Being Nixon: A Man Divided (50 page)

Nixon, who tried
so hard to “buck up” others, endeavored to raise his own morale on the day before Christmas. At 4
A.M
., he dictated to his diary:

I must get away from the thought of considering the office at any time a burden. I actually do not consider it a burden, an agony, etc., as did Eisenhower and also to an extent Johnson. As a matter of fact, I think the term glorious burden is the best description….

From this day forward, I am going to look upon it that way and rise to the challenge with as much excitement, energy, enthusiasm, and wherever possible, real joy that I can muster.

God’s help will be required as will the help of loyal people on the staff and the family.

A new group of Nixon loyalists, of course, is an urgent necessity….
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The president needed someone he could talk to, someone more politically astute and knowledgeable about the issues than Bebe Rebozo. Nixon felt lonely in Key Biscayne over the holidays. The Nixons were away from their children for the first time at Christmas (Julie, Tricia, and their husbands were traveling in Europe), and Nixon was “tense and preoccupied,” Pat related to Julie. At night after dinner, Pat would hear him on the phone with Kissinger. She decided not to probe; the details were too complex, she told Julie, and she felt wary of second-guessing.

On Christmas morning, Pat suggested to her husband that they open the gifts by the tree. He mumbled something about “later,” and the packages were taken back to Washington, still wrapped.
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That evening, Nixon made a rare admission of his own and his wife’s loneliness. Referring to himself and to Pat in the third person, he wrote: “It is inevitable that not only the President but the First Lady become more and more lonely individuals in a sense who have to depend on fewer and fewer people who can give them a lift when they need it.”
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Writing in retrospect, Nixon noted in his memoirs that “in the last weeks of December and the beginning of January, the ground began to shift, however subtly,” on Watergate. “On the White House staff there were the first signs of finger pointing.”
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Haldeman and Ehrlichman began to blame Colson, and Colson began to blame Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and everyone blamed Mitchell, who, back in New York, blamed everyone but said nothing. The accusations were “tentative, without evidence,” wrote Nixon. Observing Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon recorded in his diary on January 6, “I could see that something was eating them without knowing what.”
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Nixon did not ask. Back in November, he had declared that he wanted John Dean to write a report, to be made public, showing that “no present member” of the White House staff had been involved in Watergate.
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He was advised to keep the report narrowly focused, lest it “open the doors, doors, doors, and doors,” as Ehrlichman put it.
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Nixon did quietly push Colson and Chapin out of their jobs in the White House. Though he valued them, especially Colson, they were “lightning rods.” Nixon felt guilty about Chapin, who had worked for him as far back as the 1962 governor’s race and who, in hiring the prankster Segretti, had been carrying out Nixon’s orders to find someone who could do “Dick Tuck–type stuff.”
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Colson persuaded Nixon to let him stay on at the White House for a few more months and proceeded to drag him, half-wittingly, into the cover-up. E. Howard Hunt was using his pal Colson to extort the White House, threatening to tell all if he did not get more money and a promise of clemency.
⁴³
Colson appealed to Nixon’s sympathies—Hunt’s
wife had died in a plane crash in December, and the former spy, a father of four, was deeply depressed. Nixon agreed, at least tacitly, to consider a pardon for Hunt on humanitarian grounds. In his memoirs, he acknowledged that “it is also true that implicit in Hunt’s growing despair was a threat to start talking, although I was never sure exactly about what.” Nixon, at this stage, was probably ignorant of Hunt’s more outlandish activities, like the break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist—just one of the doors Ehrlichman wished to keep closed.
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While Nixon struggled to end the Vietnam War and to remake the Republican Party and the U.S. government closer to his image, Watergate kept bubbling back up. On January 8, trial began for the five burglars and Hunt and Liddy. Meanwhile, Congress was stirring with anti-Nixon rebellion. Nixon’s plan to reorganize the executive branch into four major departments “blew all the fuses in town,” recalled Roy Ash, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
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Congressmen regarded federal agencies as their own fiefdoms and were anxious to hang on to them. Nixon, for his part, refused to be a “supplicant” to Congress. “We won the election,” he told Haldeman. “We should let them come to us.”
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Nixon had made little effort to elect congressmen in November. “They should support P—not he them,” Haldeman had noted on September 20. “Ok to go on endorsement letters but beyond that they should grab P’s coattails.”
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During the first term, his long-suffering congressional liaison, Bill Timmons, had arranged a series of half-hour sessions with the president for selected members of Congress—informal, get-to-know-you coffees in the Oval Office. “More than once, afterward, he jammed his finger in my chest and demanded, ‘What was that for? What was that for?’ ” recalled Timmons.
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Urged to see more senators by Republican Minority Leader Hugh Scott, Nixon sneered, “Our senators are nothing but a bunch of assholes. You never get anything from them. All I can say is fuck the Senate! You bring them down and give them cookies and you can’t count on them.”
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In a Nixon nightmare come true, Senator Edward Kennedy was
maneuvering behind the scenes. In the House, the new Democratic majority leader, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, startled his colleagues by telling them that they should begin preparing for impeachment. O’Neill had inherited JFK’s congressional district and was closely tied to the Kennedys. Senator Kennedy pushed for Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a segregationist Southerner and strict-constructionist popular with Republicans, to run a special select committee to investigate campaign abuses. Prodded by Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Kennedy wanted the committee to avoid any taint of partisanship. John Dean soon pegged Ervin as a “puppet” for Kennedy. The down-home, Harvard Law–educated Ervin was his own man, but he was helped mightily by the Kennedy forces. Out of public view, Kennedy’s staffers from the Judiciary Committee had been investigating Watergate for six months and now turned over their files to what would become known as the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972 or, more popularly, the Watergate Committee.
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On January 12, Haldeman came up with an ingenious plan, which he attributed to John Dean, to get the Democrats to back off. Haldeman recalled J. Edgar Hoover’s claim, frequently cited by Nixon, that LBJ had ordered the FBI to bug Nixon’s campaign plane in 1968. The White House should demand that the Senate Select Committee investigate irregularities in the 1968 campaign as well as the one in 1972.

