The Arrogance of Power (48 page)

The
National Enquirer
quoted Liu as telling of “many dates” with Nixon in Hong Kong and of dancing with him on a yacht. “I knew he cared for me,” she was reported as saying, “because despite my constant warnings he still insisted on seeing me and being alone with me. . . . We had many opportunities
to make love—we were alone in his hotel room at least six or seven times—but I wouldn't let it happen . . . he had an important career and a wife and family to think of. . . .”

Liu later sued the
Enquirer
over aspects of its story, and the paper settled out of court. Her own attorney, she has said, had advised her not to pursue the case, warning her that the paper's reporting was “true.”
¹²
Tracked down in 1996 in Los Angeles, where she was working as a waitress, Liu offered the following account of the relationship.

Her narrative, in broken English and Chinese, was delivered in brief sentences and monosyllables, and with obvious reluctance. She told how after fleeing Communist China in her late teens, she had worked her way up to become chief hostess in the Opium Den, one of several bars at the Hong Kong Hilton. It was there, she said, that local businessman Harold Lee introduced her to Nixon.

In her interview for this book, Liu told of only two Nixon encounters. “He was nice, quiet,” she recalled with a smile. “I'll just say he was smooth and nice. . . . Not jump all over, you know. . . . He was not that handsome; one side of his face was bigger than the other! . . . He gave me a bottle of Chanel No. 5. And he gave me his card. He tell me to come to New York and see him. . . .”

Nixon and the bar hostess were photographed together in 1966 by the Hilton's publicity office. The second meeting, a private one, occurred when Nixon—in town with Rebozo—invited Liu and a hostess named Theresa to his suite at the Mandarin Hotel.

“We finished work and went to the hotel,” Liu said. “We went to their room, and they have a bar there. We had a drink and a snack. They had martinis or something. I don't drink; I had Coke. Mr. Rebozo was very quiet, don't talk much. We left there around two
A
.
M
., I think. We had to catch the last ferry. . . .”

Liu's contact with Nixon, she asserted in this recent interview, was “just talking” and involved neither sex nor a love affair. “I don't want to think about it,” she said, and then—as was obvious—insisted, “I don't want to talk about it.” She had not attended the funeral when Nixon died yet, surprising perhaps in someone who claims so minimal a connection to the man, she later went to visit his grave.
¹³

There are no further details to add to this account, except to note that Nixon both publicly and privately expressed an appreciation of Chinese women. At dinner at the Annenbergs',
¹⁴
according to Mickey Ziffren, a Los Angeles social acquaintance, he “had too much to drink and began talking about the beauty of Chinese women and how they were really much more beautiful. He was doing this in front of Pat and kept going on about the particular qualities he appreciated. . . .”

_____

In December 1967, when Nixon made “to run or not to run” the subject of a Christmas Day family debate, Pat declared she was “resigned to helping out.” “Whatever you do, we'll be proud of you,” she added later, according to Nixon. In the months that followed, when he did start running, Pat kept her word, offering the standard trite comments to the media. Pat was “a volunteer,” “running the office for him,” “having a marvelous time.”
Newsweek
puffed her as “the public man's dream, a seemingly selfless, super-efficient helpmeet . . . her looks and taste classic Middle American . . . country, family, loyalty and discipline.”

The campaign was as usual an endurance test for Pat, a time of going through the motions, frozen between bad memories and hope for the future. When a television show audience applauded her, she was seen to be glassily clapping herself. At some rallies she was merely an appendage, not even introduced by name.

Some perceptive journalists saw through the facade. Pat looked as if she hated campaigning, thought the
New Republic
's John Osborne. “Mr. Nixon publicly gave her reason to hate it. . . . On a platform near Los Angeles, in a fashion so crass it could not be missed, he ignored her presence. . . . At Saginaw, Michigan, she didn't hear him when he called her back to a makeshift platform, and jumped as if she had been flicked with a whip when he roared, ‘
Pat!
' ”

Esquire
's Garry Wills observed pityingly as Pat, asked how it felt to be on the road again, answered: “I love it; one meets so many old friends.” “But,” Wills recalled, “I watched her hands as she said it; the freckled hands were picking at each other, playing with gloves, trying to still each other's trembling.”

