The Arrogance of Power

  The following year, in an internal memo marked SECRET, Colson had reported that “substantial sums of money, perhaps a quarter of a million dollars, available for any . . . purpose we would direct” could be generated by “arrang[ing] to have James Hoffa released from prison.”

  When Hoffa was eventually released, it was done in a way designed to benefit both Fitzsimmons and Nixon. For Fitzsimmons there was a stipulation that Hoffa would be barred from union activity for a decade to come. For Nixon there was a Teamsters Union endorsement—and allegedly huge payments involving organized crime.

  Seven years after Nixon’s fall a Time magazine investigation reported on a purported 1972 “meeting between Nixon and Fitzsimmons in one of the private rooms of the White House. [Attorney General] Kleindienst had been summoned to the session and ordered to review all investigations pending against the Teamsters and to make sure that Fitzsimmons and his allies were not hurt. The meeting supposedly occurred after Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, to which the Teamsters contributed an estimated $1 million.”

  The Time article drew on IRS agents’ interviews with Fitzsimmons and some of his Teamsters colleagues, who had cooperated in hope of avoiding prosecution on other matters.7 Fitzsimmons and the cronies involved have since died, but the informant who acted as their go-between with IRS intelligence, Harry Hall, spoke with the author in 1997.

  “A large amount of money was given by the Teamsters to the Committee to Re-Elect the President,” Hall said. “Fitzsimmons figured he’d found an ally in Nixon. The Teamsters would help him financially, and Nixon ate that up. . . . I was told they gave money to Chotiner that was to go to Nixon. I think it was close to five hundred thousand dollars.”

  According to Hall, the president’s brother Don received twenty-five thousand dollars. The half million was separate from the sum donated to CREEP and intended for Nixon personally.

  Two leads on the “Las Vegas mob” connection suggest a link to the White House.8 When hush money was required during the Watergate scandal, Colson would travel to Las Vegas at the same time as a mob courier. It was then, allegedly, that another five-hundred-thousand-dollar payment was made to Nixon’s people at Fitzsimmons’s request. Later still, after Colson resigned from the White House, Fitzsimmons would retain him as an attorney at a fee of one hundred thousand dollars a year.

  Questions also arose over alleged trips to Las Vegas by the two leading figures in the operations that would culminate in the Watergate break-in, Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy.9

  _____

  “For God’s sake keep it to yourself,” Liddy confided excitedly to Hunt in late 1971. “. . . Get this: The AG [Attorney General Mitchell] wants me to set up an intelligence organization for the campaign. It’ll be big, Howard. . . . They don’t want a repetition of the last campaign; this time they want to know everything that’s going on. . . . There’s plenty of money available—half a million dollars for openers, and there’s more where that came from.”

  There was indeed, and involved in its disbursement were figures at the very top of the administration. A surviving Talking Paper prepared for Haldeman on October 1, 1971 shows that a budget of “800–300 [thousand dollars]” for “surveillance” was on the agenda for a meeting with Mitchell.

  Weeks later, Mitchell and John Dean discussed an improved “political intelligence capability,” with Liddy, no longer a humble Plumber, now transferred to CREEP with the exalted title of general counsel.

  Along with Hunt, Liddy’s principal operational colleague was to be another former CIA man, a new recruit named James McCord, who was to be CREEP’s “security coordinator,” in charge of defensive security. Soon, though, McCord would be briefing Liddy on offensive surveillance or, simply stated, bugging.

  Nixon himself knew CREEP now had an “intelligence branch,” and he was impatient for it to start getting results. The president would sit drumming his fingers on the desk, Haldeman remembered, asking again and again: “When are they going to do something over there?”

  On January 27, 1972, Liddy walked into the Justice Department, passing beneath the frieze that reads: “NO FREE GOVERNMENT CAN SURVIVE THAT IS NOT BASED ON THE SUPREMACY OF LAW,” for a meeting with Attorney General Mitchell. Also present were CREEP’s deputy director, Jeb Magruder, and presidential counsel John Dean. The plan they had assembled to discuss was blatantly criminal.

