The Arrogance of Power (59 page)

“Everything,” Butterfield said, “was spring-loaded.” Yet Nixon responded with frenetic excitement, calling Haldeman twenty times between 10:00
P
.
M
. and 1:00
A
.
M
. on the night of the speech, with instructions to counterattack critical comments on television, orders to fire off cables, and orders to get reaction and, again, to manufacture it. Nixon pleaded, a Haldeman note shows: “If only do one thing get 100 vicious dirty calls to
New York Times
and
Washington Post
about their editorials (even though no idea what they'll be).”

Nixon was so “elated,” Kissinger recalled, “he kept the congratulatory telegrams stacked on his desk in such numbers that the Oval Office could not be used for work, and for days he refused to relinquish them.”

Basking in his apparent success, the president hosted a dinner for Britain's Prince Phillip and deluged Haldeman with yet more calls saying how
marvelous everything was. “You heard a lot about those of us who screened Nixon from reality,” Ehrlichman would say years later. “Well, Nixon shielded Nixon from reality.”

Two days after the address, feet up on the desk, Nixon told aides: “We've got those liberal bastards on the run now. . . . Floored those liberal sons of bitches . . . never let them get back on their feet.”

In fact, the“liberal bastards” swarmed into Washington again the following week in even greater numbers—by one count, as many as 325,000 people. At Nixon's request, three hundred soldiers armed with rifles and machine guns were concealed in the basements of the White House and the neighboring Executive Office building, ready for possible action.

Monitoring the demonstration from a helicopter, Haldeman looked down on what was becoming a familiar scene, a White House marooned, cordoned off behind a barricade of buses. At the Justice Department, Attorney General Mitchell stood with aides on a balcony watching the demonstrators, chewing on his pipe and sending orders to U.S. marshals to use more tear gas. Later, over scotch, he said all the demonstrators should be deported to Russia. “It was like St. Petersburg in 1917,” he told Nixon.

The president had long since ordered an in-depth CIA analysis of the “Communist factors” behind the protests. When the CIA found evidence of no such involvement, he merely ordered further investigation. “There was nothing we could do to convince him,” CIA Director Helms recalled.

Nixon's reaction to the November protest was pure farce. When the young people began to march past, a single file of candle carriers with placards bearing the names of the fallen, he at first ignored them. “P not interested,” Haldeman noted. “Spent two hours at the bowling alley.” The following evening, with the demonstration continuing, Nixon offered “helpful ideas, like using helicopters to blow their candles out.”

“Of all choices,” Kissinger thought, Nixon “was probably the least suited for the act of grace that might have achieved reconciliation with the responsible members of the opposition. Seeing himself in any case the target of a liberal conspiracy to destroy him, he could not bring himself to regard the Vietnam War as anything other than a continuation of the long-lived assault on his political existence.”

In the first twelve months of his presidency, 11,527 more American servicemen had died in Vietnam.

_____

On January 20, 1970, the anniversary of his inauguration, Nixon was alone in the Oval Office as the evening shadows lengthened. Summoned into the presence, Haldeman and Rose Woods found him sitting in the dark in his overcoat, fiddling with a silver music box. Nixon lifted the lid, which bore his name and the presidential seal. Then the three of them listened as the box tinkled out a tinny, cheery rendition of “Hail to the Chief.”
⁹

He let the little box play on until the mechanism wound down and the music slid painfully into silence. Then, murmuring, “Been a year,” Nixon walked out through the French doors like an actor making a meaningful exit. No one could have guessed at the nightmare action that was to follow. The stage, though, had been set.

You talk about a police state. Let me tell you what happens when you go to what is really a police state. . . . You can't talk in your bedroom. You don't talk on the telephone . . . you can't even talk in front of a shrub.

—Richard M. Nixon, 1971

M
onths earlier, in the summer of 1969, a short gray-haired man had arrived outside the house at 3021 N Street in Washington's fashionable Georgetown district. Dressed and equipped like a telephone company repairman, the man clambered up a telephone pole and attached a small battery-powered transmitter to one of the lines. From then on every call made on that line was taped, on a recorder concealed in the trunk of a nearby parked car.

The victim of the surveillance was Joseph Kraft, one of the nation's most prominent syndicated columnists. The “repairman” was John Ragan, the wireman who had done duty for Nixon throughout the 1968 campaign by checking for bugs in his office and at hotels.
¹
He was by now, effectively, the president's personal wireman.

As cover while installing the Kraft tap, Ragan was also equipped with a bogus telephone company card. It had been supplied to him by former phone company executive John Davies, the White House “tour director,” who had been close to Nixon as early as 1962.
²

Ragan had met with Nixon repeatedly during the campaign. He was one of those to whom Nixon later presented a framed map of the United States marked with crisscross lines, a memento of the arduous route traveled on the way to victory. Ragan and his wife had been invited to the inauguration and the inaugural ball and to breakfast at the White House the following day.

