The Arrogance of Power (54 page)

Under Nixon the Vietnam War was to burn on for four more agonizing years. A second country, Cambodia, would be secretly drawn into the conflict, eventually to be overwhelmed by the cataclysm of a revolution that was to take close to two million lives. Nixon would repeatedly punish North Vietnam with bombing more prolonged and devastating than any that had gone before.

Under Nixon, and in the name of the quest for an honorable peace, 20,763 more Americans died—more than a third of the total killed during the entire period of U.S. commitment. 111,230 Americans were wounded, and 109,230 South Vietnamese soldiers died, as did some 496,260 of the Communist enemy—and unknown thousands of innocent civilians.

Some commentators—Nixon included—have argued that his extension of the conflict was justified, that the struggle prevented other Southeast Asian countries from falling to communism. In old age Nixon persistently made the case that had Congress not eventually withdrawn funding and support, the Thieu government could have survived.

The case for the contrary seems equally compelling. To innumerable men and women who served in Vietnam or who observed the war as diplomats and journalists, the corrupt southern regime never deserved the sacrifice that was made in democracy's name. In the field, thousands of miles from the talking shops of Washington, many, including this author, by 1969 had rated Vietnam's prospects of ever surviving on its own as practically nil.

To such critics, the shame is not merely that the struggle was to no avail. It is that the peace with honor “won”—as Nixon put it—was in no meaningful
way any more worthwhile than the settlement that seemed possible had the 1968 Johnson peace initiative succeeded.

There was something else, as grave a betrayal—if it is true—as the undermining of the peace effort. Henry Kissinger, soon to find fame as national security adviser and secretary of state, offered a cynical assessment of the administration's position a few months after meeting Nixon. “I agree that the war is a mistake,” he reportedly told a visitor. “I think it is clear now that we should never have gone in there, and I don't see how any good can come of it. But we can't do what you recommend and just pull out, because the boss's whole constituency would just fall apart; those are his people who support the war effort: the South; the blue-collar Democrats in the North. The Nixon constituency is behind the war effort. If we were to pull out of Vietnam, there would be a disaster, politically, for us here, at home.”

For Nixon, in November 1968, political disaster was far off. What he had, at last, was political victory—if just barely.

This really is the American dream, where people from humble circumstances can, through sheer hard work, go up the ladder.

—Pat Nixon, 1968

T
he people of the United States fulfilled Nixon's need to win in November 1968, but grudgingly. The last Harris poll, on election eve, put Humphrey ahead by three points. Neither man could hope for a clear majority.

Aboard the campaign plane, as he headed for New York to wait out the count, Nixon shocked Pat and the girls by acknowledging, “We could lose.” He lunched with Bebe Rebozo, then closeted himself in his private compartment for the rest of the journey.

Fearing the election would be stolen from him, as he believed it had been stolen in 1960 by John Kennedy, Nixon had mounted Operation Eagle Eye, designed to thwart trickery in Chicago by the Democrats' Mayor Daley. A former FBI assistant director ran Operation Integrity, monitoring the national scene. Now, in the final hours, Nixon was still anxious. When word came in of a holdup in the count in Texas, he deputed Haldeman to “find out what the hell was happening.”

Nixon sat alone in his suite at the Waldorf Towers, high above Manhattan, far into the long night. Refusing to watch the television and its yammering pundits, he relied on tallies brought to him every quarter of an hour by Haldeman. He scribbled calculations on his yellow pads and smoked his way through five cigars.

So insecure was Nixon that he had urged Humphrey to agree that should the outcome be so close that it had to go to the House of Representatives for a decision, the winner of the popular vote should get the support of the loser. Humphrey replied dryly that he would “stand by the Constitution.” The journalist Tom Wicker thought Nixon's proposal foreshadowed “what the nation was later to see in Watergate—an impatience with constitutional procedures and a willingness in some cases to circumvent them.
¹

In the dawn hours, with the numbers suggesting he had won but with Illinois yet to report, Nixon tried to steamroller his opponent. He sent word to “tell Hubert to quit playing games. We've won Illinois, so let's get this thing over with.” It was a breach of custom and etiquette, and the Humphrey camp was outraged.

In their suite down the hall Pat and the Nixon daughters had sat through the returns isolated and ignored. During the Illinois standoff, overwhelmed by nervous tension, Pat rushed to the bathroom and threw up.

Then it was over. Illinois did declare for Nixon, and Humphrey did concede. Nixon had won by an infinitesimal margin: 43.40 percent of the national vote to Humphrey's 42.72 percent, with Alabama's George Wallace and marginal candidates taking the rest. Even though four million more Americans had voted than in 1960, Nixon received more than two million votes fewer than he had against Kennedy. But he had won.