  “Smart, isn’t he? . . . must be as conservative as hell,” Nixon had remarked of Liddy after reading his memo on getting rid of J. Edgar Hoover. Now, using charts set on an easel, Liddy laid out for the attorney general, one of Nixon’s closest associates, his proposal for the project he called GEMSTONE.

  One part of the operation, code named DIAMOND, outlined methods of dealing with “urban guerrillas” expected to disrupt the Republican convention. They were to be identified in advance, kidnapped, drugged, and held incommunicado in Mexico until after the convention. The men selected for the job, Liddy told Mitchell, included “professional killers who had accounted between them for twenty-two dead so far . . . members of organized crime.”

  Another component, RUBY, was a scheme to infiltrate spies into the Democratic camp. COAL was designed to feed money clandestinely to black Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, in line with the plan to divide the Democrats that Nixon had approved earlier.10 EMERALD called for a pursuit plane to bug radiotelephone transmissions from the aircraft carrying the Democratic candidate.

  Under CRYSTAL, Liddy proposed leasing a large houseboat moored “within the line of sight” of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beech, where the Democratic convention was to be held. It was to have a dual function, doubling as a nerve center for bugging and as what intelligence people like to call a honeytrap.

  Under SAPPHIRE, the bedroom on the “opulent barge” would be furnished with a king-size bed. “I’ll use prostitutes,” Liddy explained, “to go out and seduce into the houseboat high campaign officials.” He was already seeking out females who could pose as “idly rich young women, so impressed by men of power they would let themselves be picked up at parties and bars by Democratic staffers.”

  Liddy went on to brief his colleagues on OPAL, for clandestine entries to place bugs; TOPAZ, for photographing documents; and GARNET, for mounting sham pro-Democratic demonstrations carried out in a way that would repel voters rather than attract them.

  There was also TURQUOISE, which would undertake sabotage at the Democratic convention. A “commando team” was to destroy the air-conditioning system of key buildings, making conditions intolerable for delegates in the July heat. Finally, Liddy presented the budget, which he called BRICK, set at around a million dollars.

  Although Mitchell would later claim that he thought the GEMSTONE plan “beyond the pale,” he did not fire Liddy, as one might have expected of the nation’s senior law officer. Rather, he merely dismissed the project as too expensive and urged Liddy to come back with “something more realistic.” Haldeman’s diary entry for the following day, January 28, records that Mitchell met with Nixon to discuss “the overall political plan.” It was agreed that Mitchell would soon leave the Justice Department to run CREEP full-time.

  Mitchell was present that same evening when Nixon gave a white-tie dinner in honor of DeWitt Wallace, founder of Reader’s Digest. (The Wallaces would sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom that night, beneficiaries of precisely the perk for which a later Democratic president, Bill Clinton, would come under attack by the Republicans.) The Digest had long promoted Nixon, and Wallace personally gave him more than a hundred thousand dollars for the impending campaign. According to one account, the magazine company gave much more, funneled in covertly through the Bahamas. The Digest’s editor personally brokered another huge cash contribution—from a prominent businessman—that was placed in Nixon’s personal White House safe, then quietly returned after Watergate.

  The white-tie banquet that January was for people Haldeman had designated “major political backers”—memospeak for fabulously wealthy supporter
s. It was especially galling, then, when one of the entertainers, a singer backing Ray Conniff, interrupted the performance with a protest against the Vietnam War. Looking directly at the president, she stepped to the microphone in the middle of “Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me,” pulled out a banner reading STOP THE KILLING, and appealed to Nixon to halt the bombing. She ended her action with a cry of “God bless Daniel Ellsberg!” As the singer left the stage to shouts of “Throw her out,” the president sat “speechless . . . smiling a sickly smile.” Just before the dinner, he had dictated an angry memo demanding a coordinated attack on opponents of his war policy.

