Being Nixon: A Man Divided (42 page)

At Camp David on this August night, Nixon was psyching himself up to deliver another “stunner” to the nation. With Haldeman and Weinberger as his rapt audience, Nixon held forth on the future and his role in it. America was leaving an age, begun by FDR, when “we were saying that government should do everything.” Now, said Nixon, he had to find a way to inspire people to have a goal greater than self, or neither the people nor the nation would be great.
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The president announced his “New Economic Plan” the next night on national television, risking voter wrath by preempting the Sunday night family favorite,
Bonanza
. Wage and price controls were
popular and gave the economy a boost—at first. But as the temporary controls were lifted, wages and prices jumped up, and Nixon would feel compelled to impose more, and more highly regulated, limits (by then, Nixon was in the coils of Watergate; Shultz, elevated to Treasury secretary and no longer playing the “good soldier,” quietly quit in protest). Pent-up inflation eventually burst loose, reaching double digits by the end of the decade. In his memoirs, Nixon admitted that the “New Economic Policy” (the name was dropped when someone figured out that Lenin had used it) was a short-term boost but a long-term bust. “The piper must always be paid,” wrote Nixon.
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On August 9,
a few days before his secret economic summit at Camp David, Nixon had been sitting in a cabin in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, looking out at the lake and still fretting about the Pentagon Papers. “We’ve got to keep the Pentagon Papers story going,” Nixon said, according to Haldeman’s notes, “because Larry O’Brien has decided to try to kill it.” (O’Brien, the former JFK aide and Democratic Party chairman, was forever cast as Nixon’s bugaboo.) Dictating his diary that night, Haldeman went on to say, “The P’s afraid that Krogh and our crew are too addicted to the law and are worrying about the legalisms rather than taking on the publicizing of the papers. His point here is not getting
The New York Times;
it’s getting the Democrats.”
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Nixon need not have worried about Krogh’s “addiction to the law.” Still shaken by his trip to the Oval Office in late July, Krogh was willing to entertain almost any scheme to get Daniel Ellsberg. Krogh and his team asked the CIA for a psychological profile of Ellsberg and were disappointed by the results: The CIA concluded that Ellsberg had been motivated by patriotism. G. Gordon Liddy had a bright idea: a black bag job, breaking into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, to steal records showing Ellsberg’s mental instability. The records could then be leaked to the press through the ever-ready Colson. On July 28, Howard Hunt sent a memo to Colson entitled “Neutralization of Ellsberg” with a “skeletal operations
plan” on “how to destroy his image and credibility.” On August 11, Krogh sent a lawyerly, lightly veiled memo to Ehrlichman: “We would recommend that a covert operation be undertaken to examine all the medical files still held by Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst covering the two-year period in which he was undergoing analysis.”

