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Nixon believed that the East Coast liberal establishment, by the 1960s, included a disproportionate number of Jews at the upper reaches of the federal bureaucracy, the media, and the arts.
On August 10, Nixon took an evening cruise on the Sequoia with Billy Graham. “The P went into considerable detail on his leadership decadence theory at dinner,” Haldeman recorded. The problem, said the president, was not the “hippies or youth,” but rather “our leadership class”—the ministers (“except for the Billy-Graham type fundamentalists”), the teachers, the business leaders, the politicians—who had “become soft.”7
Leadership Decadence
At Camp David on this August night, Nixon was psyching himself up to deliver another “stunner” to the nation. With Haldeman and Weinberger as his rapt audience, Nixon held forth on the future and his role in it. America was leaving an age, begun by FDR, when “we were saying that government should do everything.” Now, said Nixon, he had to find a way to inspire people to have a goal greater than self, or neither the people nor the nation would be great.
Under harsh questioning, Charles Radford, a young navy yeoman working at the White House, tearfully admitted that he had rifled the files and “burn bags” of Henry Kissinger and his staff. He denied leaking the information to Anderson. He admitted, however, that he had given top-secret documents—including highly sensitive materials like transcripts of Kissinger’s conversations on his secret trip to China—to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer.36
Two days after Nixon returned, columnist Jack Anderson reported what appeared to be a scandalous payoff of the Nixon administration. In his Washington Post column, the muckraker claimed to have a memo proving that the global conglomerate, International Telephone and Telegraph had given the Republican Party $400,000 for its upcoming convention expenses. The quid pro quo was a favorable resolution in a federal antitrust case that threatened to break up the company. Led by Larry O’Brien, the Democrats jumped on the story as a way to diminish Nixon’s China triumph. Senator Edward Kennedy began
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For some time, Nixon had allowed himself to dream that after the election he could join with his favorite, John Connally, to build a new party—“the Independent Conservative Party, or something of that sort,” Haldeman recorded—that would bring together Southern Democrats and middle-of-the-road to conservative Republicans. “Get control of the Congress without an election, simply by the realignment, and make a truly historic change,” wrote Haldeman.
Nixon had hoped to build a whole new establishment to replace the liberal elite.
“She rejoined with the observation that there were many who felt that the United States should not be a great power,” Nixon wrote in his diary. “This, of course, is the kind of poison that is fed to so many of the younger generation by their professors.”
Kissinger noted that, “play acting aside,” the president was “crisp and decisive, his questions thoughtful and to the point.” At “moments of real crisis, Nixon would become coldly analytical,” Kissinger recalled. There would be endless meetings, more writing on yellow legal pads, sometimes contradictory orders that were actually invitations to argument. But then “nervous agitation would give way to calm decisiveness,” Kissinger wrote. Nixon would get to “the essence of the problem and take the courageous course, even if it seemed to risk his immediate political interest.”
Nixon’s lack of self-awareness—his need to see himself as someone other than who he really was—
Nixon was extremely effective with foreign leaders because he did not offer high-minded lectures about freedom. He spoke instead of interests, never acted superior, and always showed respect.
“If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats, we will never achieve any progress,”
That same evening, some five thousand miles away, in the Continental Room of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., Hunt and Liddy were hosting a banquet to celebrate an impending burglary. There were snifters of brandy and cigars after dinner, and then they went to work. Hunt and one of the Cubans from the Ellsberg breakin, Virgilio Gonzalez, remained after dinner, hidden in a closet. They intended to break into the Democratic National Committee, only a corridor and elevator ride away. But the alarm on a door was unexpectedly armed, and the duo spent the night trapped in the banquet room.
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“It doesn’t sound like a skillful job,” Nixon agreed. “If we didn’t know better, we’d have thought it was deliberately botched.”
Nonetheless, Nixon was touching on a central cause of his own downfall. The president could not bring himself to have an honest and direct conversation with his former attorney general, and tragically, Mitchell could not, or did not, see fit to bring his troubles into the Oval Office. Mitchell was one of the few men—perhaps the only man—who could proverbially
In fact, like so much in Watergate, the “smoking gun” is subject to different interpretations.
