Being Nixon: A Man Divided (45 page)

When he met with Annenberg on May 9 (he gave the ambassador a set of cuff links), Nixon was unwinding from one of the most momentous decisions of his presidency. The night before, he had told the
nation that he was ordering the mining of Haiphong Harbor, where Russian ships delivered supplies to the North Vietnamese. The president was gambling his foreign policy and his presidency.

By the spring of 1972, Nixon had wound down U.S. forces in Vietnam from over half a million when he took office to under seventy thousand. But the secret peace talks with North Vietnam were stalled as usual, and at the end of March, North Vietnam launched a major invasion of the South, using Russian-made T-54 tanks. Nixon ordered a full-on bombing campaign against North Vietnam, but cloud cover obstructed the U.S. Air Force. “The air force isn’t worth a shit,” Nixon complained, according to Haldeman’s notes. “They won’t fly.”
³⁹
“Just get that weather cleared up over there,” Nixon said to Kissinger. “The bastards have never been bombed [nervously chuckles]. They’re going to be bombed this time.”
⁴⁰

Nixon was feeling isolated and unsupported. He accused the military of ducking action to avoid casualties. He told the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Moorer, that General Creighton Abrams, the U.S. ground commander, was “drinking too much” and was thus ordered to “go on the wagon throughout the balance of this offensive.” A month later, he railed about the secretary of defense, “goddamn Laird is playing his usual games, saying we can’t find targets and so forth. He is a miserable bastard, really.”
⁴¹

He was disappointed with Kissinger, whom he accused of naïveté in his dealings with Hanoi. “The point is, Bob, we’ve got to realize that on this whole business of negotiating with North Vietnam, Henry has never been right,” Nixon told Haldeman on May 2.
⁴²
Kissinger was anxious that if Nixon blockaded North Vietnam, the Russians would scotch the summit meeting scheduled for June in Moscow—the first-ever visit to Moscow by a U.S. president and the culmination of the Nixon-Kissinger triangular diplomacy. Gloomily, Kissinger put the odds of cancellation at 80 percent.
⁴³

Squeezed on all sides—by the Pentagon, the Kremlin, and Hanoi—Nixon lashed out at Kissinger and then privately regretted it. He wrote in his diary: “I think perhaps I was too insistent and rough on
Henry today, but I am so disgusted with the military’s failure to follow through that I simply had to take it out on somebody.”
⁴⁴

For some time, Nixon had allowed himself to dream that after the election he could join with his favorite, John Connally, to build a new party—“the Independent Conservative Party, or something of that sort,” Haldeman recorded—that would bring together Southern Democrats and middle-of-the-road to conservative Republicans. “Get control of the Congress without an election, simply by the realignment, and make a truly historic change,” wrote Haldeman.
⁴⁵
Nixon had hoped to build a whole new establishment to replace the liberal elite.

Now he could only think of striking a mighty blow against Hanoi, the political fallout be damned. “For once, we’ve got to use the maximum power of this country against a shit-ass little country to win the war,” he told Kissinger on May 4.
⁴⁶
But as he contemplated radical military action—a blockade, heavy bombing of Hanoi, maybe even threatening with a nuclear weapon—he realized that the voters would revolt and drive him from office in November.
⁴⁷
He began thinking of a successor: Rockefeller? Reagan? Chief Justice Burger? “Henry threw up his hands and said none of them would do,” Nixon wrote in his diary. “Henry then became very emotional about the point that I shouldn’t be thinking this way or talking this way to anybody….He made his pitch that the North Vietnamese should not be allowed to destroy two presidents.”
⁴⁸

Alone, Nixon turned to his family. Retreating to Camp David on Friday, May 5, he brought Julie with him. He told her that he was planning on mining Haiphong Harbor and striking targets around Hanoi. Warm but independent-minded, Julie told her father of her worries that the public might not back him. If we do not act, Nixon responded, we will cease to be a great power. “She rejoined with the observation that there were many who felt that the United States should not be a great power,” Nixon wrote in his diary. “This, of course, is the kind of poison that is fed to so many of the younger generation by their professors.”

Tricia’s reaction, Nixon wrote, “was immediately positive because she felt we had to do something.” That Friday night, wandering and insomniac, Nixon looked for an empty cabin to write his speech. “Very late” that night, he entered Aspen, his main residence, and noticed that Pat’s light was still on. “When I went in, she got up and came over, and put her arms around me, and said, ‘Don’t worry about anything,’ ” Nixon noted in his diary.

Back in Washington on Monday, “I had my usual light pre-speech dinner of a small bowl of wheat germ for energy around six….I jogged in place for about ten minutes and took a long cold shower.”
⁴⁹

The speech was short. “There is only one way to stop the killing,” he said. “That is to keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam.” If the Russians kept delivering tanks and other weapons on ships entering Haiphong Harbor, they would have to take the risk of losing the ships.