In an “Approve” box provided by Krogh, Ehrlichman wrote his initial, “E,” plus the notation, “if done under your assurance that it is not traceable.” Three weeks later, Krogh sent Liddy and Hunt on their way to break into Dr. Fielding’s office in Los Angeles. “For God’s sake, don’t get caught,” were his parting instructions. Liddy and Hunt decided that Krogh’s code name would be “Wally Fear.”
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On September 5, Hunt and Liddy returned to Washington and repaired to Room 16 in the Executive Office Building, where they showed Polaroid photos to Krogh of their raid on Dr. Fielding’s office. The office was trashed; they had wanted to make it look like a “drug burglary gone awry,” the two Plumbers explained. But they apparently hadn’t found any files on Ellsberg. Krogh later wrote that he was “stunned and appalled” and that Ehrlichman, too, “seemed shocked and surprised” by the scene of scattered papers and overturned furniture.
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Ehrlichman soon recovered his can-do advance-man cool. During a September 8 meeting, the president’s deputy reported on “dirty tricks.” Ehrlichman told the president, “We had one little operation that aborted out in Los Angeles, which, I think is better that you don’t know about. But we’ve got some dirty tricks under way that may pay off.”
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Two days later, Ehrlichman was suggesting that his team could “steal” documents on the Pentagon Papers from the National Archives and photograph them.
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Nixon continued to be impatient with the FBI’s investigation of Ellsberg. “I think we may just be doing it too damn legalistically,” he said.
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Meanwhile he was crudely imploring Haldeman to use the IRS to get other enemies (“Now here’s the point, Bob,
please
get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors to the Democrats….All right. Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?”).
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The Plumbers were reorganized, but the Nixonites continued to give Liddy and Hunt employment and even promotions. Two weeks after the botched burglary, eager to satisfy his boss’s incessant demands to “do something,” Ehrlichman praised the two men to the president. “We have a couple of fellows under Krogh—Liddy and Hunt—who know what they’re doing and have been around,” he boasted.
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The two galoots took on new assignments. Liddy’s ludicrous plan to put LSD in Ellsberg’s soup was called off, but Hunt blundered on trying to find evidence that JFK had ordered Diem’s assassination. Unable to find any actual proof, he forged a State Department cable and leaked it to
Life
magazine—which had the good sense not to print it.
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The Plumbers did
uncover one leak, although it wasn’t the one they were looking for. On December 14, investigative columnist Jack Anderson published transcripts of a top-secret White House meeting on a war that had broken out between Pakistan and India. The White House was backing Pakistan—a crucial go-between in Nixon’s secret diplomacy with Red China—even though Pakistan had tolerated mass slaughter when its eastern provinces broke away. In the leaked transcripts, Henry Kissinger was exposed making intemperate remarks about the Indians, who were in disfavor at the White House.
*
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Under harsh questioning, Charles Radford, a young navy yeoman working at the White House, tearfully admitted that he had rifled the files and “burn bags” of Henry Kissinger and his staff. He denied leaking the information to Anderson. He admitted, however, that he had given top-secret documents—including highly sensitive materials like transcripts of Kissinger’s conversations on his secret trip to China—to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer.
³⁶

This revelation was, on its face, shocking. The Joint Chiefs had been caught red-handed spying on the president of the United States. “Jesus Christ!” Nixon exclaimed when Ehrlichman told him. The president banged the table and threatened prosecutions.
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But then Nixon simmered down and saw a way to use the scandal to his advantage. In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that he was “disturbed” but “not really surprised.”
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Not wanting to cause a major flap over tensions between the White House and Pentagon, Nixon decided to bury the matter. Admiral Moorer was not even chided—Nixon, in his Machiavellian way, knew that he would gain an extra measure of control over the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs by sitting on his flagrant dereliction. As Ehrlichman, always the phrase-maker, put it, Moorer would now come “pre-shrunk.” Six months later, Nixon reappointed Moorer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The leaky yeoman was exiled to Oregon.

Kissinger, however, staged a foot-stomping tantrum. “He [Nixon] won’t fire Moorer!” he shouted at Ehrlichman, railing at a ubiquitous “they” of enemies. “They can spy on him and they can spy on me and betray us and he won’t fire them!”
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Nixon was becoming
increasingly concerned about Kissinger’s mood swings. According to Ehrlichman, “Nixon wondered aloud if Henry needed psychiatric care.” Nixon seemed “sincere” about it—but he didn’t want to confront Kissinger personally. “Talk to him, John,” Nixon said.
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Ehrlichman shied away, too. “No one would bell the cat and tell Henry he needed to see a psychiatrist,” Ehrlichman recounted to Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson. Asked about it many years later, Nixon denied that he had ever said that Kissinger should seek psychiatric help. “Others brought up the idea, Nixon admitted, and it was discussed.” But then Nixon launched into his standard dismissal of psychiatrists: “He tended to think that those who saw them came out worse rather than better.”
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In private conversations with Ehrlichman and others, Nixon could be psychologically shrewd about Kissinger—and about the hubris
of other powerful, egotistical men. “People get the feeling that they can do no wrong, and then, well, their defense is always to show, whenever they do make a mistake, they didn’t do it. But that, actually, they were right all the time,” Nixon said to Haldeman and Ehrlichman on December 23, as they talked about Kissinger’s “intellectual arrogance.” The president went on, more broadly and insightfully:

NIXON:
Whenever you make a mistake, unless you cut your losses and get out, you compound it by trying to prove you’re right. That was the trouble with Kennedy and Johnson on Vietnam. Assuming it was a mistake, they compound it by trying to prove that it wasn’t.