Haldeman wearily protested, “We don’t have the bureaucracy with us and we don’t have the press with us. They do.”
The country, he told Haldeman on October 14, was tired of demonstrators and “permissiveness,” tired of the elites telling them what to think and how to live; most voters wanted a return to “basic American values.”
Though the press had mostly yawned over Watergate, on October 27 CBS News gave it fourteen minutes—an eternity on a twenty-three-minute evening news program—and planned to do a second installment. The show consisted mostly of repackaged Washington Post stories, but it now had Walter Cronkite’s imprimatur. Colson called CBS News executives and bullied them into cutting the second segment in half,
Nixon’s final rally took place in Ontario, California, a few miles from his first rally twenty-six years before. He told the overflow crowd that the country, which had seemed so divided when he was elected president in 1968, was “getting together.”
Felt’s nickname inside the incestuous FBI was “the White Rat” because he had white hair and was known to leak to reporters.
The stock market was up, inflation was down, and the world, thanks in no small part to the efforts of President Nixon, seemed to be a more peaceful place.
Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad”). “Whom the gods wish to destroy,” said Flanigan, “they first make proud.”
you understand!” he ordered Haldeman. “Under no condition.”17 The president brandished a Pat Buchanan study of Ivy Leaguers in the Foreign Service to confirm what he expected—that while Ivy Leaguers made up less than 2 percent of college grads, they accounted for more than half the ambassadors.
glorious burden
While Nixon struggled to end the Vietnam War and to remake the Republican Party and the U.S. government closer to his image,
Congressmen regarded federal agencies as their own fiefdoms and were anxious to hang on to them.
O’Neill had inherited JFK’s congressional district and was closely tied to the Kennedys. Senator Kennedy pushed for Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a segregationist Southerner and strict-constructionist popular with Republicans, to run a special select committee to investigate campaign abuses. Prodded by Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Kennedy wanted the committee to avoid any taint of partisanship.
Out of public view, Kennedy’s staffers from the Judiciary Committee had been investigating Watergate for six months and now turned over their files to what would become known as the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972 or, more popularly, the Watergate Committee.
“Hell, the young don’t like the old and never have. And the women don’t like the men, generally. The men don’t like the women. They live together because of reasons that have nothing to do with love.”
The Watergate Nixon is generally portrayed as scheming and Machiavellian by the press, and the White House tapes provide no shortage of material to buttress this view.
But the overwhelming impression left by listening to the tapes is of a man who is not clever, who is all too human—who rambles, gets lost, changes his mind, knows too much and too little all at once.55 Nixon the brilliant political analyst is nowhere to be seen. His judgment is clouded by human frailty. One moment he sounds cold-blooded and ruthless. The next moment he is naïvely idealistic, prattling on about the lesson of the Hiss case as related in Six Crises—the cover-up is worse than the crime!—while plunging into an ever-deeper cover-up. Perhaps he was being cynical and manipulative. Or
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Of course, until the scandal consumed him late that winter and spring, he had much else on his mind, matters of state that seemed far more consequential.
“I was the head of Italians for Eisenhower-Nixon in 1956 in New York City. I’d like to be on the court of appeals.” Nixon had brushed him off.
As he entered his second term, Nixon’s approval rating stood at 68 percent.1 “I don’t think the country is all that stirred up” about Watergate, Nixon told Colson on February 3, 1973. “What do you think?” Colson answered, “No. Oh, God, no, the country is bored with it….The Watergate issue has never been a public issue. It’s a Washington issue. It’s a way to get at us. It’s the way Democrats think they can use to embarrass us.”
Nixon’s nominee should be left to “twist, slowly, slowly in the wind,” said the acerbic Ehrlichman, coining a phrase that would enter the national lexicon.
President didn’t seem very smart.” Dean was unfamiliar with Nixon’s way of circling around problems, a process that the tart Ehrlichman had dubbed as “chewing his cud.”11 (Indeed, appearing disengaged is an old presidential trick, practiced by, among others, FDR, Eisenhower, and Reagan.)
