Being Nixon: A Man Divided (40 page)

The real leaker
in the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, had surfaced, voluntarily, on CBS News. Nixon was determined to ruin him. When his aides argued, logically enough, that Ellsberg should be prosecuted for stealing government secrets, Nixon was not satisfied. He complained that he was surrounded by lawyers who didn’t understand “how the game is played.” Ehrlichman and Mitchell, “they’re always saying, well, we’ve got to win the court case through the court.” But Nixon scorned the slow-turning wheels of justice. “I mean, just let—convict the son of a bitch
in the press. That’s the way it’s done
….Nobody ever reads any of this in my biographies. Go back and read the chapter on the Hiss case in
Six Crises
and you’ll see how it was done. It wasn’t done waiting for the goddamn courts or the attorney general or the FBI….We have got to get going here.”
And, one more time: “Who’s going to break into the Brookings Institute?”
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Nixon began to imagine other potential secret documents that might be unearthed and leaked to the press to shame prior Democratic administrations. He wanted to know who was going to dig through “papers on the Cuban Missile Crisis, on the Bay of Pigs, on World War II and Korea? Who the hell is doing that and pulling out everything that might embarrass members of the establishment. You see? Who’s going to do that….I need a man—a commander—an officer in charge here at the White House that I can call when I wake up, as I did last night, at 2 o’clock in the morning, and I can say, now look here, I want to do this, this, this, and this. Get going. See my point?”

Nixon calmed down for a while and spoke of other matters, then returned to the question of who could play the part of the 2
A.M
. action officer. Already overburdened, Haldeman and Ehrlichman did not want the role. Colson didn’t either, but, as usual, he had a suggestion for carrying out the president’s worst impulses. “There’s one guy on the outside,” he said, “that has this capacity and ideological bent who might be able to do all of this.”

Nixon asked: “Who’s that?”

Colson reminded him about a White House consultant named E. Howard Hunt.
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Colson described a figure out of a James Bond novel. “He’s hard as nails. He’s a brilliant writer,” adding that Hunt had written forty spy novels. “He just got out of the CIA. Fifty. Kind of a tiger.”
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Colson knew Hunt from the Brown University Club of Washington (they were both grads), but that was about all. He didn’t know
much about his career in espionage, aside from some tales of derring-do spun by Hunt. Haldeman and Ehrlichman were introduced to Hunt and found him unremarkable, but figured that the ex-CIA man’s gray, bland demeanor just made him a good spy. In hindsight, they should have been warned by the way Hunt handled his first assignment. Told to pursue Nixon’s theory that JFK had ordered the assassination of President Diem, Hunt met with the CIA operative who had worked on the Diem coup. A tape recorder was set up under a couch in a vacant office, and Hunt invited the CIA man over to share a bottle of Scotch in order to loosen his tongue. After a couple of hours Hunt appeared in Colson’s office, reporting in. Bleary eyed, tie askew, Hunt stammered an apology. He sheepishly explained that, by mistake, he had sat on the tape recorder, crushing it. He had taken no notes and was too drunk to remember what the man had said.
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Among the several mysteries of the tragedy of Richard Nixon is this one: Why did no one see that Hunt and, even more so, Hunt’s partner G. Gordon Liddy were not only comically inept but dangerously so? Within the CIA, Hunt was well known as a bumbler, as the “sort of spy who would trip over his cape and fall on his sword,” as he was archly described in a negative efficiency report written by an agency superior.
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Among his peers, Hunt had a reputation for dreaming up impractical schemes that backfired. He had been marginalized at the agency after his role in the disastrous Bay of Pigs and, eventually, was quietly pushed out. Cynthia Helms, the wife of CIA Director Richard Helms, recalled that Hunt had been recommended to the White House—but only as a “charity case.” “Hunt’s daughter was blind, and he needed dough,” she recalled her husband telling her. She went on: “So Dick talked him up to Haldeman, whom he did not like.”
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The CIA gave technical support to Hunt—tape recorders, a
red wig—until Helms found out and cut it off.
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“It seemed like such a small thing at the time,” Mrs. Helms recalled.
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Daniel Ellsberg had
been a military analyst working for RAND, the defense think tank, who turned against the war. Nixon thought Ellsberg was a Soviet agent, like Alger Hiss, only worse. Ellsberg was publicly admitting that he was part of a larger conspiracy with the press. “He must be a rat,” said Nixon. “I got to say for Hiss, he never ratted on anybody else. Never. He never ratted.”
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The Justice Department internal security division reported, erroneously, that the Soviet embassy had received a set of the Pentagon Papers, and federal agents were checking with MI5, British internal security, to see if Ellsberg was another Kim Philby, the infamous Soviet mole. Nothing materialized.
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Kissinger kept Nixon riled up. The release of the Pentagon Papers “shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President,” Kissinger said, according to Haldeman, who once again suspected that Kissinger was covering for himself. A brainy ex-Marine officer, Ellsberg had been a colleague of Kissinger’s at Harvard. Kissinger poured on the calumny, telling Nixon that Ellsberg “had weird sexual habits, used drugs, and enjoyed helicopter flights in which he would take potshots at the Vietnamese below.”
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Colson continued to add gas. Nixon said of Ellsberg, “He’s our enemy. We need an enemy.” To which Colson replied, “Agree completely, and he’s a marvelous one….He’s a perfect enemy to have.”
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Ellsberg’s fellow conspirators were newspaper reporters. He was a hero to the press. The administration was able to get a court order stopping
The New York Times
from publishing more of the Pentagon Papers and then a gag on
The Washington Post
, which also published a large chunk, but ten other papers began printing parts of the top-secret document. In that season of institution-shaking protest, a constitutional crisis loomed. Could the press defy the executive branch? On June 30, a divided U.S. Supreme Court narrowly sided with the press. It lifted the government ban on publication—the Justice Department
had failed to prove that making public the Pentagon Papers harmed national security.

