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.
Another Nixon investigator was ordered to reconnoiter the offices of Potomac Associates, a policy research group run by the dissident former Kissinger aide William Watts. Potomac had published a study suggesting the country was sliding into a crisis under the Nixon administration. The investigator reported that “a penetration is deemed possible if required,” and a Haldeman aide asked to be updated. A break-in was eventually attempted.
The offices of pollster Lou Harris were broken into not once but three times, following publication of an unfavorable poll result on public reaction to the Cambodian invasion.
One of two burglaries at the Washington home of Mortimer Caplin, who had been IRS commissioner during the Kennedy administration, was especially suspect. Whoever was responsible had ignored watches, jewelry, and government bonds and taken instead a case of documents. Caplin had that month supported a Democratic party complaint about the monitoring of tax returns by the Nixon White House. His name had also appeared on one of the Enemies lists.
Of the numerous other mysterious incidents that occurred in the months that followed, only the most glaringly pertinent can be covered in these pages. Few of them attracted much attention at the time; they are relevant, though, for they suggest that the Nixon White House abuses may have taken place on a greater scale than ever publicly recognized.
“The Fourth Amendment,” Republican Senator Lowell Weicker observed of the more famous wiretaps and break-ins, “guarantees the ‘right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. . . .’ It was expressly violated.” Weicker judged the eventual “intelligence activities” of Nixon’s White House to have been its “greatest distortion of the political system.”
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“Let us be sure,” the president said at a staff dinner to celebrate the beginning of his fourth year in office, “that nothing was left undone that could have been done to make this a more decent country. . . .”
On the foreign front a moment of deserved glory was imminent. The pearl of Nixon’s international diplomacy, the breakthrough to China, would culminate weeks later in his spectacular trip to Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao Zedong. Not long afterward Air Force One was to carry the president to Moscow for momentous discussions with Leonid Brezhnev. Real progress was made on control of nuclear weapons. The war in Vietnam continued, but soon all but sixty-nine thousand American troops returned home. These were key achievements, golden assets for the coming election, the election Nixon hoped would deliver—at last—an overwhelming victory.
That Christmas of 1971 television brought the nation heartwarming pictures of the First Family. Julie took CBS viewers inside the private quarters of the White House to show that it was “like any home in the United States.” Nixon, Haldeman noted in his diary, “did his bit” by the Christmas tree.
The president had in fact wanted to avoid the holiday festivities, according to an earlier Haldeman entry. He had hoped to “drop all our services in December, skip the Christmas ‘Evening at the White House,’ schedule several weekends in Florida. . . . Also he wants the White House Christmas parties all scheduled during the time he’s going to be gone, so that he won’t have to attend them.”
Nixon did head off to Florida and Bebe Rebozo’s “Christmas boat parade,” but not until after Christmas and after attending at least one of the White House parties. One of those present, with his family in tow, was Howard Hunt. “I passed through the line,” Hunt recalled in 1997, “and Nixon recognized me. He said, ‘How nice to see you!’ I said, ‘I’m working for Chuck Colson now.’ And he said, ‘Oh yes, I know about that. . . .’ ”
On New Year’s, FBI Director Hoover sat in a parked limousine in Florida with the local agent in charge, Kenneth Whittaker. He was about to fly back to Washington with the president aboard Air Force One, and it was his birthday. Yet the old man was gloomy. “He wasn’t high on Nixon,” the agent remembered. “He said, ‘Let me tell, you, Whittaker, Pat Nixon would make a better president than him.’ ”
Back in the capital Hoover asked a journalist he trusted, Andrew Tully, to join him for lunch in his private dining room. “I have some things to say,” he told Tully, “but I don’t want you to publish it until I’m dead.” The reporter agreed, and Hoover held forth.
He was scathing about the men around Nixon. “Some of those guys don’t know a goddamned thing about due process of law. They think they can get away with murder. I told the President I hoped I’d live long enough to keep those people from getting him into bad trouble.”
Hoover dismissed Nixon’s advisers one by one. John Mitchell: “Never been in a courtroom . . . not equipped to be Attorney General.” Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Ziegler: “They don’t know anything except how to sell advertising.” John Dean: “Doesn’t know law . . . son of a bitch.” The president’s “kindergarten,” the director warned, kept “coming up with half-baked schemes.”