Nixon was not eager to violate the old mutual nonaggression pact with LBJ; in any event, the Haldeman/Dean plan fizzled. There was the inconvenient fact that the FBI never had bugged Nixon’s plane. Then there was LBJ’s reaction: He “got very hot,” according to Haldeman’s diary, and threatened to expose Nixon’s connection to Mrs. Chennault.
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Ten days later,
on January 22, LBJ died, “of a broken heart,” as Nixon wrote. President Johnson had “longed for the popular approval and affection that continued to elude him.” Notwithstanding the late flare-up over Mrs. Chennault, Nixon and Johnson had grown
close toward the end, talking on the phone and exchanging visits. “Tell the president I love him,” Johnson said before he died. “He was uniquely able to understand some of the things I was experiencing, particularly with Congress and the media over Vietnam,” Nixon wrote.
^52
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But it’s doubtful that the two presidents really opened up to each other. Outside of extraordinary circumstances, Nixon was not capable of soul-baring conversations. He could discuss the darker side of human nature in the abstract: In October, assessing the electorate, he had remarked, “Hell, the young don’t like the old and never have. And the women don’t like the men, generally. The men don’t like the women. They live together because of reasons that have nothing to do with love.”
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But he very rarely alluded to, much less discussed, any dark feelings of his own. He shied from frank personal conversation, even with friends and family.

Nor did he invite others to open up to him about their own fears and doubts. Nixon’s “bucking up” sessions were pep talks and expressions of sympathy; they were not invitations to share.

Nixon could be cagey about not wanting to know too much. He knew that leaders of countries with large national security operations needed “plausible deniability,” to be able to deny credibly that they had been involved in some of the baser acts required of global superpowers. But Nixon’s aversion to unpleasant truths had a personal, visceral element, rooted in old wounds that never healed.