Bebe Rebozo summoned Billy Graham to Nixon's suite that morning. Nixon, Pat, Tricia, Julie, and the evangelist stood in a circle holding hands as Graham gave thanks for “God's plan for the country” and “the spiritual heritage of Nixon's mother.”

Then it was down to the Waldorf ballroom, weary family at his side, secretary Rose Woods weeping with relief, to address the crowd. Nixon said his great objective as president would be to “bring the American people together.” He did not mention Vietnam but told Graham privately that the United States was “on the verge of victory”—so long as the bombing continued.

At home that afternoon, as the women packed for a break in Florida, Nixon retreated to his study. Soon, through the double doors, came the blare and brass of one of his favorite records, the Richard Rodgers theme for
Victory at Sea.
Later, as he and Pat boarded the plane, he swung her around in a pirouette. His staff noticed that the aircraft, provided by President Johnson as a courtesy, was Air Force One, the same jet that five years earlier had carried John F. Kennedy home from Dallas in a coffin.

The trappings of office were already in evidence. People accustomed to addressing him as Mr. Nixon or Dick started trying out Mr. President. To the Secret Service detail guarding him, its number now doubled, Nixon was now known by the code name Searchlight. Pat was Starlight.

This was what Nixon had yearned for so long. Yet, Haldeman thought, watching and listening to his boss, that “he felt it was very strange that he could get elected.”

_____

The days and weeks that followed were not exactly as the public was led to believe, and they were full of portents.

“Baloney!” exclaimed Ehrlichman, recalling press reports that the president-elect was ensconced with his staff and “with bulging briefcases, doing a lot of work. We did have a couple of meetings, but basically we were left on our own to compose the government. . . . How did Nixon pick the White House and other personnel? The answer to that question is: ‘Not very well.' The personnel process during our transition from Johnson was a shambles.”

Scorning the free offices that had been made available to them in Washington, the Nixon people installed themselves in Manhattan's Pierre Hotel. Campaign treasurer Maurice Stans, soon to be secretary of commerce, was shocked by “the lavish facilities and the extravagant costs,” a million dollars more than the federal allowance.

When a prepared file on possible appointees proved useless, Nixon approved a farcical scheme. Letters went out to every single person listed in
Who's Who,
some sixty thousand individuals, soliciting recommendations on how to fill two thousand government jobs.

The selection process began oddly. Less than twenty-four hours after the election, Nixon casually offered John Ehrlichman the post of attorney general. Ehrlichman, who had had limited experience as an attorney, thought the notion “ridiculous.” He became instead White House counsel, in which job, he later recalled, “I didn't do one single legal chore.” He advised, rather, on domestic policy.

The attorney general job went to campaign manager John Mitchell. Nixon's patron Thomas Dewey had sniffed that Mitchell “may be the best bond lawyer in New York, but he's no politician.” He served however—as one reference book has it—as Nixon's “political right arm—arm-twister and lightning rod, counselor and confidant. . . .”

Mitchell had not immediately joined Nixon and other staff in Florida after the election, explaining tearfully that he had to go “take care of some things with Martha.” His mercurial wife, whom Nixon could not stand and whose indiscretions were to help blacken his name, was already having problems with alcohol.

In picking Bob Haldeman as White House chief of staff, Nixon had in mind advice Eisenhower had once given him: that every president needs “his S.O.B.” At forty-two, having earned his stripes as a superefficient campaign organizer, Haldeman became by his own account his boss's “pluperfect S.O.B.”

Beguiled at first by the chief of staff's quiet manner, Theodore White thought him an “absolutely outgoing, fine guy.” Before leaving J. Walter Thompson to follow Nixon, Haldeman had supervised the accounts of 7-Up, Sani-Flush, Blue Chip Stamps, and Walt Disney Productions. His “great dream,” even after 1968, was that he would one day become head of the
Disney empire. By staying with Nixon, White later concluded, he became a man who “swam too far out, beyond his natural depth.”

The cliché would later be that with Ehrlichman, Haldeman was one of Nixon's “Nazis.”
²
While he was the aide closest to the throne, Haldeman had an odd nonrelationship with Nixon in human terms. In the thirteen years of their association, the two men dined informally together, with their wives, only once. “He didn't see me as a person, or even, I believe, as a human being,” Haldeman said years later. “To this day he doesn't know how many children I have or anything else about my personal life. He never asked. . . .

“Shortly after it came out,” Haldeman said, “I saw the movie
Star Wars:
there is a robot, a metal machine clanking along doing what it's told by a computer-like mind. From Nixon's viewpoint, that's what I was. And I was a good machine.” Nixon would eventually designate Haldeman his “Lord High Executioner.” The “good machine” inspired terror in White House colleagues.

