“And the National Security Council knew that. . . . There was no squeamishness in Richard Nixon on that score.”
As reported earlier, in the account of the Castro assassination plots, Nixon told the Senate Intelligence Committee—on oath—that assassination of a foreign leader was “an act I never had cause to consider.”
_____
Chile, though the subject of prolonged plotting, was a sideshow compared with Vietnam, which remained the nation’s agony and the president’s preoccupation. Haldeman, who kept a scribbled record of every meeting with Nixon, made this note in 1969:
VN [Vietnam] enemy
Misjudges 2 things
—the time—has 3 years + 3 mo
—the man—won’t be 1st P to lose war
However strong his resolve, “the Man,” as aides sometimes referred to the president, found his military and diplomatic efforts constantly frustrated. Secret contacts with the North Vietnamese seemed to lead nowhere. Attempts to negotiate through the Soviets, who were supplying Hanoi with arms, did not bring a breakthrough, nor did a deliberate leak, designed to make the enemy believe Nixon was considering invading the North. In his memoirs Nixon pinned the blame for the impasse on those known in the Oval Office as “the bad guys,” the domestic opponents of the war.
In the fall of the first year two massive demonstrations were held in Washington. During the first, in October 1969, a quarter of a million people took to the streets. “Don’t get rattled—don’t waver—don’t react,” Nixon scribbled in a note to himself. Time magazine reported that the president seemed “unconcerned and aloof from it all.”
His public posture notwithstanding, Nixon was in fact consumed by both the war and the domestic opposition to it. With another huge demonstration looming, he decided to address the nation. “Three of us worked on a first draft,” recalled National Security Council aide William Watts. “The line we took would have had us out of Vietnam in six months. Then, voom, it was gone. The speech he gave had nothing to do with what we wrote.”
Nixon made a note to himself to “talk softly and carry a big stick.” In early November, after days of writing and rewriting, on one occasion working through the night, he went on national television to ask for the support of “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” to fulfill the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. The route to peace, Nixon insisted, was to continue fighting. He would not be deflected by the protesting “minority.”
In a White House staffed at the top by advertising men, Vietnam policy was largely conceived and measured in public relations terms. “The important thing” in rallying Republican support, Haldeman aide Larry Higby had said in a recent memo, was to get out a headline reading WORLD WIDE ACCLAIM FOR NIXON’S PEACE INITIATIVES. The big speech more than achieved that—or so, until very recently, it seemed.
“The White House switchboard,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “lighted up from the minute I left the air. . . . More than 50,000 telegrams and 30,000 letters poured in, and the percentage of critical messages among them was low. . . . For the first time, the Silent Majority had made itself heard.”
Nixon claimed he had barely slept the night he made the speech, so “keyed up” was he over what the reaction might be. Only in 1999 did Alexander Butterfield, the aide who handled the flow of paper in the Oval Office, reveal the truth: The positive reaction, he maintained, was “largely contrived. It was manufactured.”
Weeks before the address, Butterfield said, he was told “to make damn sure that the response was fantastic.” A high proportion of the telegrams and letters was generated in advance by contacting Republican state chairmen, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the like. Future presidential candidate Ross Perot, then a billionaire businessman mustering support for Nixon’s war policy, promised a trainload of mail and did not fall far short of his pledge.
“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.
26
* * *
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
Months 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?”