The Arrogance of Power (67 page)

It was not true. If the earlier meetings were insignificant and understandably forgotten, Hunt's name had at least been floated past the president by June 30, 1971. On that day, the tapes show, he had mentioned Hunt's name as a candidate for the Brookings break-in. The following morning Colson briefed the president in detail, praising Hunt as “a very close friend of [Senator] Jim Buckley's . . . hard as nails . . . a brilliant writer . . . just got out of the CIA, fifty, kind of a tiger.” Colson knew Hunt because they had socialized before the presidency as members of the Brown University alumni club.

Haldeman also discussed Hunt with the president as a potential recruit, on two occasions. Colson praised him again a month later, recommending Hunt as “a first-rate analyst who spent his whole life in subversive warfare . . . an admirer of yours since the Alger Hiss case.” Hunt's name, he later recalled, was at the bottom of a list of six men he put forward for the job of countering leaks like the Pentagon Papers. It was, however, Hunt whom Nixon picked.

Haldeman had noted in his diary that week that the president wanted a “dirty guy” to go after the “conspiracy” against him. Now he had one. “I want to alert you,” Ehrlichman said in a call to Cushman, by now a senior CIA official, “that an old acquaintance, Howard Hunt, has been asked by the President to do some special consultant work on security problems. He may be contacting you sometime in the future for some assistance. . . . You should consider he has pretty much carte blanche.”

Sitting in the sun on the terrace at San Clemente, a week after Hunt had joined up, Nixon proceeded from the hiring of one individual to the establishment of a secret investigative unit that would respond directly to the Oval Office.

The new group, composed of five men, would soon be working out of a room in the half basement of the Executive Office Building, with a sign on the door reading
MR
.
YOUNG
,
PLUMBER
. Young was David Young, the unit's joint leader. “Plumber” described their mission: to plug the leaks that infuriated the president.

Nixon had personally briefed the other man assigned to run the outfit, Egil (“Bud”) Krogh, the young aide who had witnessed his bizarre dawn visit to the House of Representatives the previous year. Krogh was, and is—as the author learned in extensive interviews—one of the most decent of those who served on the White House staff. He was at that time also somewhat inexperienced or, by one friend's account, “the kind of guy who, if you put him in charge of a big wedding . . . wouldn't have known how to get a couple of cops to help with the traffic.” As such, he was not, perhaps, an ideal choice to head the president's crack undercover unit.

Also drafted were Howard Hunt and the strange character with whom his name would be forever linked, Gordon Liddy. A former FBI agent, then aged forty, Liddy had a particular interest in Nazi Germany. The music of the Third Reich stirred him, made him feel “strength inside.” He was also, by his own account, preoccupied with guns, violence, and the elemental power of the human will.

Liddy liked to discuss methods of killing—such as how to dispatch a victim with one thrust of a sharp pencil just above the Adam's apple—and acquired a CIA 9 mm parabellum pistol “for use in the event Bud Krogh or other of my White House superiors tasked me with an assassination.” It was perhaps not an irrelevant potential asset, as these pages will show.

“Gordon's a cowboy,” said one who knew him then, and the description would remain apt far into the future. In the year 2000, at seventy, he was a hectoring talk-show host with a “LIDDYPage” Web site featuring himself with his “formidable Lingenfelter modified '94 Corvette ZR–1,” his “Boss-Hoss” motorcycle, and his role in the TV series
18 Wheels of Justice
. The site also included an ad for the “G. Gordon Liddy Stacked and Packed Calendar Featuring America's Most Beautiful Women Heavily Armed.” This was the man who, in 1971, became field operations coordinator for the president's special unit.

Soon after becoming a Plumber, Liddy would brag later, he would earn Nixon's praise for writing “the best memo he's seen in years. . . .” The reference was to a report he had submitted summarizing why it was time for FBI Director Hoover to retire, an argument of which Nixon was already persuaded. Hoover had long been an ally, but now he wanted him gone.