Having won the presidency, Nixon rid himself of many old friends and retainers. Herb Klein, remembered as one of the most decent figures in the entourage, was passed over as press secretary in favor of Ron Ziegler, a much younger man from Haldeman's old ad agency. Ziegler—“Zigzag” to reporters because of his talent for obscuring the facts—would remain loyal to the end and beyond.

On Haldeman's orders, but with Nixon's acquiescence, even the faithful Rose Woods was relegated to a basement room far from the Oval Office. At one stage after hearing this news, she refused to speak to Nixon, even allowing herself an outraged “Go fuck yourself!” She made her point and, while Haldeman got the office adjacent to the president, she wound up with one close by.

One after another, White House posts were filled with clean-cut, upright-seeming young men approved by Haldeman. A cosmetics businessman, Jeb Magruder, was brought in as a special assistant. Another J. Walter Thompson product, Dwight Chapin, would work the Oval Office phones and tend to Nixon's personal needs. He believed his boss would become “the greatest president in history.” A lawyer completing a hitch in army intelligence, Tom Huston, was recruited to the domestic security committee. A young attorney with the Nixon law firm, Gordon Strachan, became Haldeman's personal assistant.

Later arrivals would include attorney Charles Colson, an ex-marine who became a Nixon intimate and, in his own words, a “flag-waving, kick-'em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic”; and John Dean, the counsel Nixon was to describe as “a Judas and a turncoat . . .” when he spilled the Watergate beans to a Senate committee.

Colson's father considered his son “viciously loyal,” and colleagues recall Dean's initial eagerness to “please the boss.” Huston would later speak—one assumes with hyperbole—of the unquestioning readiness of Nixon's young men to follow orders. “If Nixon told them to nationalize the railroads,” he said, “they'd have nationalized the railroads. If he'd told them to exterminate the Jews, they'd have exterminated the Jews.”

Haldeman and Ehrlichman would later come to view such unconditional obedience as the key to the scandals that would one day destroy them all. Nixon, Ehrlichman said, was given to issuing “rhetorical instructions . . . excesses . . . you just simply had to know the difference. . . . There were people around who didn't know the difference, such as the Marine Corps types. They saluted and went out and did whatever they were told.” The implication was that unlike some of their colleagues, he and Haldeman knew when to ignore Nixon's more foolhardy orders.

Nixon's announcement of his cabinet was promoted as a major public relations event, but in the event it excited no one. His priority was to transform foreign policy, and the cabinet appointments, even that of secretary of state, had little relevance to that. Nixon thought domestic policy “a bore.” “I've always thought this country could run itself domestically without a president,” he had said the previous year. “All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a president for foreign policy. . . .”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, appointed assistant for urban affairs, came away from a first meeting with Nixon amazed at his ready admission of the huge gaps in his knowledge. As even his strongest critics must agree, however, the opposite was true of Nixon's knowledge of geopolitics. He intended to make foreign policy himself, and that meant giving priority to the appointment of assistant for national security affairs, to which he named forty-six-year-old Henry Kissinger.

The collaboration of the politician and the professor was a historic one, but had improbable beginnings. As a lecturer heading Harvard's Defense Studies Program, Kissinger had declared a special abhorrence of Nixon. While he dismissed Humphrey during the campaign as a “clown,” he deemed the Republican party “hopeless” and Nixon “the most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as President.” He was “not fit to be President,” a “disaster,” who if elected would bring national catastrophe. Kissinger expressed such views despite a first meeting with Nixon the previous year at which he had found Nixon “gentler . . . more thoughtful” than he had expected.

Kissinger had cannily played both sides against the middle in the months before the election. He contacted Humphrey's foreign policy adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, saying he “hated” Nixon and offering to make “shit files” on him available to the Democrats—a proposal on which he never delivered. Soon afterward, according to Nixon and his campaign foreign policy adviser, he leaked what he knew of the Vietnam peace talks to the Republicans.

Shortly after the election Kissinger called the journalist Gloria Steinem to ask whether he should work for Nixon if invited. Was it better he wondered, to “try to make things less bad by working from the inside?” Steinem got Kissinger to agree to write a piece for
New York
magazine entitled “The Collaboration Problem.” He never followed up on the assignment because Nixon did offer him a position, which he accepted.

Soon Kissinger would be on his way to morning meetings at the White
House, growling,
“Guten Morgen, Herr Haldeman!”
Haldeman would respond with “And a
guten Morgen
to you, Heinz!” Ahead lay the drawn-out entanglement of the Vietnam negotiations, the breakthrough to China, a complex relationship with Nixon—and lasting fame.