  Meanwhile Gordon Liddy had gone back to the drawing board. What exactly he had planned, and what targets were finally authorized and when are questions that were to become the subject of bitter controversy. The one issue that matters, amid the bickering, is what the president—or his most senior aides, who should have kept him informed—knew, and when.

  Dean has always claimed that, after a second inconclusive meeting with Liddy in Mitchell’s office, he recommended to Haldeman that the White House should have nothing to do with the project. If true, Dean’s assertion means that Haldeman knew about the scheme by early February 1972.11 There is no doubt, at any rate, that word of GEMSTONE did reach the president’s orbit in that same period.

  Impatient because the project remained stalled, Liddy got Hunt to introduce him to Nixon’s confidant Charles Colson. Colson immediately phoned CREEP’s Magruder, indicating, according to Magruder, that “the president wanted—he always used ‘the President’—to get this thing off the dime, get it going.”

  Nixon by now had reason for confidence about his showing in the election. Muskie still looked quite good in the polls but was faltering in the face of the White House counteroffensive. The president thought the liberal Senator George McGovern, though steadily moving up, would be an easy opponent to beat. He was not complacent, however. George Wallace, whom all of Nixon’s maneuvering had failed to remove from the race, was running well enough to erode the Republican vote.

  This time around, however, it was not sufficient that Nixon merely win. As Colson has expressed it, “We wanted a coronation; we wanted the power that went with the biggest landslide in history.”

  On March 30, in a house owned by Bebe Rebozo on Key Biscayne, Magruder attended another planning meeting with John Mitchell. There, according to Magruder, Mitchell gave the go-ahead for a scaled-down version of the Liddy plan.12 The project was then memorialized in a Political Action Memorandum and was on the agenda when, only days later, Mitchell met with Haldeman.

  The president’s closest aide, it now seems certain, was notified that the project had been authorized. A document that surfaced only in the nineties, a Talking Paper written to prepare Haldeman for the meeting with Mitchell, includes a paragraph headed “Intelligence” that begins: “Gordon Liddy’s intelligence operation proposal ($300)* has been approved. Now you may want to cover with Mitchell who will be privy to the information.”

  Not long after the Mitchell meeting, moreover, Haldeman ordered that Liddy was to shift his “capability” away from Muskie to the Democrat now gaining ground, McGovern.

  It seems more than possible that Nixon too knew about the Liddy project. Haldeman’s diary and White House logs indicate that Mitchell saw the president, as well as Haldeman, on the very day the Talking Paper featuring the “intelligence operation” was to be discussed.

  One copy of the document is marked with a ringed letter that may be a P at its top right-hand corner. If the original bore such a P, Haldeman’s regular abbreviation for the president—with a check mark through it—that would indicate that Nixon almost certainly read or discussed it. We do not have the original, however, because it was one of the documents consigned to the shredder, on Haldeman’s orders, at the onset of the Watergate crisis.13

  Nixon was later to deny that CREEP’s intelligence plan was discussed at the meeting, and the tape of the relevant Oval Office conversation contains no reference to it. He also insisted, on another White House recording: “I didn’t talk to Mitchell about this matter. . . . I never met with him alone.” That statement has been disputed by Alexander Butterfield, whose job required him to be privy to Nixon’s White House movements hour by hour. Butterfield recalled that during the campaign “the president met with John Mitchell almost every night, over in the Executive Office Building.”

  Microphones had been installed in Nixon’s office at the EOB, but Mitchell spoke privately of campaign discussions with the president that occurred in locations where there were none. “I usually met with the President in his living quarters or talked to him on a secure line,” he told Rabbi Baruch Korff, one of Nixon’s most vocal supporters during the Watergate struggle.

  Many of the meetings in the spring of 1972, Mitchell said, were held in the solarium and kitchen of the White House. “No one was present—no one was allowed.” Even family members, and Nixon’s valet, were warned to keep their distance. “I never did anything,” Mitchell added, “without his approval.”