Nixon was furious; Ellsberg was going around speaking on television and at antiwar rallies promoting unlawful dissent, and the American legal system was cowering. Kissinger told Nixon that the country was in a “revolutionary situation.” In early July, Nixon gave a speech to newspaper and TV executives in front of the columned portico of the National Archives. “When I see those columns, I think of what happened to Greece and Rome,” the president said. “They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilizations. The United States is reaching that period.”
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On the morning of July 2, Nixon told Haldeman that he had spoken the night before to J. Edgar Hoover about Ellsberg. “Hoover is not going after this case as strong as I’d like,” said Nixon. “There’s something dragging him.” Hoover had cautioned Nixon not to make a “martyr” out of Ellsberg. Nixon was indignant when he heard that Ellsberg’s father-in-law, a toy manufacturer named Louis Marx, was regarded as “F.O.B.”—“Friend of Bureau”—and enjoyed Hoover’s protection.
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The FBI and CIA were useless to Nixon. He railed at Ehrlichman, “If we can’t get anyone in this damn government to do something about the problem that may be the most serious one we have, then, by god, we’ll do it ourselves. I want you to set up a little group right here in the White House. Have them get off their tails and find out what’s going on and figure out how to stop it.”
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Haldeman’s notes refer
to “the Jew (Ellsberg).”
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(Actually, Ellsberg’s parents had converted to Christian Science.) Nixon’s atavistic rancor over Ellsberg seemed to infect his judgment on other matters. On that same day, July 2, Nixon read a story quoting an anonymous official at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who explained that a recent dip in the unemployment numbers was a statistical fluke. Colson snooped around and discovered that the official was Assistant Commissioner of Labor Statistics Harold Goldstein. “This drove the P
right up the wall tonight, and he started hounding Colson every couple of minutes, demanding that we get Goldstein fired, etc,” Haldeman noted.
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In the morning, Nixon started in on the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

NIXON:
I said [to Colson] is it all Jews? He said, “Yes, every one of them is a Jew.”

The president began ventilating to Haldeman about the number of Jews in the federal bureaucracy.

NIXON:
All right. I want a look at any sensitive areas around where Jews are involved, Bob. See, the Jews are all through the government, and we have got to get in those areas. We’ve got to get a man in charge who is not Jewish to control the Jewish…do you understand?

HALDEMAN:
I sure do.

NIXON:
The government is full of Jews.

HALDEMAN:
I sure do.

NIXON:
Second, most Jews are disloyal.

