Being Nixon: A Man Divided (44 page)

Meeting with his cabinet at the White House, Nixon handed out teacups as souvenirs. “Now you can say you drank from the cup Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai drank from,” he said. The president was weary but breezy and down-to-earth. He scoffed at “the naïve assumption, particularly among Americans, that problems evaporate when nations get to know one another. That’s nonsense. The idea that either of us is going to be affected by mere personal visitors is baloney.” But he relished recounting his eyeball-to-eyeball personal diplomacy. Describing Chou, he said, “Another characteristic of his is similar to mine: Whenever he said anything particularly tough, he became much cooler. When it was really down to extremely controversial issues, both of us spoke in a way our interpreter couldn’t quite hear. Of course, talking loudly tends to make you much less impressive.” Secretary Rogers observed that while they were talking to Chou, a “girl came up and handed him the galleys of the next day’s newspaper, and there he was—rearranging the front page.” Nixon muttered, “I’d like to rearrange a front page now and then.”
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Everyone had a good laugh. The president was wry, confident, in command.

The mood did not last. He began complaining again about the press coverage, badgering his aides for a PR campaign that would emphasize his personal role (and thus downplay Kissinger’s) in the China breakthrough. “Once more we encountered the curious phenomenon that success seemed to unsettle Nixon more than failure,” Kissinger wrote. “He seemed obsessed by the fear that he was not receiving adequate credit.”
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Dwight Chapin, too, noted that Nixon “couldn’t seem to celebrate. After China it was all, how are we going to exploit this politically? How are we using this? It was almost as if he was surrendering the high he could have had.”
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Two days after
Nixon returned, columnist Jack Anderson reported what appeared to be a scandalous payoff of the Nixon administration. In his
Washington Post
column, the muckraker claimed to have a memo proving that the global conglomerate, International Telephone
and Telegraph had given the Republican Party $400,000 for its upcoming convention expenses. The quid pro quo was a favorable resolution in a federal antitrust case that threatened to break up the company. Led by Larry O’Brien, the Democrats jumped on the story as a way to diminish Nixon’s China triumph. Senator Edward Kennedy began Judiciary Committee hearings on the scandal, which the establishment press duly hyped. Or so it seemed to Nixon, who was furious. In fact, the president
had
tried to quash the antitrust case—but not in return for a political contribution. As Nixon later explained in his memoirs, he had intervened because Justice Department bureaucrats had defied his order not to break up a company simply because it was big.
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The White House was sure that the incriminating payoff memo, supposedly written by an ITT lobbyist named Dita Beard, was a forgery. To prove it, E. Howard Hunt was dispatched to confront Beard in her hospital bed, where she had collapsed in the midst of the scandal. Wearing a red wig and a voice-altering device supplied by the CIA, the Plumber grilled the lobbyist, who protested her innocence in the whole affair (she had been bragging, exaggerating her clout). The case quickly devolved into acrimonious and confusing charges and countercharges until, after a few weeks, the press lost interest.
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Hunt was still
working out of the White House, but his partner, Liddy, had gone on the payroll of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, CRP, or as it was soon dubbed, “Creep.” With the November election approaching, resources were being poured into the effort to ensure the president a second term. Nixon had declared that he was not going to be outspent in 1972 the way he had been by the Kennedy machine in 1960. Influence peddlers and seekers were put on notice that ambassadorships would go to generous donors.
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Chatting with Nixon, Haldeman marveled that the fundraisers had “sucked” in so much money that it was going to be hard to spend it all.

