13. Sudoplatov’s book, written by his son and two journalists, one of them a former diplomatic editor of Time, caused a storm because of its claim that leading scientists on America’s wartime atom bomb project fed information to the Soviets. Based largely on taped interviews with Sudoplatov, the book was criticized by some reviewers for its lack of documentation. The present-day Russian Foreign Intelligence Service called it a mosaic of “truthful events, semi-truths and open inventions.” Others praised the book, Le Monde’s reviewer thought it “the most important historical testimony to appear since the death of Stalin.” It devotes three pages to Alger Hiss, apparently drawn directly from the Sudoplatov interviews. Sudoplatov indicated that much of what he said was based on a 1993 conversation with a former colleague who had been a GRU agent in New York and London. The former colleague believed Hiss was chosen by President Roosevelt for secret contacts with the Soviets in the knowledge “that he had contacts and was pro-Soviet.” (Sudoplatov, op. cit., p. 227–, New York Review of Books, June 8, Sept. 22, WP Book World, May 1; NYT, May 6, 1994; WP, Sept. 27, 1996.)
14. In the United States Chambers had from the very start cast suspicion on Hiss’s wife, Priscilla, and his brother, Donald, who also worked at the State Department. Their names appear with Alger’s in the notes and journal entries made in September 1939 by President Roosevelt’s security adviser Adolf Berle after Chambers had spent the evening with him. (See chapter 7, note 11.) “I think,” Berle wrote in a later diary entry, on August 9, 1949, “that when we get to the bottom of this we will discover the true Communist in the Hiss family is the wife either of Alger or Donald Hiss.” Priscilla Hiss’s role in the case remains somewhat unclear, and there has been speculation that Hiss deceived questioners in order to protect her. (Notes: MO, pp. 388, 911 [n. for 388]); journal: Berle and Jacobs, eds., op. cit., pp. 249, 583.)
15. Not only was Dulles still in regular touch with Donovan, but he had his own connection to the Hiss scenario. In the course of his OSS work in Europe, he had had extensive dealings with Hiss associate Noel Field and been duped by him. Dulles reportedly took revenge in 1949 by feeding the Soviets information that Field had all along been an American spy; thus Field wound up spending eight years behind the Iron Curtain in a Communist jail. (Mosley, op. cit., pp. 276, 506–; Stuart Steven, Operation Splinter Factor, New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1974, pp. 85–, 97–.)
16. As of this writing, there are no certainties as to how much progress had been made in decoding the VENONA documents by August 1948, when Nixon’s probe of Hiss got under way. The FBI’s Robert Lamphere said in an interview for this book that the ALES message (see facsimile, p. 493) was not broken until 1955. Yet an FBI document copied to Lamphere in May 1950 refers to the message—saying it likely refers to Hiss. A CIA spokesperson told the author that the available documentation indicated that the message had probably been decoded in the spring of 1950. Both these responses are clearly wrong. A rendering of the message obtained under the Freedom of Information Act provided to the author bears the legend TOP SECRET COPSE—and a notation that this was a code word for the VENONA material used only in 1949. According to the author Nigel West, writing in 1999, one of only two deliberate excisions in the modern publication of the declassified documents is “the consistent removal throughout of all references to the first date of circulation [within the intelligence community]” (Lamphere int.: Robert Lamphere, Belmont to Ladd, May 15, 1950; FBI doc. provided to author; CIA spokesperson: int. Anya Guilsher, CIA press office, after consulting staff who reviewed VENONA decrypts; “COPSE”: March 30, 1945 message Washington–Moscow, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and provided to the author by John Lowenthal—a notation reads “The codeword COPSE was in use in 1949 only.”)
Chapter 9
1. Over the next two decades Tuck earned the sobriquet clown prince of U.S. domestic politics. Although Nixon and his aides held him up during Watergate as an example of Democratic dirty tricks, Tuck’s japes were very different from Republican operations during the Nixon presidency. While irritating to the Republican side, his antics were essentially humorous. Nixon communications director Herb Klein considered his work “legitimate intelligence,” his activities more amusing than sinister, and thought of Tuck as a friend. During the 1956 campaign, when Nixon was in San Francisco, Tuck went out at night and affixed Nixon placards to road signs designed to guide garbage trucks. Daylight revealed that they now read, DUMP NIXON! In 1968 Tuck hired a group of obviously pregnant women to carry signs reading NIXON’S THE ONE. Nixon was not Tuck’s only target; he once persuaded a flight attendant on Barry Goldwater’s plane to offer the candidate a choice of “coffee, tea, or hemlock.” (“clown prince”: Boston Globe, Sept. 30, 1973; Nixon, aides: WP, June 17, 1997, and “An Evening with Dick Tuck,” broadcast tape available at Library of Congress; 1956: ibid., David Halberstam, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy, London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1968, p. 71; Klein: Klein, op. cit., pp. 139, 145; women: Halberstam, op. cit., p. 72; Goldwater: ibid.)