Fred Malek, the chief of personnel at the White House, was instructed to survey the administration. But first, a Haldeman aide checked to make sure that Malek wasn’t Jewish. (As it turned out, Nixon ended up removing a Protestant as head of the BLS and replacing him with a Jew.)
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Nixon’s occasional anti-Semitic outbursts were a source of serious discomfort to many of his aides, several of whom were Jewish. In later years, most would insist that Nixon was not really anti-Semitic. Protesting too much, perhaps, one former aide noted that Tricia’s first boyfriend, Jeffrey Donfeld, was Jewish, and that he borrowed Nixon’s white tie and tails to escort Tricia to the International Debutante Ball. Nixon, it should be remembered, was ardently pro-Israel and
counted on Jewish advisers like Kissinger, Safire, Garment, Burns, and economic adviser Herb Stein. He enjoyed and respected—at times, appeared to revere—Israel’s earthy, blunt prime minister, Golda Meir. Nixon’s defenders say that his offensive rants sprung from his anti-elitist resentment or partisanship; he was irked that Jews continued to vote Democratic despite his strong efforts for Israel. While not subscribing to the hoary canard of an international Jewish cabal, Nixon believed that the East Coast liberal establishment, by the 1960s, included a disproportionate number of Jews at the upper reaches of the federal bureaucracy, the media, and the arts.

The excuses of his followers aside, there is no hiding the ugliness of Nixon’s remarks. Nixon’s derisive anti-Semitic remarks were not uncharacteristic of many men from his generation or earlier. As a Harvard overseer, FDR supported a Jewish quota. Truman—who in 1948 brushed aside State Department opposition and ordered diplomatic recognition of Israel—casually referred to Jews as “kikes.”
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But Nixon was more imperative.
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While Nixon was
bemoaning his inability to control his own government, he was on the verge of changing the balance of nations. On July 7—the day after Nixon gave his gloomy speech about America’s decline to the newspaper editors in front of the National Archives—Kissinger feigned a stomachache on a stopover in Pakistan and slipped over the Chinese border. His secret trip to Beijing was code-named “Marco Polo,” after the fourteenth-century Venetian traveler to China, and his mission was to arrange a meeting between Nixon and Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese leadership.

On July 11, while Nixon was looking out over the Pacific in San
Clemente, he received a call from Kissinger’s aide, Al Haig. “Any message?” Nixon asked. Haig answered with a pre-designated code word: “Eureka,” meaning success.

Kissinger had been “literally trembling,” Haldeman wrote, when the national security adviser first told Nixon that the Chinese had invited him to Beijing in early June.
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Nixon and Kissinger had raised a glass of Courvoisier to themselves and their achievement. “Let us drink to generations to come who may have a better chance to live in peace because of what we have done,” Nixon had toasted. Now Kissinger presented Nixon with a report on his seventeen hours of intense negotiations with Chou En-lai, the smooth Chinese prime minister who was representing the aging and ailing Chairman Mao. “We have laid the groundwork for you and Mao to turn a page in history,” Kissinger’s report began.
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From Casa Pacifica, Nixon flew by helicopter to an NBC studio in Burbank to tell the world about the China opening. The international reaction was stunned and full of praise. “Le Coup de Nixon” headlined
France-Soir
in Paris. “The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope,” wrote the normally anti-Nixon columnist Max Lerner. Nixon, who could be easy and sweet with his secretaries, turned to Marjorie Acker and asked, “Whaddya think?”
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That evening, Nixon rounded up his staff and took them to Perino’s, a Wilshire Boulevard restaurant that had once been a celebrity haunt but now catered more often to tourists. Nixon ordered a magnum of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 1961 (the Secret Service had to talk down the bill for the bottle from $600 to $300).
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As he was leaving, Nixon stopped at the front of the dining room to introduce Kissinger as “the man who has traveled to Peking.” Most of the diners, who had not been glued to their TV sets, had no idea what he was talking about. Kissinger described the scene: “Nixon was not boastful; he acted almost as if he could not quite believe what he had just announced. There was a mutual shyness; Nixon was always ill at ease
with strangers, and the other guests were not comfortable in approaching a president. In his hour of achievement Richard Nixon was oddly vulnerable.”
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