Very occasionally the mask slipped. “I tell them what their readers want to hear,” Pat said wearily of the scores of required interviews with women's magazines. On a flight from Denver to St. Louis she tried hard to say nothing to Gloria Steinem, on assignment—as reported earlier—for
New York
magazine. Steinem, however, pressed for more than the usual bland answers. Had Pat really liked all the stories written in past campaigns? “Yes, of course,” she replied. “I don't object to what's been written . . . most of you have been very kind.” In that case, Steinem recalled telling her, she was “the only person I'd ever met, including myself, who liked everything written about them.” There was a flicker of annoyance behind the hazel eyes; the first sign of life.

“No, she was never bored with campaigning. . . . She liked the theatre, especially
My Fair Lady,
and had seen
Hello, Dolly!
three times . . . ‘I feel there's enough seriousness in the world without seeing it in the theatre.'

“There is no Generation Gap in our family,” Pat went on. “Why, only the other day, Tricia and Julie didn't go to one of their parties. I said, ‘Aren't you going out?' And they said, ‘No, we'd much rather have dinner with you and Daddy.' ” “Mamie Eisenhower was the woman in history she most admired, Pat said, ‘because she meant so much to young people.' ”

As she probed Pat's platitudes, Steinem was briefly rewarded with “a stream of anger and resentment”: resentment about her disadvantaged youth, and resentment of Richard Nixon. “There were things she said about her husband that I couldn't figure out a tasteful way to use,” Steinem remembered, “but she wanted me to say them. She didn't like doing what she was doing, she
didn't
like campaigning. She didn't like the world in which she was, the world he had created. . . .”

I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates to the Watergate affair of 1972. . . . As the same men faced the election of 1972, there were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit—or beyond.

—Walt Rostow, Special Assistant for National Security to President Johnson, 1973

M
onths before Nixon announced he was running for president in 1968, his aides were using a code name for their leader in office communications. Their designation—DC—was a straightforward statement of certainty about his ultimate destination.

From early in the year of the election Nixon ran hard and brilliantly. A Nixon for President headquarters had long since opened its doors, in an old bank building in Washington. The real heart of the operation, though, was the candidate's New York law office. Throughout the previous year it had served as recruiting office for his troops, including advisers, speechwriters and aides, all waiting to be unleashed.

Even before Nixon formally announced, the press carried a picture of a group of bright young men in suits, the “New Nixon team.” Absent were Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, still on the West Coast waiting for the serious action to begin; Murray Chotiner, a key player but one whom it was prudent not to publicize; and the new power at the center, John Mitchell.

Mitchell, of jowly face and trademark pipe, had become a multimillionaire as an attorney specializing in municipal bonds. His clients had been the bond sellers, while the Nixon firm had been the underwriters, and it was this mutual interest that had led the two partnerships to merge. (Perhaps not incidentally the new partnership thus formed had contact with Franklin DeBoer, the broker who later claimed he handled a secret Nixon portfolio at Rebozo's bank.
¹
Rebozo, DeBoer revealed, used Mitchell to buy bonds in New Jersey.)

Mitchell's public finance expertise gave him a useful entrée to the political world. He was tough but soft-spoken and so understated that even after 1968 the press would characterize him as “a blank.” Billing him as “our leader against crime and lawlessness,” Nixon would later appoint Mitchell attorney general of the United States, in which capacity he would preside over the initial planning of the Watergate break-in and later be sentenced to prison for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Nixon went into the New Hampshire primary with surgical skill, entering in late January at the last possible moment, and won with more votes than any candidate in any presidential primary in the history of the state. He then triumphed in five other states, the last of them a critical win over Ronald Reagan in Oregon.

Ehrlichman, who came on board in the Oregon race, was impressed and relieved by the candidate's performance. In the past, as reported earlier, he had been concerned about Nixon's drinking, which he thought serious enough to “cost him any chance of a return to public life.” He agreed to join up in 1968 only if Nixon promised to abstain. Nixon responded by taking a “solemn pledge,” which Ehrlichman never saw him break during the campaign.

The “New Nixon” of whom the pundits were writing seemed easier in his skin, relaxed with the press, less angry, less obviously driven. He presented himself not just as a candidate but as a confident man claiming a well-deserved crown. “Nixon,” thought Theodore White, “has the weight and presence. It is visible. . . . He runs as President.”