Nixon felt that Dean was being “melodramatic.” He failed to see that he had arrived at a moment of truth. Here was the chance to finally “prick the boil,” to use a Nixon term, to get Watergate behind him, at great cost and amid inevitable tumult, but in a way that would save his presidency. It was too late to spare his top advisers from criminal investigations or to spare himself from serious embarrassment. But had Nixon called in an outside lawyer and run a truly open investigation, his presidency would have endured—weakened, badly shaken, but also purified. Nixon did, for a brief instant,
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It is hard to explain this failure of judgment, the most critical mistake Nixon ever made. Favoring hush money over full disclosure was a moral lapse, regardless of whether Nixon had committed a crime, but the reasons for his actions are complex and not easy to sort out. It is generally true, as his defenders have argued, that Nixon was continuing to view his problems as political when they were by now legal—criminally so.28 But this explanation begs deeper questions. Nixon suffered from a blind spot brought on by mixed motives, some of them decent but ultimately fatal to his presidency. His
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Having come out on both sides—for covering up and coming clean—Nixon did not choose either. Rather, he continued to wander into his own past. “Eisenhower—that’s all he ever cared about. Christ. ‘Be sure he was clean.’ ” Nixon began to think back to his own humiliation in 1952, the Fund Crisis and the agony of the Checkers Speech. Nixon would not be a self-protecting prig. “I don’t look at it that way,” he said to Mitchell, who as usual said very little. “And I just—that’s the thing I am really concerned with. We’re going to protect our people if we can.”32
But, as ever, Nixon could not stand to deliver the news himself. He sent Ehrlichman, armed with a little speech the president had prepared, to face Mitchell: “I told Ehrlichman to tell Mitchell that this was the toughest decision I had ever made—tougher than Cambodia, May 8 [mining Haiphong Harbor], and December 18 [the Christmas bombing] put together. I said he should tell Mitchell that I simply could not bring myself to talk to him personally about it.” He added a vow that Mitchell “would never go to prison.”
John Dean had gone over to the other side. He had gotten himself a white-collar crime lawyer—one, it turned out, with close connections to the Kennedys
“The question isn’t whether or not there is a criminal case that can be made against them that will stand up in court, Mr. President. What you have to realize is that these two men have not served you well. They already have, and in the future will, cause you embarrassment, and embarrassment to the presidency.”
Nixon resisted. “I can’t fire men simply because of the appearance of guilt. I have to have proof of their guilt.” Petersen “straightened,” Nixon recalled, and said, “What you have just said, Mr. President, speaks very well of you as a man. It does not speak well of you as a President.”43
Inevitably, debates over interpretation have been shaded by sympathy and ideology.31
In the April 30 speech I gave the impression that I had known nothing at all about the cover-up until my March 21 meeting with Dean. I indicated that once I had learned about it I had acted with dispatch and dispassion to end it. In fact, I had known some of the details of the cover-up before March 21, and when I did become aware of their implications, instead of exerting presidential leadership aimed at uncovering the cover-up, I embarked in an increasingly desperate search for ways to limit the damage to my friends, my administration, and myself.
RICHARDSON: Well, I was very—I thought that was really great. NIXON: Well, you’re very kind to say that. RICHARDSON: In a real sense, your finest hour. Then, after some more mutual stroking, Nixon got down to business: NIXON: Elliot, the one thing they’re going to be hitting you on is about the special prosecutor.
RICHARDSON: Yeah. NIXON: The point is, I’m not sure you should have one.13 Richardson replied that he would think about it. The new attorney general proceeded to appoint as Watergate special prosecutor a man Nixon would come to fear and loathe. Archibald Cox, a Harvard Law professor, was, like Richardson, a true believer in the rule of law and a high Wasp whose tribal loyalties did not lie with Richard Nixon. Cox proceeded to recruit a staff heavily laced with Harvard grads and former aides to Senator Edward Kennedy. Appointed solicitor general by President Kennedy, Cox himself was so close to
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torrent of stories—many of them true, but some hyped, garbled, or wrong—flooded the news.
In the new world of “investigative” journalism, “sources say” was sufficient authority.