2. The nickname Tricky Dick was coined in the spring of 1950 by a small newspaper, Independent Review. It did not catch on until late September, when the paper used it again in an editorial, and it was subsequently adopted by Douglas supporters. (Mitchell, op. cit., p. 184–; Douglas, op. cit., p. 328.)
3. A heavily researched account of the 1950 campaign is that of Roger Morris, in his book Nixon, Rise and Fall of an American Politician. His work on the entire period, from Nixon’s birth to his inauguration as vice president, is also valuable. This is so notwithstanding the challenge to aspects of Morris’s work in 1999 by Professor Irwin Gellman of Chapman University, Orange, California, in his book The Contender. While Gellman’s book was published only when this author’s research had already proceeded too far for exhaustive followup, his criticisms of Morris seem strident and somewhat inconclusive. A truly scholarly comparison of the two studies would be a welcome addition to the literature. See Bibliography for details of both books.
4. Nixon’s spokesman later said there was “no basis in fact” to what Astor had written (AMI, p. 459, MO, p. 617.)
Chapter 10
1. Dr. Hutschnecker has said that his concentration on psychosomatic theory began at the Charitee, the hospital of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where he trained as a doctor. In the United States any medical doctor could specialize in psychotherapy. To be certified by the Board of Psychiatry and Neurology of the American Psychiatric Association, however, required a two-year residency in psychiatric medicine. Hutschnecker did not have that certification. He was a member of the American Medical Association, a member of the American Psychosomatic Society, and a fellow of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine. (Author’s research; WP, Nov. 20, 1973; Roger Rappoport, The Superdoctors, Chicago Playboy Press, 1975, p. 155.)
2. Salisbury came to know Dr. Hutschnecker well but apparently only after the 1960 encounter. (Hutschnecker, Drive for Power, op. cit., pp. 18, 182–, 267.)
3. In testimony to the Senate Rules Committee in 1973, after Winter-Berger’s account of the doctor’s alleged table talk was published, Dr. Hutschnecker excoriated Winter-Berger, dismissing his comments as a “deliberate attempt to hurt people.” However, the doctor does seem to have been rather loquacious about his Nixon connection—at times he believed he was speaking privately—and the author (who has met Winter-Berger) tends to believe the lobbyist’s account. (Hutschnecker, Drive for Power, op. cit., citing Rules Committee testimony, p. 20–.)
4. Fawn Brodie’s book Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character was published posthumously, in 1981, after Brodie’s death from cancer earlier that year. It was much criticized for its overemphasis on psychiatric interpretation of Nixon’s life. Yet the book contains valuable research, and Brodie’s files, preserved at the University of Utah, Marriott Library, remain an indispensable tool for any scholar working on Nixon. (Fawn Brodie, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, New York: Norton, 1981.)
5. This
quotation is taken from historian Fawn Brodie’s notes of her interview with Leo Katcher, brother of the source, Herbert Katcher. Leo indicated the analyst was a woman. A more alarming version came to Brodie from Daniel Ellsberg, the protagonist in the Pentagon Papers case. Ellsberg, apparently citing Leo Katcher at one remove, suggested Nixon’s analyst had called him an “extreme paranoid megalomaniac, very well controlled but far out—[who] feared his being in the seat of power.” Absent corroboration, the author has used the version Leo Katcher gave to Brodie. Leo Katcher had a special interest in psychiatry, he held a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. As a journalist he also had direct experience with Nixon; he had been one of several journalists who developed the fund story in 1952 and was investigated by the FBI afterward. “For twenty-five years,” he said in 1975, “that man has to some extent possessed me. He stands in the same relationship to morality as a color-blind man stands to color.” (FB notes of ints. Daniel Ellsberg and Leo Katcher; FB, p. 275.)
6. Nixon makes no reference to Dr. Hutschnecker in his memoirs, in spite of the evidence not only of the doctor’s medical care but also of the long friendship between the two men. Nixon does write, dismissively, of the fact that some journalists concluded he was starting to go “off [his] rocker” during Watergate and asked “whether I was under psychiatric care.” (MEM, p. 961–.)