Officially Ragan was employed during the first Nixon presidency by the Republican National Committee as “security director” at a salary of thirty-four thousand dollars. He would later describe the bulk of his work as “defensive,” but the claim is suspect. During the Nixon effort to unseat President Allende, Ragan was sent to Chile by ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph) ostensibly to teach antibugging techniques. He met Allende during the trip and supposedly swept the presidential palace and residence for bugs.
³
Given Ragan's connections and Nixon's malign intentions toward the Chilean leader, it is possible he also planted some.

Ragan is known to have investigated a member of the Democratic National Committee and—a long-ignored fact that has never been adequately explored—to have had advance knowledge of the activities of the Watergate burglars.

The actual order to bug columnist Kraft had been issued by a former New York police detective, John Caulfield, also now working for the White House. Caulfield had worked security for Nixon during his presidential campaigns, at Nixon's personal request, and was especially close to Rose Woods. His White House function was to provide “investigative support.”

Caulfield in turn received his instructions to bug Kraft from John Ehrlichman. When he assigned the job to Ragan, Caulfield told him the orders originated with “the top man.” Correctly, Ragan took this to mean Nixon himself.

_____

“I want no climate of fear in this country,” Nixon had insisted to Theodore White within days of his inauguration, “no wiretapping scare.” He claimed he had instructed Attorney General Mitchell to control wiretapping with an iron hand. Yet within three months he was secretly issuing orders to initiate electronic surveillance of numerous journalists and administration officials.

The bugging was triggered by Nixon's fury at the “crew cut boy scouts” of the press and specifically at the
New York Times.
It began in April 1969, when the
Times
ran a report suggesting there might be a unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, and got under way in earnest when the paper revealed the secret bombing of Cambodia. Haldeman remembered the reaction to that story: “We were in Key Biscayne. . . . That morning, at breakfast by the pool, Henry [Kissinger] had been reading the morning newspapers. Suddenly he stood up, shaking. He showed me the offending story and said that the President must be informed at once.”
⁴

Nixon was “enraged,” and Kissinger immediately phoned FBI Director Hoover with instructions to find out who was leaking to the press. There
followed two years of FBI snooping on seventeen targets: journalists, some of whom considered themselves Kissinger's confidants; members of Kissinger's and Nixon's staffs; and State and Defense Department officials. The wiretap of columnist Kraft was carried out by White House operatives, Nixon said in his memoirs, because the FBI at first failed to cooperate.

Despite the extent of the operation, none of the bugging produced useful information. “The taps,” Nixon was to tell counsel John Dean, “never helped us. Just gobs and gobs of material; gossip and bullshitting. . . .”

He and Kissinger later tried to blame each other for the operation. “Henry ordered the whole goddamn thing,” the president said during the Watergate crisis. “He ordered it all, believe you me. He was the one who was in my office jumping up and down about ‘This and that got out,' and buh, buh, buh got out. I didn't give a shit . . . but he did. . . . He read every one of those taps until the very last one. . . . I never saw a one, never. . . .”

Other information suggests that Nixon's version of the events was simply not true. “The overall program was approved by the president, and I was aware of that from the outset,” said Alexander Haig, who cited the “highest authority” when he transmitted some of the earliest bugging orders to the FBI. Bureau documents indicate the wiretap logs at first went “only to the President” and later were delivered directly to Haldeman, who suddenly found himself living a cloak-and-dagger existence. “Every now and then, on my way into the office or in a hotel corridor on a trip, a man would suddenly jump out of a dark doorway, thrust an envelope in my hand, then disappear. . . .” Nixon, he insisted, “was one hundred percent behind the wiretaps.”

A friendly interviewer later asked Nixon whether, given that press leaks are a fact of political life, he had perhaps overreacted in ordering the taps. “You're being too kind,” came the unusually candid reply. “I was paranoiac, or almost a basket case, with regard to secrecy. . . .”

Nixon recognized that exposure of the bugging would be disastrous. When FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan, who had custody of the wiretap records, warned that Hoover might use them as blackmail material, Nixon ordered the file transferred to the White House at once. But he was soon worrying about Sullivan himself. “Will he rat on us?” he asked sharply when Ehrlichman reminded him that Sullivan, recently fired from the FBI, had “executed all your instructions for the secret taps.” “It depends on how he's treated,” Ehrlichman replied, and Nixon suggested Sullivan be found a new job. He was duly appointed head of the new Office of National Narcotics Intelligence.

The wiretapping was to be a key item when, in 1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary drew up its articles of impeachment. “In violation of his constitutional oath . . . and in disregard of his constitutional duty,” the article stated, Nixon had “repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens. . . .”

The full extent of the surveillance will probably never be known. Electronic measures aside, FBI agents lurked outside the home of former Ambassador Averell Harriman to try to identify his visitors. Others covertly took photographs of meetings between journalists. The congressional doorkeeper, William Miller, was taken aback one day to discover Signal Corps technicians wiring the Speaker's dining room before a luncheon to be attended by Nixon, the Speaker, the majority and minority leaders, and the party whips.