The president had been having trouble with the director, most recently over the pursuit of Daniel Ellsberg. “Notwithstanding the president's agitation,” Ehrlichman recalled, “Hoover assigned a very low priority to the project.” Nixon was frustrated by the apparent indifference, so much so that he phoned Hoover to say he was “having to resort to sending two people out there.”

The “two people” were Hunt and Liddy, and “out there” was California. Disappointed by an initial psychiatric profile of Ellsberg provided by the CIA, the Plumbers had proposed, in writing, a “covert operation” to “examine all the medical files” in the office of Ellsberg's Los Angeles psychiatrist. Ehrlichman approved the idea, again in writing, on condition the mission could be carried out in a way that was “not traceable.”

As the world would learn during Watergate, Hunt and Liddy duly flew to the West Coast. Equipped with silly disguises provided by the CIA and assisted by Cuban exile accomplices, they broke into the doctor's office, found nothing, and left the place a mess to give the impression that their motive had been to steal drugs. The crime achieved absolutely nothing except—one day in the future—to imperil further Nixon's presidency.

In a 1973 broadcast to the nation, after the break-in had been exposed, Nixon would explain that his brief to the Plumbers had been that the Ellsberg matter was “of vital importance to the national security.” He was more forthright in the memoirs, insisting that Ellsberg's “views had to be discredited.” In other words, the sort of charges Kissinger had alleged against Ellsberg were to be corroborated and made public. “He can be painted evil,” as Colson told Nixon; or “neutralized,” Hunt put it in a memo.

Whether Nixon ordered the break-in or knew of it in advance is a question that has long been debated. Krogh, who sent Hunt and Liddy on their mission, told the author Nixon had given him general “authority” for the assignment but no specific break-in order. Ehrlichman quoted Nixon as having given the go-ahead for “direct action” by Hunt and Liddy.
¹⁶

Recently released White House tapes fail to clarify the matter. “I briefed Ehrlichman on it today on the investigative side,” Nixon told Colson during a discussion of the Pentagon Papers. This conversation took place at the very time, and probably on the very day, that Ehrlichman signed the memo approving the mission.

Days after the break-in, however, Ehrlichman withheld specific details about it from the president, telling him only that there had recently been “one little operation. It's been aborted out in Los Angeles, which, I think, it's better you don't know about.” Ehrlichman later testified that he opted not to communicate to his boss what had happened, after the fact—because “there wasn't anything the President could do about it.”
¹⁷

Likewise Nixon's later conversations with aides reveal no certainties as to the level of his involvement. “Goddamn to hell,” he would complain to his press spokesman, Ron Zeigler, in the midst of Watergate. “I didn't tell them to go fuck up the goddamn Ellsberg place.” Two days later: “I am stuck with, and have to be stuck with . . . approving this plan, which I did. I didn't check whether there were burglaries and all that. God to hell, we didn't even think of such things!”

As the tapes clearly demonstrate, Nixon certainly had considered similar actions. He had repeatedly ordered a break-in of the Brookings Institution only
two months before the burglary of the psychiatrist's office. Another exchange makes it clear what his primary motive was as scandal engulfed him. “I believe somehow,” he told colleagues, “I have to avoid having the President approve the break-in of a psychiatrist.”

In the 1973 broadcast Nixon did categorically deny involvement, insisting he “did not authorize and had no knowledge of any illegal means.” In private, days after his resignation, he was less assured. “Did I know about it?” he asked former Plumber Egil Krogh, one of the first visitors to San Clemente after Nixon had left Washington.
¹⁸

Two years later, Nixon expressed the same uncertainty to Bob Haldeman. “I was so damn mad at Ellsberg in those days,” he said. “I've been thinking—and maybe I did order that break-in.”