  The exchange with Mitchell, Korff recalled, reminded him of something odd Nixon was to say to him after the resignation, a curious question reminiscent of Nixon’s musings to Haldeman and Egil Krogh on whether he had after all ordered the break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. “Don’t you think,” he was to ask Korff, speaking this time of Watergate, “that everyone agrees now that I didn’t know beforehand of the burglary?”

  “That was the moment,” Korff, so long Nixon’s loyal defender, reflected in 1995, “I realized that if he told the whole truth, he might never recover, privately or publicly.”

  _____

  According to three key witnesses, discussion of Liddy’s “intelligence project” included talk of breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices almost from the start. As of March, it also included plans to make “entries” at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, site of the Democratic convention, and at the headquarters of whichever candidate the Democrats picked. The priority target, though, was the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building.

  Hunt and Liddy had been frantically busy with nefarious projects since the start of the year. There had been a handful of break-ins, in Washington and farther afield, that none would connect with them until long afterward.14 They had also been recruiting foot soldiers, a motley all-purpose crew from Miami. All were anti-Castro Cuban exiles except for one, Frank Sturgis, an ex-marine deeply involved in the exile cause.

  On May 2 the foot soldiers were summoned to action in the streets of Washington. FBI Director Hoover had died in his sleep, a loss that Nixon would come to regret. At the time, however, he is said to have greeted the news with a prolonged silence, followed by “Jesus Christ! That old cocksucker!” Then, having ordered a display of national mourning, he followed up with a truly bizarre command.

  For several weeks now the president had been raging about the new Communist offensive in Vietnam. “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time,” he had told Haldeman and Mitchell. He ordered ever mightier strikes, and his behavior at times seemed especially erratic. Once he burst into a meeting in the White House press office, kicked press spokesman Ron Ziegler’s desk, and demanded that the North Vietnamese always be termed “the enemy.” “The Old Man’s really high again,” Ziegler had murmured, as the door closed behind him.

  As the flags drooped at half-mast, and Hoover’s body lay in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol, word came that an antiwar demonstration was to take place on the Mall. The cursed Daniel Ellsberg would be in attendance, and a Viet Cong flag would be flying. A ludicrous directive now issued forth from the Oval Office, in the form of a call from Colson to CREEP’s Magruder, passed down the line to Gordon Liddy.

  “The president is really pissed about the Viet Cong flag” was how Liddy recalled the message. “. . . Do you think your guys could break [the rally] up and get it?” The flag wa
s to be seized, he was told, and presented to Nixon as a trophy.

  The following evening, as demonstrators intoned the names of the Vietnam dead, a group of strangers erupted on the scene, fists flying and shouting abuse. Hunt’s Cubans had been flown from Miami to Washington, first class, and then briefed. Shown a picture of Ellsberg, they were told: “Our mission is to hit him, call him a traitor, and punch him in the nose. Hit him and run.”

  The Miamians did manage to provoke a melee. Two were briefly arrested but then released when a man in civilian clothes had a word with the police. Although a man close by him took a punch, Ellsberg was unharmed. The president never got his Viet Cong flag, for there was none to capture.

  As Nixon readied for a groundbreaking trip to Moscow, the first ever by an American president, a new proposal came to Howard Hunt. On May 15, while campaigning in a Washington suburb, George Wallace was shot by a revolver-toting gunman wearing a red, white, and blue shirt and a campaign button. The assailant, an apparently deranged twenty-two-year old named Arthur Bremer, was seized at the scene. Wallace, his spinal cord severely damaged, was paralyzed for life.15

  Nixon’s public posture was one of sympathy and concern. He was to write in his memoirs that the news was “terrible and stunning,” and he offered a lump-in-throat description of a hospital visit to his gravely wounded opponent. The president’s conversations behind the scenes, however, were utterly cynical and triggered the summons to Hunt.

  Reconstructing the events from several sources, including recently released Nixon tapes, the following scenario emerges: Nixon was “agitated” when informed of the shooting, and “voiced immediate concern that the assassin might have ties to the Republican party or, even worse, to the President’s Re-election Committee.” Were that to have been the case, Colson was to note, “it could have cost the President the election.”