Chapter 11
1. There is some doubt about the date. In his memoirs Nixon placed it in 1951, and a thank-you letter in his vice presidential papers, the first-known note of its kind, is dated January 9, 1952. Interviews with Rebozo, Danner, and another member of the circle of friends, Sloan McCrae, also place the first Nixon-Rebozo meeting in the early Senate period, 1950 or 1951. Yet the author’s interviews with Smathers and 1972 interviews with Danner and another friend, a former FBI agent, John Madala, suggest the Miami visits began as early as 1948, when Nixon became overwrought during his pursuit of Alger Hiss, or even earlier.
According to Danner and Madala, there were several such early trips, during which Nixon went on boat outings with Rebozo and Tatem Wofford, a hotelier. The journalist who conducted the 1972 interviews, Jeff Gerth, concluded that the later date for the initial visit, 1951, was concocted to conceal the fact that Nixon was in Miami and associating with men linked to organized crime in the late forties, a period when, as revealed by the Kefauver Committee and prominently reported, some top Miami hotels were controlled by mobsters. One of them, Gerth points out, was the Wofford Hotel. Research for this book, however, does not indicate that Tatem Wofford was involved with the Wofford Hotel; it was owned, rather, by John and Olive Wofford.
Not least because of Nixon’s January 1952 letter of thanks, the author inclines toward dating the first Nixon-Rebozo meeting to late 1951. This is not to deny that Nixon had Florida connections that placed him unhealthily close to organized crime; these are covered later in this chapter. (Memoirs: MEM, p. 247, and MO, p. 655; Rebozo: Miami Herald, Nov. 1, 1973; Smathers: ints. George Smathers; Danner: deposition, Sept. 4, 1973, Box B56, E files, NA; McCrae: int. Sloan McCrae; Danner, Madala: article by Jeff Gerth, Sundance, Nov.–Dec. 1972; Kefauver: Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, U.S. Senate, 81st Cong., Washington, D.C., U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1950, Interim Report, p. 7–; obituary of Olive Wofford: Miami News, Oct. 11, 1978, and listing for Tatem Wofford [of Tatem Surf Club] in 1953 city directory.)
2. Rebozo told the Miami News in mid-June 1974 that he had advised Nixon that it would probably be better to resign. Yet according to the president in his memoirs, Rebozo was still trying to persuade him not to resign as late as August 1, by which time the situation was even less tenable than it had been earlier. (Miami News, June 18, 1974; PAT, p. 398; MEM, p. 1058.)
3. There was strict tire rationing at the time because of the acute wartime rubber shortage, and big profits were made by those who found a way around the regulations. Several people linked to Rebozo—including George Smathers’s father, Frank—administered rationing in the Miami area, contrary to the rules. The regulations were enforced by the Office of Price Administration in Washington, where in the same year Rebozo expanded to become the largest tire retread operative in the area, Nixon was acting chief of interpretations of the department covering tire rationing. Researchers have sought without success to prove some linkage between Nixon and Rebozo at this time, and many relevant OPA records have long since been routinely destroyed. (During the war Rebozo served as a civilian navigator flying for Army Transport Command, leaving the gas and tire business to be managed by one of his brothers.) (MO, p. 237; Weisman, op. cit., p. 255–; Sundance, Nov./Dec. 1972, p. 35; Life, July 31, 1970.)
4. This is Jane Lucke, who worked for Rebozo’s attorney and business partner Thomas Wakefield. A divorcée, she lived with her mother and two sons, who often came along on her dates with Rebozo. She got to know the Nixons, visited the White House, and was supportive of her husband and the president. She survived Rebozo on his death in 1998. (Ints. Jake Jernigan, Don Berg, Sloan McCrae; Boston Globe, Oct. 4, 1970; Ladies’ Home Journal, Nov. 1973 supra.; Miami Herald, Oct. 7, 1971, Oct. 14, 1973; Nation, Nov. 12, 1973.)
5. Nixon made oddly few references to Rebozo in his memoirs, given the amount of time they spent together. He did, though, acknowledge him as his “friend” several times, and at one point as “one of the kindest and most generous men I have ever met . . . a man of great character and integrity.” (MEM, pp. 247, 967, 964.)
