my interest in the bombing halt file was rekindled. When I was told that it was still at Brookings, I was furious and frustrated. In the midst of a war and with our secrets being spilled through printing presses all over the world, top secret government reports were out of reach in the hands of a private think tank largely staffed with antiwar Democrats. It seemed absurd. I could not accept that we had lost so much control over the workings of the government we had been elected to run—I saw absolutely no reason for the report to be at Brookings, and I said I wanted it back right now—even if that meant having to get it surreptitiously.
¹⁸

Nixon was often frustrated by bureaucratic intransigence, and it’s easy to imagine him conjuring up a conspiracy of liberal elitists to thwart him. Indeed, liberal elitists
were
conspiring against him, and the justification of “national security” was hardly bogus during wartime when the president was engaged in secret diplomacy abroad. Journalists would later scoff at the term
national security
as a cynical excuse to conceal and cover up, but on the White House tapes, Nixon and his aides sound genuinely worried that leaks could, literally speaking, undermine national security. Still, there may be more to the story. Nixon seemed to like playing the tough guy around Kissinger, forcing his Harvard professor adviser to go along with the boys (a role Kissinger was perhaps too willing to play). Ken Hughes, a student of the Nixon tapes at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center,
has argued that Nixon was moved by fears of his own exposure as well as a desire to get his political enemies. The story has some twists and turns and is based partly on inference, but it bears consideration.

After the 1968 election, Nixon had been told—falsely—by J. Edgar Hoover that LBJ had bugged Nixon’s campaign plane. Nixon had to worry what the Johnson administration, through its own bugging and spying, knew about his own role in trying to sabotage the bombing halt. What if the missing bombing halt report included evidence that Nixon—through his go-between, Madame Chennault—had urged President Thieu to play the spoiler? After the election, Johnson and Nixon had implicitly agreed not to air each other’s dirty laundry. Now, in the wake of the Pentagon Papers leak, Nixon had reason to fear that if the report showed that Nixon had also played political games with national security, the Democrats might leak it, in an escalating tit for tat of smears. Nixon never let on why the contents of the mysterious file obsessed him so. But the urgency of Nixon’s desire to see the missing report—and the reckless steps he was willing to take to get it—do suggest that he was unusually concerned about what the report might show about him as well as about LBJ.
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