The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  What is more interesting, though, is the fact that Nixon seems to have used different personas with different people. Rebozo, predictably, claimed the president “never” used a “bad word.” Others—Finch, Kissinger, General Cushman, speechwriter Ray Price, and Stephen Hess—did not remember him as having been foulmouthed. Yet even Nixon’s mother said her son swore “like a sailor” when tense. Nixon’s friend Earl Mazo claimed he did so only among friends.

  In fact, a witness who heard Nixon at a diplomatic dinner party as early as 1956 had been taken aback by his foul language. Butterfield remembered him, in the White House, aiming the word “fuck” at Transportation Secretary John Volpe behind his back. Nixon called Canada’s prime minister “fucking Trudeau” and Richard Kleindienst, his second attorney general, a “motherfucking cocksucker” during an angry phone call. Ed Rollins, a Republican political consultant, recalled that when they first met—as late as 1979—Nixon used three obscenities in his first sentence.

  “All Presidents swear,” Nixon protested in old age. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln had a reputation for using expletives, and Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson all used swear words. The difference between Nixon and them is in the hypocrisy. Nixon, although himself a habitual swearer, deprecated the cursing of other politicians. He publicly condemned Truman for having used “gutter language”—he had come out with a “go to hell”—and said piously that as president he intended to avoid such talk—“as a responsibility to the children of this country.”

  Alcohol may have been partly responsible for Nixon’s use of expletives. In 1962, on Paradise Island, Jack Paar had noted Nixon’s profanity while “drinking heavily.” A Washington Post report observed that it was “plain from his slurred syllables that he had been drinking” when on a 1973 tape he came out with “Goddamn it, I’m never going to discuss this son-of-a-bitching Watergate thing again. Never, never, never. . . .”

  Spiro Agnew recalled Nixon worrying aloud, that same year, about “how the tapes would be used to embarrass him and affect his future place in history . . . he had the look of a frightened man.” Public response to the tapes’ content would matter much more than disapproval of the swearing, and Nixon knew it.

  His natural allies appreciated how devastating the tapes were as soon as they were released. William Randolph Hearst, Jr., wrote a column blasting Nixon as a man “with a moral blind spot.” The president and his aides, he said, sounded like “a gang of racketeers talking over strategy in a jam-up situation.”

  Billy Graham wept as he perused the published transcripts and reportedly vomited afterward. The evangelist said he had a “real love” for Nixon, had looked upon him as the nation’s best hope. “But then the way it sounded in those tapes—it was all something totally foreign to me. He was just suddenly somebody else.”

  “The spider got entangled in its own web,” Kissinger concluded. “Even had Watergate not occurred, the tapes would have damaged Nixon’s reputation severely. . . . Had the tapes trickled out posthumously, Nixon would have managed the extraordinary feat of committing suicide after his own death.”

  Just weeks before the taping system was installed, Nixon had sat alone in the Lincoln Room, writing of his need to create a “definite image.” He listed the character traits he hoped would be the foundation for such an image, a list so long that only a few of the items can be included: “compassionate, humane, fatherly, warmth, confidence in future, optimistic, upbeat, candor, honesty, openness, trustworthy, boldness, fights for what he believes, vitality, youth, enjoyment, zest, vision, dignity, respect, a man people can be proud of. . . .” And so on for as many words again, all contributing to the “visible presidential leadership” Nixon wanted his public relations to convey. If such a Richard Nixon existed, he does not appear on the White House tapes thus far released.

  The tapes that we have are, rather, a unique opportunity to glimpse the public man in private, rarely obviously cheerful, often moody, ever resentful of apparent slights, ever scheming and fighting, and habitually subject to self-pity.

  _____

  Recent tape releases also reveal a man with a penchant for ethnic and sexist slurs. In 1999, as the legal contest between government attorneys and the Nixon estate dragged on, the dead man’s voice boomed out again in a Washington courtroom.

  Women in government, he said, were “a pain in the neck, very difficult to handle,” and he doubted they were “worth the effort.” The problem with Mexicans, Nixon told colleagues, was finding one who was honest. “Italians,” he added, “have somewhat the same problem.”