The Watergate Nixon is generally portrayed as scheming and Machiavellian by the press, and the White House tapes provide no shortage of material to buttress this view. But the overwhelming impression left by listening to the tapes is of a man who is
not
clever, who is all too human—who rambles, gets lost, changes his mind, knows too much and too little all at once.
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Nixon the brilliant political analyst
is nowhere to be seen. His judgment is clouded by human frailty. One moment he sounds cold-blooded and ruthless. The next moment he is naïvely idealistic, prattling on about the lesson of the Hiss case as related in
Six Crises
—the cover-up is worse than the crime!—while plunging into an ever-deeper cover-up. Perhaps he was being cynical and manipulative. Or maybe he was just torn and confused. He was motivated by arrogance and pride, yes, but also by their close cousins, fear and denial.

For whatever reason—probably for all of these reasons—Nixon did not press too closely when his top aides began pointing fingers at each other in the early winter of 1973. Nixon would prod a little, tentatively ask what one man knew about the other—but then retreat when the answers were vague or guarded, as they usually were.
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Perhaps Nixon was tenderly protecting his old friend, John Mitchell. And—or—perhaps he was protecting himself, knowing, as a lawyer, that he could be held responsible for failing to disclose the crimes of his subordinates. In any case, until it was too late, and not really even then, did Nixon grill his chief subordinates on what they knew and when they knew it. Nor did he bring in a trustworthy outsider who could be counted on to do the job for him. As a result he was often ignorant, misinformed, or confused as Watergate surfaced as a mortal threat.

Of course, until the scandal consumed him late that winter and spring, he had much else on his mind, matters of state that seemed far more consequential. He had to get a peace settlement in Vietnam and to secure the release of the POWs—a cause especially dear to him.
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Still, Nixon’s isolation is striking. He didn’t want to hear bad news. He would not seek counsel from the First Lady—Pat later told Julie, with regret, that she had assumed Nixon wanted to be left alone and could handle the complexities of Watergate, as he had managed so many crises before.
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At some level Nixon did not want to hear more bad news from anyone. It’s impossible to know his inner struggles, but he clearly did not want to add to them. He was searching for relief—the sort of escape that careworn leaders sometimes crave
when the burdens of state threaten to become overwhelming. Early that January, when LBJ was starting to fail, Nixon offered to send him to Bebe Rebozo’s place in Key Biscayne because, as Nixon told LBJ over the phone, “Ole Bebe is a great guy to have around. He cheers people up, you know. He never brings up unpleasant subjects.”
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Nixon, too, wanted to cheer up people, himself included, and stay away from “unpleasant subjects,” such as: Who had ordered the Watergate break-in? If he really knew who was to blame, he might have to fire him—and all those involved, including, he was beginning to suspect, his closest aides. Nixon dreaded the prospect of firing anyone. He had used Haldeman for that. But what if Haldeman, too, was implicated? Fond of quoting British statesmen, Nixon was familiar with William Gladstone’s maxim that “The first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher.”
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Nixon, by his own admission, was not a good butcher.
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On January 9,
his sixtieth birthday, Nixon was sitting in the Oval Office at noon when Haldeman handed him an “Eyes Only” telegram. Putting on his reading glasses—which he never showed in public—Nixon read, “We celebrated the president’s birthday today by making a major breakthrough in the negotiations.”
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Nixon looked up and told Haldeman, “Henry’s probably overoptimistic again,” but then he dictated his response—that it was the best birthday present he’d had in sixty years.
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In the early morning hours of January 11, he took up his yellow pad to write his resolutions, among them “restore respect for the office; New idealism—respect for flag, country; Compassion—understanding.”
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Nixon had taken to sporting a little American flag in his lapel; he had gotten the idea, a burst of defiance, from two movies,
The Man
and
The Candidate
, in which the bad guys—Republicans—wore tiny flags in their lapels. “I told Haldeman I was going to wear the flag, come hell or high water, from now on….” The staff was instructed to do likewise.
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