According to Ehrlichman, two aides who worked with Nixon in exile told him Nixon eventually did take responsibility. “Nixon now admits what he formerly denied,” Ehrlichman claimed. “He knew of the [Ellsberg psychiatrist] break-in before it occurred, and he encouraged it.”
¹⁹

In the memoirs Nixon resorted to vagueness. “I do not believe I was told about the break-in at the time,” he wrote, “. . . but I cannot rule it out.” The equivocation enraged Ehrlichman, for while Nixon was never held to account, he and Krogh had served time in jail in large part because of their role in the break-in of the psychiatrist's office.

Ehrlichman went to his grave believing that Nixon did authorize the crime, through Charles Colson. Colson has denied involvement, yet the paper record proves he was privy to the idea from the moment it was proposed.
²⁰
He features too in another, more pathetic possible explanation for Nixon's apparent amnesia on the matter.

“It would be hard to know what [Nixon] did—or didn't—know,” said Haldeman's eventual replacement, Alexander Haig. Colson “would get President Nixon in the bag—when I say ‘in the bag,' all Nixon needed was one scotch. His toleration of alcohol is zero—and he could get pretty high. . . . The real éminence grise of all this was Colson.”

_____

It was unbelievable, Nixon was to grumble as Congress's investigation began, that he had to put up with “this horse's-ass crap” about his operatives' covert activity. A skein of information, however, suggests that more such activity had been undertaken, even by late 1971, than Watergate probers ever were able to investigate.

Argument on whether Nixon personally plotted the break-in of the psychiatrist's office seems academic in the context of what we now know of other plotting. The taped evidence, and not just that recording his insistence on a burglary of the Brookings Institution, indicated that theft, to him, was easily justified.

A week after the break-in of Ellsberg's doctor's office, Nixon conspired
with Ehrlichman about how to purloin documents from the National Archives, the nation's most revered repository of historical records. As in the Brookings scheme, the aim was to get access to files on the Vietnam War, records deposited by former Johnson officials on condition that only they could authorize access.

“I am going to steal these documents out of the National Archives . . . and photograph them . . .” Ehrlichman told the president on September 10, 1971. Nixon merely asked, “How do you do that?” and Ehrlichman explained his plan. He would arrange through a Nixon appointee in the General Services Administration to have the archivist of the United States leave town. Then, he said, “we can get in there and [the Nixon appointee] will photograph, and we'll reseal them.” At a later meeting, they discussed how the job could be carried out without disturbing the seals.

The photographic work, Ehrlichman told the president, would be done by staff sent over from the Pentagon by one of their own, Defense Department counsel Fred Buzhardt. Two years later, as Nixon's Watergate counsel, Buzhardt would warn Nixon there were likely to be “rumors of additional burglaries . . . they won't know by whom. . . .”

Nixon responded by claiming he knew of none. Henry Kissinger, however, has recalled being told by another Nixon attorney that there had indeed been “other break-ins sanctioned from the White House for several different purposes, some as yet unclear . . . [it was] a ‘sordid mess.' ”
²¹

A study by one of the most thorough students of the period suggests there may have been as many as a hundred “political” break-ins during the Nixon administration. “Although the evidence linking the government to these break-ins is largely circumstantial,” U.S. Senator James Abourezk told colleagues, “it is both striking and persuasive . . . virtually all the victims were objects of administration concern . . . the attacks against them followed a consistent pattern.”
²²

The intruders in the cases studied were no ordinary burglars. They stole little or nothing of value and targeted instead correspondence, financial records, and tapes. Consider some of the suspicious break-ins that occurred during the first presidency.

Three months after Nixon's men made their way into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, unidentified burglars entered the New York office of the psychoanalyst who had treated Ellsberg's wife. The file cabinet containing her records received special attention. The study also noted a burglary of the New York offices of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which had been fighting the administration's race policies. It occurred twenty-four hours after the break-in of Ellsberg's doctor's quarters, and Hunt and Liddy are know to have traveled to New York that day.