6. As early as 1961 Rebozo accompanied former Ambassador William Pawley on a secret mission to see Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo shortly before he was assassinated. A Newsday probe suggested he was involved in covert operations prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Two of the Watergate defendants, Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, were officers of real estate firms that acted in property deals for Nixon and Rebozo. Three days after the break-in Nixon told Haldeman he was going to call Rebozo and have him round up some anti-Castro Cubans to raise money for “the boys” who had got caught. (Trujillo: William Turner and Warren Hinckle, The Fish Is Red, New York: Harper & Row, 1981, p. 192; Newsday: Oct. 6, 1971; defendants: Scott, Hoch, and Stetler eds., op. cit., p. 372–; William Turner, “Richard Nixon’s Vendetta and the Old Boy Network,” unpub. ms., p. 61; RN, Haldeman: Haldeman, Ends of Power, op. cit., p. 24.)
7. The other friend was Robert Abplanalp, the millionaire who developed the aerosol valve and founded the Precision Valve Corporation. Abplanalp became close to Nixon after the 1960 election, hired him as an attorney during the sixties wilderness years, and regularly welcomed him to his Bahamian island hideaway. Abplanalp’s role in the property deals involved in the purchase of San Clemente was investigated during Watergate. He did not respond to requests for an interview for this book. (Summers to Abplanalp, Dec. 30, 1996, Feb. 18, July 31, Oct. 17, 1997; NYT Magazine, Jan. 13, 1974, p. 12; Ron Kessler, “Abplanalp Hired Nixon as Lawyer,” WP, undated clip.)
8. This was the scandal surrounding President Eisenhower’s close aide Sherman Adams, driven from office in 1958 because of accusations that he had intervened on behalf of a textile manufacturer in exchange for gifts and favors. Vice President Nixon, one of Adams’s few supporters, may have felt obliged to back him; Adams had first been touched by corruption charges during a Senate probe of influence peddling by Nixon’s own close friend, Murray Chotiner. (Associations: Piers Brendon, Ike, His Life and Times, New York: Harper & Row, 1985, pp. 519–, 361; Herbert Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades, New York: Macmillan, 1972, p. 519–.)
9. Nixon told Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, when about to fire them, that money could easily be produced for their legal fees: “There’s a way we can get it to you . . . two or three thousand dollars, huh? . . . No strain . . . I never intended to use the money . . . I told Bebe . . . ‘Be sure that people . . . who have contributed money . . . are, uh, favored.’ And he’s used it. . . .” (NM, p. 366, citing WHT, Apr. 17, 1973; Haldeman, Ends of Power, op. cit., p. 348, and
see RN version, MEM, p. 827.)
10. The Lansky associate in question was Gil Beckley, whose name appeared in Fincher’s coded address book in 1966. Two years later some of Beckley’s mob colleagues were convicted in a major stolen stocks case in which Rebozo featured controversially, as reported later in this chapter. (Moldea, Interference, op. cit., p. 292–; Sifakis, op. cit., p. 314.)
11. Berg was quoted by Newsday in 1971 as saying Nixon “got a substantial discount.” The company’s vice president, Francisco Saralegui, said he thought Nixon should have been given the sites for nothing. In his interview for this book Berg denied that Nixon got a special deal. (Newsday, Oct. 13, 1971; int. Donald Berg.)
12. Berg acknowledged negotiating with a Lansky associate, Lou Chesler, about a planned deal in the Bahamas. See reference chapter 20 and chapter 20, Note 4. (Berg acknowledged: Newsday, Oct. 13, 1971.)
13. Rebozo sued the Washington Post for a story on the stock theft case that asserted, quoting insurance investigator George Riley, that Rebozo had cashed $91,500 of the stock even after the investigator had notified him that it was stolen. Rebozo denied the investigator had told him that, and alleged libel. He demanded ten million dollars in damages. The case ended, after ten years of litigation, with a settlement under which both Rebozo and the Post donated undisclosed sums to the Boys’ Clubs of America. The Post published a statement clarifying its “intentions” in publication of the article. Rebozo won no damages. (WP, Oct. 25, 1973; Miami Herald, Nov. 6, 1983; int. Ron Kessler.)
14. A 1973 FBI report asserted that the bureau had “no derogatory information” about Rebozo. One should take into account, however, that Rebozo had long since engaged in unctuous correspondence with Director Hoover—Rebozo signed himself “Bebe”—and was a “close personal friend” of Miami special agent in charge Kenneth Whittaker. For reporting on the attitude of Hoover’s FBI to organized crime, see Official & Confidential, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, by this author. (“no derogatory”: SAC Miami to acting director, May 30, 1973, FBI 62-112974-4; Rebozo, Hoover: corr. Jan. 14, 20, 1959, Dec. 2, 11, 1964, July 14, 1969, FBI 9436880-1, 62-109811-4185, 62-112974-3; SAC “friend”: SAC Miami to acting director, supra.)