Liddy was doing his best. Flying first class around the country and staying in fancy hotels, Liddy was recruiting operatives with blandishments of cash and excitement. On board came some Cuban exiles who called Liddy “El Halcón”—the Falcon, the “birds other birds fear.” Liddy scared off one potential secretary when he put his hand in a flame to demonstrate his ability to endure pain, but he signed up a pair of blond prostitutes to ensnare wayward Democrats.
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On January 27, equipped with charts and graphs, Liddy, accompanied by White House Counsel John Dean and CRP deputy chief Jeb Magruder, had gone to the Office of the Attorney General at the Justice Department to brief John Mitchell on a proposed “Operation Gemstone.” Liddy wanted campaign intelligence that was “offensive” as well as “defensive.” To secure the Republican Convention from antiwar protesters, Liddy suggested kidnapping their leaders, drugging them, and spiriting them away to Mexico. He labeled these disappearances
Nacht und Nebel
, “night and fog,” a term used by Nazi stormtroopers. Liddy explained that he already had a lease on a houseboat in Miami Beach, site of the Democratic Convention, to house the prostitutes (this was “Operation Sapphire”). Liddy ticked off various other ideas for black bag jobs and bugging operations to hit the headquarters of Democratic candidates.
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Puffing his pipe, the attorney general listened impassively. John Dean later claimed that when he caught Mitchell’s eye, the attorney general winked. According to Dean, Mitchell drily told Liddy that Operation Gemstone was “not quite what I had in mind.”
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In Liddy’s world, the line between kidding and crime was often fuzzy. (Liddy addressed the attorney general as “General,” with a hard “g.”) Mitchell later said, “I should have thrown Liddy out the window.”

But at the time, he merely agreed to another meeting. Liddy pared down the million-dollar plan, cutting out the houseboat (but keeping
the prostitutes) and dropping a “chase plane” to pursue Democratic candidates.
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A third meeting followed in Florida, where Mitchell was vacationing. It has never been clear what Mitchell approved. He later claimed to have said no at all three meetings, but between the pipe-puffing and the drollery, it was sometimes unclear what he had intended. He was exhausted and distracted—Martha was collapsing, again—and he wanted to go back to his New York law practice after managing the Nixon campaign. The Liddy-Hunt team continued to scheme, along with other Dirty Tricksters in the employ of CRP or the White House. H. R. Haldeman signed off on $300,000 for “intelligence gathering,” and no one put a stop to the madness.
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Liddy’s nominal boss at CRP, Jeb Magruder, was afraid of “El Halcón,” especially after Liddy said to him, “Jeb, if you don’t take your arm off my shoulder, I’m going to tear it off and beat you to death with it.” Magruder later wrote that he was instructed to get along with Liddy, who appeared to have the backing of Dean and Colson. “Liddy’s a Hitler, but at least he’s our Hitler,” he was told by Gordon Strachan, the White House aide assigned by Haldeman to keep an eye on Magruder. Liddy claims that he even proposed to assassinate Jack Anderson but was told to “forget it” by Hunt.
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What did Richard
Nixon know of Operation Gemstone or Liddy’s various plots? Probably nothing. Though Haldeman may have kept Nixon apprised of political intelligence operations in general terms, Nixon in the winter and spring of 1972 was absorbed by China, Russia, and Vietnam. While massively winning reelection was always a top priority, presidential politics consumed less time than geopolitics. As the president rose in the polls, his Democratic challengers fell by the wayside until Senator George McGovern, an uncharismatic liberal from South Dakota, was the last man standing. Nixon knew he was going to win; the only question was by how much. It’s possible that Nixon had a warning or two of the rot down below. Nixon assistant Henry Cashen recalled standing with Murray Chotiner, the original Nixon nut-cutter, as they looked up at the CRP’s plush new
headquarters at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, across the street from the Executive Office Building, in the fall of 1971. “These guys have nothing to do,” said Chotiner. “We’re going to win going away. They”—he gestured to the shiny campaign headquarters—“are going to get in trouble.” Chotiner told Cashen that he had warned Haldeman of his premonition in writing but had received only an acknowledgment.
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Nixon would later be compared to Henry II, who cried out, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” thus inspiring his attentive knights to murder Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury. In the Nixon White House, as well as at the CRP, the gathering and spreading of dirt was sanctioned, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, from on high. Chuck Colson, Nixon’s self-described hatchet man, explained to Jonathan Aitken, “It was like a culture taking root in a corporation. Haldeman, no doubt with the president’s blessing, ran a sort of system by which a nod, a smile, or a word of approval or an invitation to a White House function was bestowed on those who brought in dirt on our opponents. You could always get rewarded if you showed up in the White House with a bit of negative intelligence, so the puppies kept coming in with their bones.”
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Pressed by Haldeman (or so he later testified), White House counsel John Dean began drawing up a White House “enemies list.” Actually, there were several lists—so many that it became confusing. In an almost farcical attempt to avoid overlap or omission, Alex Butterfield wrote Haldeman:

I received a copy of the very sensitive Eyes Only “Opponents List” put together by Messrs. Colson and Bell, I do not see in the media section of that list the names of Kandy Stroud of
Women’s Wear Daily
[she had coined the “Plastic Pat” label], Judith Martin or Maxine Cheshire of the
Washington Post
, who, according to my understanding, are on the current “Freeze List.” At the same time, I do note the names of others on the “Freeze List”—namely, Senators Nelson, Kennedy, and Muskie, Congressman Robert Kastenmeier and Sander Vanocur of PBS.
Am I wrong to assume that the “Freeze List” is something over and above the “Opponent List”?…If you will straighten me out on this matter, I will pass the word to Colson, Bell, Rose Mary Woods…and others who have a need to know.
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The enemies lists (or “opponents lists” or “freeze lists”) were fed by Nixon, compiled from the angry notations on the president’s copy of the Daily News Summary. Nixon was hardly the first (or last) president to make lists—literal or notional—of his enemies. Eisenhower made a practice of writing down the names of his enemies and tossing them in a drawer.
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But Nixon was unusually vituperative. In April, he ordered Haldeman and Ziegler to banish
Time
magazine’s Sidey and
The New Republic
’s John Osborne (to whom Ehrlichman regularly leaked) for their coverage of the ITT scandal. “Both have spoken in the most vicious derogatory terms of RN in the place where you really find out what people think—the Georgetown cocktail parties,” Nixon dictated. “The evidence on this is absolutely conclusive. You do not need to ask me where I got it.”
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Nixon seemed oblivious to the corrosive power of his own rage. On May 9, Walter Annenberg, the wealthy publisher appointed ambassador to Britain by Nixon, chatted with the president about “our friend Norman Vincent Peale,” whose sermons on the “power of positive thinking” Nixon had regularly taken in when he lived in New York. Annenberg recited Peale’s teaching that it wise to “practice being dispassionate” because “resentful feelings complicate things, even affect your health.” But then, as if he had never heard of Norman Vincent Peale, Annenberg became passionate about avenging his enemies—one in particular.

With the president murmuring in agreement, Annenberg began talking about how much he resented Katharine Graham. The publisher (TV
Guide, The Philadelphia Inquirer
) said that he was thinking of commissioning a reporting team to investigate the life of Mrs. Graham’s late husband Philip, who had committed suicide in 1963.
Annenberg claimed that during a social encounter in London, he had told the
Post
’s proprietor that her “journalistic operation was an absolute disgrace.” Nixon hooted and chortled as Annenberg continued: “This bitch has got it coming.” “Right,” said Nixon. John Ehrlichman was taking notes on the conversation, which was also recorded. His cryptic jottings reflect the abrupt turn from high-mindedness to crude japes:

Norman V. Peale

Resentful feelings affect health

Practice being dispassionate

P—power of positive thinking

Told K G: paper is a disgrace

A: someone will do the Phil Graham story in revenge

Do it in paperback

She’s got it coming

“Bitch”
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Nixon didn’t just laugh at vulgar jokes about
The Washington Post
’s owner. In the fall of 1971, in the wake of the Pentagon Papers disclosure, groups organized by Bebe Rebozo and other pro-Nixon businessmen had begun challenging the FCC licenses of TV stations owned by Graham’s publishing company. The effect on the newspaper’s staff was predictable.
Washington Post
executive editor Ben Bradlee recalled: “Our stock price nosedived as the word got out that the
Post
was going to lose its TV station income. It was a scary time, and it had an absolutely critical impact on us internally. From that time on we knew that Nixon hated us and we reciprocated. Without that, the
Post
would never have behaved so confidently in its reporting of Watergate.”
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