The Arrogance of Power (75 page)

To “the average guy,” he would still be insisting months afterward, “whether or not the Republicans fuck the Democrats doesn't mean a goddamn thing.” Even a year later, with his presidency beginning to founder, the president would still be calling Watergate “chicken shit.”

As few are aware, the criminal plotting continued. Just two weeks after the arrests, again in the Oval Office with the tapes running, Nixon and Colson twice discussed the notion of faking a break-in at his own party headquarters to make people think the Democrats were as guilty as the Republicans of this sort of activity. “There should be a rifling . . . missing files,” Nixon said, “something where it's really torn up, where pictures could be taken.”
¹¹

No such phony break-in ever took place, but a similar one may have done. Three months later, in an apparent break-in at the office of the president's California physician, Dr. John Lungren, cash was ignored, but a file containing Nixon's patient records left disordered on the floor. Haldeman and an aide then called the FBI at the highest level fifteen times, urging that the bureau issue a press release on the case.

Assistant Director Mark Felt turned down the request, saying it was a matter for the local police. Such was the persistence of Nixon's men, though, that
Felt came to suspect someone at the White House, fearing news of the break-in of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office would surface sooner or later, “wanted to be able to show that President Nixon had also been a victim of such tactics.”
¹²

At a more serious level, covert operations against the Democrats and Larry O'Brien continued unabated even after the Watergate arrests. CREEP's Jeb Magruder recalled Haldeman asking him to “get someone into McGovern's headquarters in July, so that we could get his schedule further in advance than the press release was telling. . . . Even with the problems of the break-in, they were still talking in those terms.”

According to the state's attorney for the Miami area, Richard Gerstein, the abuse went much further than simply tracking down schedules. His investigators concluded that the Fontainbleau Hotel, headquarters for the Democratic convention, was bugged from a listening post established in a nearby apartment building. The groundwork for the operation had been laid by Watergate burglar Howard Hunt before his arrest and carried out nonetheless.

Gerstein and his staff had been probing local Watergate angles from the start because most of the burglars were Miami-based. Their own office had been broken into within weeks.

There had also been a break-in at the Texas home of Lawrence O'Brien's close colleague Robert Strauss. The house had been ransacked, but jewelry worth thousands of dollars left untouched.
¹³

“Go gung-ho on O'B—& the others,” read a Haldeman note of an instruction from Nixon in the late summer of 1972. “What, if anything, is being done on the Democratic candidate?” Nixon said into the Oval Office mikes around the same time. “I mean for example on his income [tax], on O'Brien. Have we got anything further on that, Bob? . . .” As for McGovern, he hoped the candidate “might have feet of clay . . . kick him again . . . keep whacking, whacking, whacking . . . on O'Brien . . . if you could dirty up O'Brien.”

“Get everything you possibly can,” Nixon demanded in the early fall. “Any little crumb or lead involving anyone. I don't care. O'Brien, another senator. Anything that involves a Democrat . . . Goddamn it.” His aides tried, hard, unlawfully bullying the IRS to get compromising financial information on O'Brien, by then heading the Democratic campaign. “I wanted them to turn up something and send him to jail before the election,” Ehrlichman would admit later. Nothing materialized; O'Brien's records were in order.

After the election Nixon would direct his public relations staff to prepare propaganda pointing out that he had run “one of the cleanest campaigns in history.”

_____

In the end, all the undercover operations would prove to have been unnecessary. By mid-July there was virtually no question who was going to be president. The Democratic convention had been a disastrous, chaotic affair guaranteed to alienate vast numbers of party members. The television coverage
had shown viewers an explosion of disaffected youth and wild-looking advocates of every fashionable demand for freedom: “women's lib,” abortion rights, rights for homosexuals, black militancy, freedom to smoke marijuana. The picture the public saw was of a party and a culture out of control.

McGovern's chances plummeted even further after the convention when it emerged that his running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, had been hospitalized three times for psychiatric care that had included electroshock treatments for depression. McGovern eventually dropped Eagleton but only after damaging prevarication. Nixon's response, by his account, was compassionate and he would later quote in his memoirs a long handwritten letter of sympathy that he had sent to the humiliated senator's son. The truth may have been shabbier.

“Supposing,” McGovern aide Frank Manckiewicz asked Eagleton early in the crisis, “Chuck Colson has the [psychiatric] records before him, and he's going in to tell the President. . . .” That dire possibility was then merely an imagined horror, but it may have been prescient. The
Washington Post
's Bob Woodward was told by “Deep Throat,” his mysterious inside source, that the exposure of Eagleton involved Nixon's undercover operatives.
¹⁴

CREEP had had a plant in the McGovern camp at the Democratic convention, a private detective who later admitted having overheard a discussion about Eagleton's personal history. There was a report too, again in the
Washington Post,
that not long before the senator's medical records were leaked to the press, they were in John Ehrlichman's possession.

“Bob Haldeman once intimated to me,” Nixon's aide Alexander Butterfield revealed recently, “that they had stuff on Eagleton: that electroshock therapy. They were just waiting to spring it, waiting for the right time. They knew it would be explosive.”

As for Nixon's professed sympathy, a recently released tape indicates that just as the news was breaking publicly, he discussed with Haldeman how best to exploit the Eagleton revelations. It would be a fine idea to plant hecklers at Eagleton meetings, the pair agreed, to badger him with accusations of dishonesty.

The Republican convention, in mid-August, presented an image the very opposite of that of the Democratic shambles. “Everything was scheduled and organized,” observed journalist and Republican aide James Cannon, “not for the delegates in the hall but for middle America, to convey a sense of order at home and the promise of peace in the world. The Republicans arrived united in the cause of four more years for President Nixon.”