Then, with uncanny presc
ience, he effectively predicted the coming disaster. “By God,” he growled, “Nixon’s got some former CIA men working for him that I’d kick out of my office. Someday that bunch will serve him up a fine mess.”
Hoover would not live to save the president from catastrophe. The Watergate break-in was less than six months away.
29
* * *
We are lucky it was Watergate, because if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something much worse, the way things were going.
—Bryce Harlow, presidential counsel, recalling a conversation with Henry Kissinger after Watergate
“Jesus God!” Nixon had exclaimed in the summer of 1971. “We need two million dollars . . . at least two million. . . .” He had asked how much money was stashed away for special operations, and Haldeman had told him “about $1,000,000,” around four million dollars at today’s values.1 Fantastic campaign wealth was to enrich the coffers further, and large portions of it would be spent on dirty tricks.
An early indicator of just how much money was generated for Nixon’s 1972 campaign came to investigators in the form of “Rose Mary’s Baby,” a list of secret contributors that had been kept in the desk drawer of the president’s secretary and escaped post-Watergate shredding.
The Committee to Re-Elect the President—properly CRP but since known universally as CREEP—would eventually acknowledge having collected more than sixty million dollars, almost twice the amount available for the 1968 campaign.
Both parties are perennially guilty of financial abuses. The money flow to the Nixon side in 1972, however, was fantastic. Much of it came in cash, delivered not by the bag but by the suitcase. Huge sums were of doubtful origin, and some of the donations were plainly illegal.
The shah of Iran, visited by Nixon that year and given carte blanche to buy any American conventional weapon he wished, provided hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps more than a million, reportedly delivered through the Swiss Bank Corporation and the Banco de Londres y Mexico in Mexico City. Having tracked the course of the money, one dogged journalist found his inquiries to the Iranian Embassy answered in person, and blocked, by the president’s close associate William Rogers.
Another donor at that time, as he has acknowledged privately, was Saudi businessman Adnan Khashoggi, who gave a million dollars.2 “We Arabs,” said the influential Egyptian editor Mohammed Haykal, “were almost the most zealous contributors to Nixon’s campaign.” From the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos reportedly came through once again. Then, as now, contributions by foreign governments or their agents were illegal.
Domestically, money was gathered by dint of strong persuasion and virtual extortion. Top business leaders were invited to a conference, ostensibly to hear Nixon speak on the year’s financial prospects. Commerce Secretary Stans, who convened the meeting, resigned while it was in progress to become CREEP’s chief fund-raiser. Corporate chiefs were taken aside and told the president was putting together “a coalition of voters and campaign techniques that will keep Nixon and his chosen successors in power at least through 1990.”
Companies were promised “a friendly climate in Washington”—if they came through with gifts for CREEP. Corporate donations to political campaigns were illegal, however, and many big concerns, including Phillips Petroleum, Ashland Oil, Occidental, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Braniff, and American Airlines, would eventually find themselves being prosecuted.
Oilmen alone gave five million dollars. Officials of Gulf Oil, one of the companies later fined, recalled having been informed just how much the company was expected to provide. “I certainly considered it pressure when two cabinet officials asked me for funds,” said one. “It’s different from someone collecting for the Boy Scouts.” Another recalled having withdrawn money in hundred-dollar bills from a Swiss bank and handing the cash to Stans stuffed in an envelope.
A Grumman Corporation chief would tell how a White House aide urged him to make a million-dollar contribution in return for Nixon’s “assistance” in arranging an aircraft sale to Japan. The aide argued that the profits to be made on the E2C, a reconnaissance plane, justified that amount. The president was due to meet with Japan’s prime minister soon after the conversation took place.
An order to McDonald’s, canceling an unauthorized price increase levied on its quarter-pounder cheeseburger, was reversed—after the company’s chairman had donated $255,000. Smaller companies had less luck. A New York architectural firm found its bid for a government contract withdrawn when its senior partner decided not to contribute. His reason for not donating, he had incautiously told CREEP representatives, was that he thought Nixon “wasn’t a good character.”
“If you’re thinking of coming in for under a hundred thousand dollars,” Nixon’s personal attorney told American Shipbuilding chairman George Steinbrenner, “don’t bother. We work up to a million around here. You do a lot of business in Washington. You’d do well to get in with the right people.” Afraid to decline, Steinbrenner paid as instructed.