Nixon was watching on television in Oregon when Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy. According to speechwriter Richard Whalen, he repeated two or three times, “We can beat the little S.O.B.” As Ehrlichman recalled, he shook his head for a long moment, then said: “We've just seen some very terrible forces unleashed. Something bad is going to come of this.”

“Why does Bobby get to be so mean,” Nixon grumbled as the Kennedy effort got under way, “and why do I have to be so nice?” In fact, he welcomed the prospect of Robert's becoming the Democratic nominee, believing it offered an opportunity to indict the Democrats “right back to the Bay of Pigs.” And as Whalen recalled, “He wanted to beat a Kennedy.”

The ultimate “something bad” that Nixon had foreseen came in June, with Kennedy's assassination in the kitchen of Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel, two months after the murder of Martin Luther King. Nixon had attended King's funeral but worried afterward that it had been “a serious mistake” that would
cost him crucial southern white votes. Robert Kennedy's death was “tragic” for Nixon, according to his brother Ed. He also went to that funeral, and then headed for the Bahamas and relaxation with Rebozo and the owners of Paradise Island.

Two months later, in a regal arrival ritual timed to coincide with prime time television, he flew into Miami for the Republican National Convention. “Nixon's the One!” sang the campaign girls gathered at the entrance to the Hilton, and soon he was.

Once nominated, Nixon had to pick a running mate. One outsider was a young Texas congressman named George Bush. The senior House Republican, Gerald Ford, thought he was being seriously considered.
²
Nixon, however, had long been focused primarily on Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland.
³
Gasps of disbelief went up from the convention floor when the choice was announced.

Agnew's only apparent qualification was that he was a centrist, a moderate, though some thought “mediocre” a more apt description. The Democrats quickly capitalized on the curious selection by running derisive commercials, with the sound of prolonged laughter over the slogan “Agnew for Vice President.” Nixon would admit years later that he had opted for Agnew knowing that his running mate was corrupt, the flaw that would eventually force Agnew's resignation.

Nixon made an acceptance speech filled with patriotic sentiment, featuring calls for reconciliation at home and peacemaking abroad. Its best-remembered element, though, would be his allusion to the dream of a child—Nixon himself—the son of a hardworking father and a “gentle Quaker mother,” on his way to achieving the American dream. (Two passages from the speech were not included in the excerpts reprinted in Nixon's memoirs. “Respect for law,” he told his followers, “can come only from people who take the law into their hearts and their minds. . . .” and “Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and to live the truth. That's what we will do.”)

Between the convention and election day the public continued to see a self-assured, effective Nixon backed by meticulous organization. The campaign was to spawn a book by Joe McGinniss titled
The Selling of the President,
and sold Nixon was—by a New York advertising agency, two television producers with long experience at CBS, and a “creative supervisor” from J. Walter Thompson.
⁴
Bob Haldeman, of course, came from the J. Walter Thompson stable.

Nixon at first spoke more readily to the press, dismissing television as a gimmick. “He was afraid of television,” thought McGinniss. “He half expected it was an eastern liberal trick: one more way to make him look silly.” The TV men converted him, however, and print journalists found themselves relegated to “three-bump interviews,” the time between the campaign plane's landing approach and its arrival at the terminal.

Nixon's television team, McGinniss concluded, “controlled him, controlled the atmosphere around him. It was as if they were building not a President but an Astrodome, where the wind would never blow, the temperature never rise or fall, and the ball never bounce erratically. . . .” They left no chance that the horrors of the 1960 debates with Kennedy would be repeated, and—when a televised appearance had to be live—Nixon's managers made sure it was rigidly circumscribed.

Control was exerted right down to the party symbol, the elephant. A Republican rally in 1960 had been spoiled when an inconsiderate pachyderm defecated pungently in front of the speaker's platform. In 1968 a printed manual instructed Nixon advance men to see to it that all performing elephants had preemptive enemas.

While the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, was also represented by a Madison Avenue ad agency, the difference was in the funding. The Nixon side had vastly more money to spend on propaganda—twice as much, in fact, as the Democrats. “The response” of the public, Nixon aide Ray Price remarked, was “to the image, not the man. . . .”

“I was ashamed of being in the company of mediocre merchandisers,” speechwriter Whalen wrote ruefully later. To him, the men around Nixon were “a bunch of second-raters and automatons, dangerous men without serious political convictions.” Whalen quit, but he was an exception.