  House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, angered by a Nixon tape he heard in 1974, called in Tip O’Neill to listen along with him. “They’re not, we, ah, they’re not like us,” Nixon said of Italians. “Difference is they smell different, they look different, they act different . . . trouble is, you can’t find one that’s honest. . . . I’ve got to deal with the Germans and the Italians and all those shit-asses . . .” he said on another tape. (Before becoming president, Nixon had voted for the Immigration and Nationality Act, a measure some criticized as being designed to prevent Italian immigration.)

  “The President,” the chief of naval operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, was informed, “castigates every ethnic group in the U.S. as being against him—the Jews, the blacks, the Catholics, the Wasps etc. . . .”

  Was Nixon anti-Semitic? He did after all appoint Kissinger, a Jewish immigrant, to the second most powerful post in his administration. Another Jew, Arthur Burns, was named chairman of the Federal Reserve, and yet another, Herb Stein, headed the Council of Economic Advisers. Murray Chotiner was a Jew, as was Nixon’s counsel Leonard Garment.

  “Show me a Christian, or for that matter a Jew who does not have some traces of anti-Semitism in his or her soul,” Garment has said, “I will show you a human being whose body contains no germs.” On an anti-Semitism scale of one to one hundred, Garment placed Nixon “somewhere between fifteen and twenty—better than most, worse than some, much like the rest of the world.” Rabbi Baruch Korff, a Nixon champion in the final days, said he thought there was “not an ounce of prejudice” in the man.

  Kissinger disagreed. “You can’t believe how much anti-Semitism there is at the top of this government,” he said, “and I mean at the top.” “Nixon would talk about Jewish traitors,” Ehrlichman recalled, “and he’d play off Kissinger. ‘Isn’t that right, Henry? Don’t you agree?’ And Henry would respond, ‘Well, Mr. President, there are Jews and there are Jews.’ ”

  The tapes and the contemporary record tend to support Kissinger’s view. Nixon once wanted to know, Haldeman noted in his diary, why “all the Jews seem to be the ones that are for liberalizing the regulations and marijuana.” Urging a revival of the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate spies, Nixon told Haldeman: “You know what’s going to charge up an audience, Jesus Christ, they’ll be hanging off the rafters. . . . going after all these Jews. Just find one that is a Jew, will you?”

  Nixon once ordered an aide to investigate a “Jewish cabal” at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to contemporary notes, and two Jewish bureau officials were transferred within weeks. An entry in the Haldeman diary cites him as identifying “our enemies” as “youth, black, Jew.” Nixon objected to “having a Rabbi again” to conduct the White House church service. In 1970, as he nagged Ehrlichman to ensure the tax affairs of Democratic contributors be investigated, he zeroed in on “. . . the Jews, you know, that are stealing . . . [next phrase hard to hear on tape].”10

  Days later Nixon was begging Haldeman: “[P]lease get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors. . . . Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?” The IRS, he insisted, was “full of Jews,” and he demanded the firing of a California Immigration Service official, “a kike by the name of Rosenberg. He is to be out. . . . Transfer him. . . .”

  “This is national security,” Nixon said in 1973, while trying to justify illegal White House activity
. “We’ve got all sorts of activities because we’ve been trying to run this town by avoiding the Jews in the government, because there were very serious questions.”

  “Jews are all over the government,” the president complained at an Oval Office meeting, adding they should be brought under control by putting someone “in charge who is not Jewish.” “Most Jews are disloyal,” he told Haldeman, “. . . generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you. . . .”

  No one, surely, could maintain that such remarks are permissible from a president, even in private. Yet some of his defenders have continued to argue that Nixon was not an anti-Semite, citing the fact that, long before he became president, a leading Jewish group defended him against charges of anti-Semitism. They point, also, to his role in helping Jews emigrate from the Soviet Union and the perception of him as a friend of Israel.

  There seem to have been two Nixons where minorities were concerned: the private man, spewing the abuse evident on the tapes, and the candidate, concerned above all about garnering votes. In a somewhat more complex way, the same went for Nixon and blacks.