Theirs was a convention that followed a script written and produced by Bob Haldeman, staffed by bland men in blue suits and ties carrying walkie-talkies. The young people in attendance, a different species entirely from those who had thronged to the Democrats' gathering, were praised by Ehrlichman as individuals who had “come here spontaneously, sometimes at great hardship, to support Nixon.” The truth was that a party committee had subsidized their attendance, and a cheerleader orchestrated their chants.

A television audience of some sixty million Americans, it was calculated, was treated to packaged movies tracing the high points of Nixon's presidency, from grandeur in the White House to the Beijing and Moscow summit meetings. At the crowning moment the president himself appeared in triumph on a podium designed by the art director of the program
The Dating Game,
its floor constructed to rise or fall at the flick of a switch, to ensure that no other speaker could appear taller than Nixon.

“I ask everyone listening to me tonight,” he said in his acceptance speech, the fifth in two decades, “Democrats, Republicans and independents—to join our majority. . . .” It was already becoming clear that that majority would be massive. A Gallup poll in the wake of the convention gave Nixon 64 percent to McGovern's 30 percent.

The election, when it came, was the predicted landslide. Of people who identified themselves as Democrats, more than a third voted for Nixon, a defection without precedent in American political history. With George Wallace out of the race, moreover, Nixon even carried the South. In the final tally he won more than 60 percent of the national vote, only marginally less than Lyndon Johnson's massive majority of eight years earlier.

The victory was not quite as impressive as it first seemed, however, for almost half the electorate had chosen not to vote at all. “Americans, numbed by words, headlines and TV shows, cross-analyzed by canvassers, telephone banks and statisticians,” noted Theodore White, “simply drew in on themselves.” Also, the people returned a Congress in which the Republicans remained a minority, a factor that was to prove pivotal for Nixon in the ordeal that was coming.

For a man who now had the “coronation” he had so long desired, Nixon seemed joyless on the night of his election. He appeared “preoccupied, somber instead of elated, and somewhat sad” to a reporter who encountered him hours later, walking alone in the White House precincts. The cap on one of the president's front teeth had snapped off, and some attributed his melancholy to that.

Nixon spent most of the evening in the Lincoln Sitting Room, listening to
Victory at Sea
again and some light classical music. Later, at 2:00
A
.
M
., he was ensconced in his room in the Executive Office Building with Haldeman and Charles Colson. Nixon ordered a scotch and soda, downed most of it in one swallow, and soon called for another. Haldeman also seemed surly, angry almost. “The picture was out of focus,” thought Colson. “If this was victory, what might these three men have looked like in defeat?”

By the next day the sourness had spread. “The good feeling was shattered within twelve hours,” Henry Kissinger recalled. “The White House staff had been asked to assemble at 11:00
A
.
M
. in the Roosevelt Room. At the dot, Nixon strode in. He was grim and remote as if the more fateful period of his life lay ahead. Nothing in his demeanor betrayed that he was meeting associates from perilous and trying times; he acted as though they were from a past now irrevocably finished.”

The president said a few words and quickly departed, leaving Haldeman to announce to the staff they were—all of them—to submit their resignations at once. The cabinet received the same instructions soon afterward. Although some would be reappointed, and Nixon had supposedly meant to administer a short, sharp shock of fresh energy, few saw it that way. Kissinger thought the move “degrading . . . political butchery,” delivered in a manner that was “almost maniacal.”

Nixon spent much of the month that followed sequestered at Camp David, seeing old and new appointees. Colson found the atmosphere there “something right out of
1984
 . . . like one of those secret hideaways in a James Bond movie—eerie.” Back at the White House, there was pervasive bitterness.

In December Nixon embarked on the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, the final brutal drive to get the United States out of the war. United States troop levels had fallen to about twenty-five thousand, and few of them were combat troops. American casualties had been reduced to very small numbers, and it had seemed in October that a settlement was imminent. “We believe peace is at hand,” Kissinger had said dramatically two weeks before the election. Now there was a new stalemate, with the North again intransigent, and the South's President Thieu stubbornly blocking a deal he thought fatal for his regime.

Nixon, however, desired a resolution before the start of his second term. “He now wanted the war over on almost any terms,” according to Kissinger. “. . . The North Vietnamese committed a cardinal error in dealing with Nixon: They cornered him. Nixon was never more dangerous than when he seemed to have run out of options.”

The president responded by mounting the most concentrated air offensive of the entire conflict, which he set in motion on Monday, December 18. Haldeman had noted in his diary: “The P said I would rather bomb on Monday, unless you think we really need to do it on Sunday. He didn't like the idea of having a Sunday church service while we were bombing.” This domestic squeamishness aside, Haldeman observed, Nixon “wanted to appear to be the tough guy all the way through.”

An armada of some two hundred airplanes—more than half the Strategic Air Command's B-52s—flew nearly three thousand sorties, bombing Hanoi and Haiphong virtually around the clock. The North Vietnamese suffered serious losses—estimates of casualties and destruction vary wildly—and twenty-six American planes were shot down. Except for a break Nixon allowed on Christmas, the assault continued for twelve days.

When he ordered the bombers in, the president told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs that the air offensive was a chance to “win this war.” Won it was not, but North Vietnam accepted a deal with the United States within two weeks, in time for Nixon's sixtieth birthday. “Brutality is nothing,” he told Kissinger when South Vietnam's Thieu at first declined to fall into line. “You've
never seen it if this son-of-a-bitch doesn't go along.” Thieu soon yielded, for he had no choice.

A peace agreement was duly signed in late January, and Nixon told the nation that “peace with honor” had been achieved. To “have it break within a year or two,” the president would recall having observed to Kissinger, “would leave us nothing to be proud of. . . .”