“I believe that for possibly three years in a row the room was bugged,” Miller said. “Nixon must have had a record of what the congressmen were saying about him even before his arrival . . . or what they might have been saying about him on the other side of the table, where they thought he couldn't hear. . . . Maybe I should have made a fuss about it.”

Men as disparate as Nixon's old friend Bob Finch, secretary of health, education and welfare, and Colonel Ralph Albertazzie, captain of Air Force One, strongly suspected their phones were tapped. Both had the disquieting experience of having had what they assumed to be private conversations, then discovering soon afterward that a third party appeared fully informed on what they had said. Finch considered raising the matter with the president but, like others, wound up doing nothing.

_____

Nixon's own beliefs about how extensive his surveillance powers should be emerged behind the scenes in July 1970 after a series of traumatic political events.

In response to a temporary U.S. invasion of Cambodia, an action that drew that country inexorably into the Vietnam conflict, student unrest erupted at campuses across the land. Arsonists burned buildings at three universities, and a bomb exploded at an army teaching center in Wisconsin, killing a physicist and wounding others. Four students were shot dead and nine injured when national guardsmen opened fire at Kent State University in Ohio. At Jackson State University, in Mississippi, police killed two students and wounded twelve.

Nixon's response to the mayhem was maladroit and disastrously timed. Three days before the Kent State shootings, in emotional comments to a group of Pentagon employees, he spoke of the “bums blowing up campuses” and of the nation's students—“the luckiest people in the world”—in the same breath. After Kent State, he managed only a tut-tutting statement that “when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy” and offered not a word of sympathy in public for the dead and wounded. He urged that a story that the guardsmen had not been justified in shooting be knocked down, and another—a baseless allegation that the guardsmen had been targeted by a sniper—promoted.
⁵
Leafing through photographs of the Jackson dead, Nixon asked: “What are we going to do to get more respect for the police from our young people?”

Soon afterward, following another massive protest in Washington, Nixon
directed the heads of the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency to discuss how to combat the “hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans . . . determined to destroy our society.” The resulting plan, drawn up by a Nixon aide, would cause an outcry when eventually made public. Senator Sam Ervin would denounce it as a “Gestapo” scheme. More soberly, in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the plan would have meant that: “With presidential authority, the intelligence community could at will intercept and transcribe the communications of Americans using international telecommunications facilities; eavesdrop from near or far on anyone deemed to be a ‘Threat to the internal security,' read the mail of American citizens, break into the homes of anyone tagged as a security threat.”

The plan never went into effect, and some of the measures described were not even really new. Its historical significance is that Nixon, apparently convinced he had the authority to break the law, approved it and believed he had the power to do so.

“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Nixon explained years later, when asked about the plan by British interviewer David Frost. There were, he suggested, circumstances in which a president could justifiably order crimes like break-ins. He did not reject outright the possibility that a president might be within his rights to order murder.

The abortive 1970 operation had been one of the earliest of what John Mitchell came to call the “White House horrors.” For although it was shelved, Nixon's frustration with what he saw as the failures of the agencies remained, frustration that soon enough would lead him and his aides to plot break-ins and buggings of their own.

By that time, and fatally for the presidency, he had also decided to bug himself.

_____

“Mr. President,” Haldeman aide Alexander Butterfield said one evening in February 1971, “the taping system that Bob said you wanted is in place now. It works fine, and I would like to brief you on the locations of the microphones.”
⁶

Nixon at first gave Butterfield a blank stare and mumbled: “Oh, hmm, ah, hmm, ah, oh, well,” as if reluctant to discuss the matter. Then at last he asked, “How does it work?” and Butterfield explained. The White House tapes had started rolling and were to roll on for more than two years.

The desire to record his own conversations was not a novel idea for Nixon. During the 1962 campaign in California he had made an unusual request of the electronics specialist employed to debug his office. “One of the first things I was asked to do,” the technician remembered, “was to put microphones and a recorder in his office. He just wanted a record of
everything
. . . . I put in a nice system.”

At the beginning of the presidency, as reported earlier, Nixon had ordered
most of President Johnson's recording equipment removed. Although he was skittish about a system that was not of his own making, he remained preoccupied with the notion that a record had to be kept.

Haldeman provided two reasons for this: Nixon wanted to be able to rebut anyone who might quote him inaccurately, and he wished to have a complete record for the writing of his memoirs. Elliot Richardson, his second secretary of defense, had an elegant theory about this desire to keep a record. Nixon was fascinated by Robert Blake's biography of the nineteenth-century British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, a book, Richardson thought, that one put down “with the sense that this extraordinary, exotic, even bizarre creature remains elusive.” As a result, Richardson believed, Nixon decided that only an exhaustive record could provide the “indispensable tool whereby
his
biographers would gain the insights denied to Blake.”