On the three TV networks, the commentators unanimously foresaw a superpower confrontation that would doom the summit.
⁵⁰
But the Russians made only pro forma protests, even after losing one of their freighters to an American mine. The antiwar protests were relatively muted; with the draft ended and the troops coming home, the movement was fading. As American B-52s pounded their targets, the North Vietnamese invasion faltered.

The summit was still on. The Russians had watched America sidle up to China with real apprehension; the Kremlin leaders were eager for détente with the West. Nixon had gambled and won.

In his memoirs, Kissinger poked mild fun at his boss in the throes of deciding whether to risk the summit by striking Hanoi. “Instead of slouching in an easy chair with his feet on a settee as usual, he was pacing up and down, gesticulating with a pipe on which he was occasionally puffing, something I had never previously seen him do,” Kissinger wrote. “On one level he was playing MacArthur. On another he was steeling himself for a decision on which his political future would depend.”

Kissinger noted that, “play acting aside,” the president was “crisp and decisive, his questions thoughtful and to the point.” At “moments of real crisis, Nixon would become coldly analytical,” Kissinger recalled. There would be endless meetings, more writing on yellow legal pads, sometimes contradictory orders that were actually invitations to argument. But then “nervous agitation would give way to calm decisiveness,” Kissinger wrote. Nixon would get to “the essence of the problem and take the courageous course, even if it seemed to risk his immediate political interest.”
⁵¹

E. Howard Hunt.

Bettmann/Corbis

O
n Saturday, May 20, 1972, as Air Force One lifted off from Washington en route to the Moscow Summit, Kissinger came into the president’s cabin and exclaimed, “This has to be one of the great diplomatic coups of all times! Three weeks ago everyone predicted it would be called off, and today we’re on our way!”
¹
Though he had been one of the doubters, Kissinger had worked night and day to set up the meeting, right down to the exchange of gifts. Ambassador Dobrynin had suggested that Nixon might like a little hydrofoil speedboat for tooling along the Potomac. Kissinger had inquired, What would please Secretary Brezhnev? “A Cadillac,” answered the Kremlin’s man.
²

Nixon had teased Kissinger about his reputation as an international playboy after Kissinger’s advance trip to Moscow in late April. Sitting with Rose Woods, who also enjoyed ribbing Kissinger, Nixon suggested that the national security adviser had been hard to reach in Moscow because, as Woods interjected, he was “probably out with some babe.” A bit stiffly, Kissinger demurred but added, “I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. President, it wasn’t through lack of offers.”

Nixon perked up. “Is that right?” Woods chimed in, “Oh my word. Aren’t you modest, Henry.” Kissinger spluttered, “No, no, there it’s got nothing to do with modesty. The head of their state security, General [Sergei] Antonov, greeted me at the airport and said he had a whole bunch of girls, all twenty-five years and younger—”
³

Nixon enjoyed inflating, then deflating Kissinger’s ego. He thought he could manipulate Kissinger, though he sometimes inadvertently created a reciprocating engine that served neither man well. William Safire, an astute observer of Nixon and his convoluted relationship with Kissinger, commented that Nixon’s lack of self-awareness—his need to see himself as someone other than who he really was—caused the president to be played by the man he thought he was playing. “Nixon, who thought of himself not as he was but as he thought of himself,” Safire wrote, “could use Kissinger as a marionette, and then place himself in his own marionette’s hands because the President profoundly understood in his assistant the needs he refused to examine himself.”
⁴
Safire, who enjoyed playing with language, was creating a Russian doll of psychological insight. More plainly stated, Nixon saw himself as the cool one calming the emotional Kissinger. But Nixon’s insecurities made him susceptible to Kissinger’s neediness—which was not so different from Nixon’s.

Safire, who as a budding PR man had first seen Nixon in action at the 1959 Kitchen Debate with Khrushchev, was aboard Air Force One as it flew east. The speechwriter noted that “Nixon had been euphoric, filled with wonderment and the sense of history, at the prospect of going to China, but he was withdrawn and filled with a sense of caution in returning to Moscow.”
⁵
In describing the Soviet mind-set, Nixon was fond of quoting Lenin: “Thrust with the bayonet until you hit steel.” Nixon was steeling himself for the hard-edged Kremlin leaders.