EHRLICHMAN:
Yeah, yeah.

NIXON:
So it got deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and deeper.
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Truer words, perhaps, but Nixon—like so many powerful men—seemed incapable of following his own advice.
*
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On rare occasions, a flicker of self-awareness would creep into the presidential mind. At Christmastime in 1971, Nixon spoke with John Mitchell about the extraordinary degree of subterfuge among his own advisers. One reason he did not want to fire Admiral Moorer was that Moorer had been the White House back channel to go around Defense Secretary Mel Laird, who himself was spying on the president through the intercepts of the National Security Agency.
⁴⁴
For a moment, Nixon was able to see what a tangled web he had woven. In a soft, halting voice, the president said to Mitchell, “I created
this whole situation, this—this
lesion
. It’s just unbelievable. Unbelievable.”

But within two weeks he was blithely back to using the Joint Chiefs to circumvent the secretary of defense.
⁴⁵

For all his bluster,
Kissinger was not blind to his own shortcomings. On December 30, during a long heart-to-heart with Haldeman, Kissinger admitted that he was “egotistical” and “nervous.” He knew that Nixon was tiring of his histrionics. But then, as Haldeman noted, “he tossed in the thing of being essential to the China trip.” Kissinger’s job security—or so he believed—was that only he could handle the immense complexities of arranging the president’s trip to Beijing, coming up in February.
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Nixon usually tried to be philosophical about his national security adviser’s self-promotion, even when it came at the president’s expense. In discussing the endless squabbling between Kissinger and Rogers, Nixon could affect a lofty, forbearing tone. “Both think the other is an egomaniac,” Bill Safire remarked to Nixon on January 18. “And in a sense they’re both right,” Nixon replied. “Ego is something we all have, and then you either grow out of it or it takes you over. I’ve grown out of it,” Nixon said to his speechwriter, who may have struggled to keep a straight face. The president continued: “It’s really compensation for an inferiority complex. Henry has that, of course, and Bill has it too—because this isn’t his field, and he knows Henry knows more than he does.”
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Kissinger was a deft courtier who usually knew his place. Still, he couldn’t resist dangerous liaisons. Stepping out to Georgetown had become risky to Kissinger, but that was part of the thrill. Skipping the First Lady’s birthday party in March 1971, Kissinger had instead gone to dinner at Kay Graham’s. In a telephone conversation picked up by Kissinger’s own taping system—everyone, it seems, had one—Kissinger worried to Mrs. Graham what would happen “if one of the Nixon courtiers points out that I was at your house.” The proprietor
of
The Washington Post
agreed, “We’d both be beheaded.” They laughed, anxiously, giddily.
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Nixon’s suspicions of Kissinger’s perfidy grew. In the convoluted world of White House court politics, Kissinger’s reputation as a double agent both threatened his continued employment and protected it. Early in the new year, Haldeman recorded that the president “has really been thinking about the Kissinger thing, and that maybe we’ve got to bite the bullet now and get him out. The problem is, if we don’t, he’ll be in the driver’s seat during the campaign, and we’ve got to remember he leaked things to us in ’68, maybe we’ve got to assume he’s capable of doing the same to our opponents in ’72.”
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In the end, with the China trip looming, Nixon decided to keep his vexing but essential national security adviser. Locked in a Machiavellian embrace, they embarked on a journey to a long-forbidden continent that Nixon likened to “going to the moon.”
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“I know of
no presidential trip that was as carefully planned nor of any president who ever prepared himself so conscientiously,” Kissinger wrote of their trip to China.
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Nixon pored over massive briefing books. (Years later, Haldeman’s aide, Larry Higby, recalled, “I had to lug those things around China, but he didn’t need them. He had memorized them.”)
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Clumsy with a soup spoon, Nixon practiced for hours using chopsticks. He invited scholars and old China hands to the White House, including the writer André Malraux, who had known Mao and Chou as young revolutionaries in the 1930s. Kissinger regarded Malraux as a has-been and a bit of a faker, but the French philosopher said the right thing to Nixon: If de Gaulle were still alive, he would salute the American president and say, “You are about to attempt one of the most important things of the century.”
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