“With Nixon there are good manners and white shirts and thin-line briefcases,” Hugh Sidey reported after a ride on the
Tricia,
the lead plane in Nixon's three-jet flotilla. “The candidate is combed, shaved, tanned, pressed and serious. . . . Nixon resides, both physically and emotionally, just above the battle.”

By contrast, Sidey wrote, “Humphrey sweats and removes his coat and shouts back at the yippies and dodges tomatoes and grapples at every stop with the problems of race and war and lawlessness. It is steamy and sordid and yet it is real.”

Walter Cronkite had an audience with another Nixon, a Nixon who lay back on a sofa with a drink and talked “the language of the streets, sprinkled with profanities.” This was a Nixon few outsiders would ever see or hear—at least not until years later, when transcripts of the Watergate tapes appeared peppered with the notation “expletive deleted.”

Sidey did notice occasional public slips, as when Nixon “smiles too quickly and for a fleeting moment doesn't seem to mean it.” “None of us,” Whalen had thought, “could say with confidence what, if anything, Nixon felt passionately about. . . . We were like bootleggers serving a client of unpredictable taste and thirst; all we could do was leave samples on his doorstep.”

Oddly, Nixon seemed to scorn the voters, the very people who could guarantee his victory. “It hasn't changed in twenty years,” he complained in private. “You still have to put out a folder saying what you're for and against, where you stand on the issues. Women particularly like it. They don't have the slightest idea what it means, but the voter's been taught to expect it.” Whalen
thought the candidate aimed no higher than “the least assailable middle ground.”

Some tactics had not changed. The public Nixon urged an audience to give protesters a hearing because they “may have something to say worth listening to.” The private Nixon meanwhile told staffers: “Kick the weirdos and beardos on the college campuses. I want to see the violent ones expelled.”

“We would go in and infiltrate the opposition,” recalled advance man Ron Walker. “I was the one that grew the beard and put the wig on and went into these meetings and incited. . . . I'd cause all kinds of problems. . . . I would get a mimeograph machine, and in the middle of the night I was in my bathroom printing opposite material that would fuck them up.”

Walker was in the lead car of a Nixon motorcade in New Jersey when a radio call came warning of possible “difficulty with demonstrators.” Humphrey supporters up ahead were brandishing posters picturing a large black pregnant woman and the legend “Nixon's the One!”—a mocking play on the Republican campaign slogan.

“I wanted those signs down before Nixon got there,” Walker explained. “We simply went in and pulled them down. All the black ladies came falling to the floor. . . . And the people were sitting there, their signs were down and they were pulling splinters out of their hands for a week. . . . I don't call that dirty tricks as much as, you know, guerrilla warfare.”

Nixon's solution to the protesters problem, Ehrlichman remembered, “was to order me to have the Secret Service rough up the hecklers.” When informed that the Secret Service, which had been placed at each candidate's disposal since the Robert Kennedy murder, would have none of it, Nixon had a fallback plan. “He wanted me to create some kind of flying goon squad of our own,” Ehrlichman said, “to rough up the hecklers, take down their signs and silence them. . . . He approved of strong-arm tactics.”

Advance man Walker recalled another confrontation, also in New Jersey, when opponents were disrupting a rally. “I said, ‘Let's take them out!' And I had ushers who were off-duty policemen and firemen that were on our side, and there were hard knocks and stuff. And we moved the people out of our entrance so our guests could get in.” The Nixon team sometimes even paid cash to have opponents forcibly silenced.

Meanwhile they also went on the offensive. Busloads of pro-Nixon hecklers followed Humphrey from rally to rally, trying to drown out his speeches, and there were other, more subtle deceits. Three times a day a TWX wire machine on the Nixon plane clattered into life, transmitting messages from a spy in the Humphrey camp. The Humphrey people knew him as Hearst journalist Seymour Freidin, a friendly fellow who played a mean game of poker and spoke little about his job. In reality Freidin, a veteran CIA informant, was receiving thousands of Republican dollars to phone reports on the Democrats to a secretary in Murray Chotiner's office. Chotiner edited the messages, then wired them to Nixon's plane.

Freidin's 1968 code name, as it would be in 1972, was Chapman's Friend. Republican kingmaker Tom Dewey had used the designation for covert contacts with Nixon as early as 1952. At the start of the 1968 campaign, to hide from the press, Nixon himself had registered at a hotel under the name Chapman. The spy in the Humphrey camp was his spy.