“Anybody that wants to be an ambassador,” Nixon told Haldeman in a recorded conversation, “wants to pay at least $250,000 . . . from now on, the contributors have got to be I mean . . . big. . . . I’m not gonna do it with quote, ‘political’ friends and all the rest of this crap . . .” The president was aiming a little high, but the thirteen noncareer ambassadors he was to appoint after his reelection did donate an aggregate of more than $700,000. Walter Annenberg, who alone gave $250,000, was given the London embassy.3
Bebe Rebozo, whose advice Nixon heeded on ambassadorships, took delivery of fifty thousand dollars in cash (in bundles of hundred-dollar bills) from a supermarket chain head at a Key Biscayne bar. Albert (“Toots”) Manzi, a fund-raiser for former Massachusetts Governor John Volpe, reportedly gave Nixon five hundred thousand dollars in the hopes that Volpe might be chosen for the vice presidency in the second term.4 “I made the kitty,” a witness in an extortion case quoted Manzi as saying, “and the kitty was presented to Mr. Nixon.”
Even today the true nature of the Nixon connection with Robert Vesco, the financier at the center of what the Securities and Exchange Commission called “one of the largest securities frauds ever perpetrated,” remains unclear. In the year 2000, as he remained in Castro’s Cuba, in jail for fraud and other offenses, pending charges against Vesco in the United States included an indictment for an illegal two-hundred-thousand-dollar contribution to Nixon’s 1972 campaign.
“Vesco is a crook. I never met the man,” Nixon is heard to say on one of the White House tapes. In fact, the two men had been introduced at a VIP dinner soon after the 1968 election, which Vesco had backed with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar contribution. Vesco’s longtime private pilot told the author that his boss sat with Nixon, then president-elect, at the Rose Bowl game a few weeks later.
In a muddle of evidence, some facts stand out. Just as fund-raising for 1972 was getting under way, Vesco was arrested in Switzerland on charges of fraud and embezzlement. Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, intervened personally, ordering U.S. diplomats in Berne to bring “all possible pressure” to secure his release.
Soon afterward a senior Nixon campaign aide suggested to a Vesco associate that the financier might want to contribute to CREEP. A month or so later a Vesco aide flew to the States with a briefcase containing two hundred thousand dollars.5
The younger of the president’s two brothers, Edward Nixon, described by CREEP’s deputy director as a “presidential surrogate,” helped arrange the delivery of the Vesco cash. His elder brother Donald had been a conduit for Vesco’s 1968 donation. Donald’s son, Donald, Jr., worked for Vesco as a personal aide during the presidency.
In 1974 Walter Cronkite would interview the financier in Costa Rica, his then country of refuge. Asked if he had spoken with Nixon personally about the money he donated in 1972, Vesco paused for a full half minute and then said, “Let’s go to the next question. . . . I didn’t quite hear the question too clearly.
And I’m sure if you said it ten times, I still couldn’t hear it. . . .”
Vesco did reveal one detail of substance. The person who told him his campaign contribution should be in cash, he said, had been Nixon’s longest-serving retainer, Murray Chotiner. It was Chotiner who, with Charles Colson, played a key role in an episode that, had even its bare outline become known at the time, might have been as great a scandal as Watergate itself.
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“The P,” Haldeman noted in his diary in December 1971, “apparently met with the Attorney General yesterday and agreed to pardon Hoffa.” Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters leader, had been jailed for tampering in 1967 after a long pursuit by Robert Kennedy. Nixon nevertheless decided to free him, with nine years of his sentence still to run. How that came about is a complex tale with links to the 1972 election.
The previous year Haldeman had sent Colson the following instruction: “The President wants you to take on the responsibility for working on developing your strength with the labor unions. . . . He feels this must be done by picking them off one by one . . . we have to pick them as individuals. . . . The President has specifically in mind the Teamsters. . . . There is a great deal of gold there to be mined.”
Colson was ordered to work closely with businessman Curtis Counts, a friend of the Nixons’ from Whittier days, whom they had known for more than thirty years.6 Counts, now a labor mediator, had recently introduced Nixon to Frank Fitzsimmons, who was standing in for Hoffa during his imprisonment and was intent on seizing the union leadership for himself. Nixon colluded in this scheme and began a long-term alliance with Fitzsimmons, one sealed with hard cash.
Even before the instruction to Colson, word of a darker element had reached White House aide Clark Mollenhoff, a decent man opposed to such shenanigans. He had been informed that Nixon was going to spring Hoffa and that Chotiner was “handling it with the Las Vegas mob.”