The public reception in the Russian capital was chilly. The crowds had been restricted to side streets, sealed off from the main roads by buses. The Nixons were given an entire floor in the Grand Palace inside the Kremlin, but to avoid eavesdropping devices, Nixon had to conduct meaningful conversations out-of-doors. As usual he was unable to sleep, and he startled the Secret Service at 4:30
A.M
. by slipping out, dressed in a sports jacket, to tour the streets of Moscow in the gray northern light of summer. He spoke to some anxious Soviet guards—the only people on the street at this hour—and felt a rush of
emotion looking back at the onion domes of the Kremlin to see the American flag flying over his guest quarters. (The flag was shown again and again on American TV to a public becoming more and more appreciative of their globetrotting president-for-peace.)
⁶

To Nixon, Brezhnev came across as a tough American labor leader. Nixon was extremely effective with foreign leaders because he did not offer high-minded lectures about freedom. He spoke instead of interests, never acted superior, and always showed respect.
⁷
With Brezhnev, he knew that it was important to look past the rough manners and see the crafty intelligence that had allowed the longtime apparatchik to outlast cutthroat rivals. The two men had met thirteen years before at the Kitchen Debate, when Brezhnev was serving as an aide to Khrushchev. Now, over tea in Brezhnev’s ornate office, the bushy-eyebrowed, solidly built Soviet leader offered a fixed smile and warily eyed the American president.

After some opening bluster, Brezhnev warmed, slightly. He recalled that Franklin Roosevelt had been a hero to the Soviet people for his alliance with Moscow against Hitler. Nixon carefully noted that he had studied the relationship between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill and found that they had been able to overcome the doubts of their subordinates by establishing personal relationships. That is what Nixon wanted, too, he said. “If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats, we will never achieve any progress,” Nixon added drily. “They would bury us in paper.” At this Brezhnev “laughed heartily and slapped his palm on the table,” Nixon recalled in his memoirs. “It seemed like a good beginning.”
⁸

Brezhnev interrupted talks on the second day to take the American president for a speedboat ride, slapping Nixon’s knee in the limousine on the drive to the Volga River and cracking off-color jokes. It was all very jolly; at their own tea, Mrs. Brezhnev began referring to Mrs. Nixon as “sister.” But then, just before dinner, Brezhnev and two other Politburo members began stalking about the room denouncing American involvement in Vietnam, which Brezhnev called “barbaric” and “just like the Nazis.” The American delegation suspected
that the Kremlin leaders were making a transcript to send to Hanoi to reassure their North Vietnamese comrades.
⁹

Nixon was unfazed. He sat impassively while the insults flew. At one point he asked the Soviet leader, “Are you threatening here?” Brezhnev calmed down, and at the delayed dinner, the jokes and toasts resumed. The negotiations over the nearly completed arms limitation treaty dragged on another day. Brezhnev doodled little rockets with his red pen and tried to take back some earlier concessions. Nixon listened; later, lying naked on Dr. Riland’s massage table, he calmly instructed Kissinger not to bend.
¹⁰
Two days later, the Politburo accepted all of the American terms. At about 11
P.M
. on Friday, May 26, the Americans and Russians signed the first-ever arms control treaty, freezing nuclear arsenals while work progressed on a more comprehensive deal. “Everyone’s spirits were high,” recalled Nixon. Brezhnev and Nixon exuberantly drank cognac toasts to each other and to peace.

Pat Nixon asked her husband if she could attend the historic ceremony in the grand, gleaming white St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin. Since none of the other wives would be permitted, Nixon suggested that she slip in and stand behind one of the large columns, which she did.
¹¹

That same evening,
some five thousand miles away, in the Continental Room of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., Hunt and Liddy were hosting a banquet to celebrate an impending burglary. There were snifters of brandy and cigars after dinner, and then they went to work. Hunt and one of the Cubans from the Ellsberg breakin, Virgilio Gonzalez, remained after dinner, hidden in a closet. They intended to break into the Democratic National Committee, only a corridor and elevator ride away. But the alarm on a door was unexpectedly armed, and the duo spent the night trapped in the banquet room. The next night, a different group of burglars, lacking the proper tools to pick the locks, failed as well. On the third try, the burglars got into the Watergate and placed bugs on the phone of
DNC chairman Larry O’Brien and another official. One of the bugs didn’t work. The Plumbers broke into the DNC’s Watergate offices again on the night of June 16, but one of the burglars taped the door’s locks horizontally, instead of vertically, allowing the tape to show. A security guard saw the telltale sign and called the police. The burglars were arrested in the early hours of June 17. In their rush to flee the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, where they were monitoring the operation from across the street, Hunt and Liddy left behind some consecutively numbered hundred-dollar bills, a notebook with Hunt’s name and White House telephone number, and a $6.36 check to Hunt’s country club. Thus did amateurish bumbling doom the presidency of Richard Nixon.
¹²

On Sunday morning,
June 18, Nixon smelled coffee brewing and went into the kitchen at Key Biscayne to get a cup. He glanced at a headline over a small story in the middle of the front page of the
Miami Herald
: “Miamians Held in D.C., Try to Bug Demo Headquarters.” He scanned the opening paragraph. Five men, four of them from Miami, had been arrested in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters. One of the five identified himself as a former employee of the CIA. Three were Cuban natives. They had been wearing rubber gloves. “I dismissed it as some sort of prank,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. He spent most of the day taking restful swims and, in his diary that night, vowed to go bowling for a half hour at the end of each day. In the evening he reread the last chapters of Churchill’s memoir,
Triumph and Tragedy
.
¹³

There is an aura of disengagement, detachment, even mild bemusement in Nixon’s recounting of his initial reaction to the Watergate break-in. He regarded spying on opponents as normal and accepted, and from the very beginning of the Watergate scandal complained about a “double standard” in the press that let Democrats get away with dirty tricks but not the Republicans.
¹⁴
“They’re all doing it,” Nixon said to Haldeman on June 20. “That’s the standard thing. Why the Christ do we have to hire people to sweep our rooms?”
When Haldeman began to answer, “We know they’re—” Nixon finished his sentence. “Yeah, they’re bugging.” He recalled J. Edgar Hoover’s (false) report that LBJ had bugged his campaign plane in 1968. “We have been bugged in the past, right?” he asked rhetorically.
¹⁵

His diary entry on June 19 did note some “disturbing news.” The ex-CIA employee caught breaking into the Watergate was a security consultant named James McCord. McCord had been hired to do security work by the Committee to Re-Elect the President. But Nixon’s reaction to this alarming tidbit seems to have been typically tit-for-tat. He noted that he had learned from “one of [Murray] Chotiner’s operatives” that McGovern had tried to bug the Republican National Committee. Nixon’s response was to “get somebody on the PR side” to put out the story of the Democrats’ alleged bugging attempt to distract, or at least to even the score.

On Tuesday morning, June 20, Nixon read a front-page headline in
The Washington Post
: “White House Consultant Tied to Bugging Figure.” The Post had learned that E. Howard Hunt’s name had turned up in the address books of two of the burglars caught inside DNC headquarters. The story said that until March, Hunt had worked as a consultant to Chuck Colson. “The mention of Colson’s name gave me a start,” Nixon later wrote. “I had always valued his hardball instincts. Now I wondered if he might have gone too far.”
¹⁶

Nixon’s reaction may have been more violent than he let on in his memoirs. According to Colson, Nixon told him that he had “smashed an ashtray down” when he first learned about the break-in that Sunday.
¹⁷
In any case, after reading the
Post
story linking Hunt to both the break-in and to Colson, Nixon called Colson over from his Executive Office Building office next door. Colson was all wounded innocence and self-pity. “Pick up that goddamn
Washington Post
. See the guilt by association,” Colson grumbled, blaming the
Post
for smearing him. Colson told the president that he didn’t see how his man Hunt could be involved—not that Hunt wouldn’t stage a black bag job, just that the former spy would have been more skillful about
it. “I think he’s, he’s too smart to do it this way, he’s just too damn shrewd,” said Colson. “It doesn’t sound like a skillful job,” Nixon agreed. “If we didn’t know better, we’d have thought it was deliberately botched.” Nixon was all nonchalance. “I’m not going to worry about it. I’ve—shit, the hell with it. We’ll let it fly, we’re not going to react to it.” The conversation later turned to Katharine Graham. Colson said he wanted to use the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate the Washington Post Company because he believed Graham was a “vicious” woman primarily concerned with social niceties and who wanted someone in the White House to “kiss her ass.”
¹⁸

Nixon did not entirely trust Colson to tell him the truth, so he checked with Haldeman, who had tried, with mixed success, to keep an eye on the president’s favorite “nut cutter.” As was his way, Nixon did not ask directly but tested a proposition to get Haldeman’s reaction. “Colson protested his innocence in this,” Nixon told Haldeman. “As I’ve told you, I’ve come to the conclusion that Colson’s not that dumb.”

Haldeman agreed. He began to explain, warily, cryptically, that others in the White House had tried to respond to the president’s steady demand for campaign intelligence by undertaking certain projects—but nothing so crude and clumsy as the Watergate breakin. “In fact,” said Haldeman, “we all knew that there were some—”

“—intelligence things,” the president interjected.

“Some activities, and we were getting reports, or some input here and there. But I don’t think Chuck specifically knew that this project was under way or that these people were involved.”
¹⁹

So began a series of opaque conversations between the president and his chief of staff about who, if anyone, on the White House staff or at the Committee to Re-Elect the President was responsible for the break-in. The two men were speaking in a by-now familiar shorthand that did not need to spell out precise meanings. Still, judged by the standards of their normal discourse, Haldeman was guarded and elliptical. The next morning at 9:30, Nixon pressed Haldeman again
about Colson’s involvement. “You’re convinced, though, that this is a situation where Colson is not involved, aren’t you?”