  _____

  “With blacks you can usually settle for an incompetent,” the president said, discussing hiring policy on an early tape, “because there are just not enough competent ones. And so you put incompetents in and get along with them, because the symbolism is vitally important. You have to show you care.” Such private scorn on racial matters, leavened by necessary public gestures, was an ambiguity that had a long history with Nixon.

  A Quaker great-grandfather in Indiana is said to have helped smuggle escaped slaves to freedom, and Nixon’s own mother welcomed black employees to her dinner table. At college Nixon was instrumental in getting the only black youth on campus into the social club. At Duke Law School in North Carolina, where racial prejudice was deeply ingrained, he raised his voice against it.

  As vice president Nixon took a black Senate attendant to baseball games in his limousine. As president he made a point of chatting with the lone black technician on a television crew. He even made the occasional trip to the White House basement to drink with a black employee. “My feelings on race,” Nixon told Ehrlichman, “are ultra-liberal.”

  Martin Luther King, who met him during the vice presidency, thought he had “a genius for convincing one that he is sincere . . . he almost disarms you with his sincerity. . . . I would conclude that if Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.” Years later, though, with her husband dead and Nixon in the White House, King’s widow, Coretta, decided he had “not evolved from racist reflexes.”

  Solicitor General Robert Bork, no liberal, thought Nixon “had the usual country club prejudices against blacks.” Former aides have said he referred to blacks as “niggers,” “jigs,” “jigaboos,” and “jungle bunnies.” This last epithet, John Ehrlichman said, was picked up from Bebe Rebozo.

  Nixon told Haldeman there had “never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true. . . . Africa is hopeless. . . .” He had spoken out during the 1968 campaign in support of the Ibos in Nigeria, then fighting for independence. Once he was in office, however, his administration virtually ignored the problem while hundreds of thousands starved. His policy toward white supremacist South Africa was to be vocal in opposition to apartheid while relaxing economic restrictions against the country. “Let’s leave the niggers” to the State Department, Nixon reportedly told Kissinger; “we’ll take care of the rest of the world.”

  “He presented different sides to different people,” Ehrlichman said. “He was the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. . . . There were things he said to me that he never would have said on the record, for example, that blacks are ethnically inferior. . . .” According to researchers at the National Archives, describing as yet unreleased tapes, Nixon spoke of blacks as being “just down from the trees.”

  Again according to Ehrlichman, Nixon thought “blacks could never achieve parity—in intelligence, economic success or social qualities. . . . He would do his best for them by getting them a place at the starting line.” Nixon’s “best” included urging desegregation and greatly increasing the federal budget for civil rights enforcement. His administration also appointed the first black assistant secretary of the navy, a black admiral, and a black head of the Federal Communications Commission.

  Yet many critics excoriated Nixon for not doing enough in this area, especially regarding his adamant opposition to the busing of schoolchildren. Repeatedly, Haldeman noted in his diary, Nixon said he wanted “nothing more done in South beyond what law requires,” for as he viewed it there was “No political gain for us.”

  When Kissinger was preparing a foreign policy speech, Nixon exhorted him to “make sure there’s something in it for the jigs.” He reminded Haldeman, on the other hand: “We do not make votes playing to Negroes.”

  Nixon resorted to deceit to avoid alienating white voters with his racial policies. Ehrlichman, deep in negotiations over busing in Michigan, was startled to discover that another White House aide was in the state making inflammatory antibusing speeches. The president denied having ordered the second aide into action, but Ehrlichman was sure he was lying.

  When it came to winning votes, the tapes show, the president was utterly cynical on the race issue. With the 1972 election on the horizon, he discussed a plan to funnel five million dollars secretly to a black candidate, but only as a device to siphon votes away from the Democrats. Aides initially put forward the names of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and civil rights activist Julian Bond as potential puppets.

  A few weeks later Jesse Jackson’s name was suggested as a possible stooge. Haldeman proposed mailing the preacher thousands of one-dollar bills, to fool him into thinking large numbers of blacks supported his candidacy. Then, Haldeman hoped, the White House could strike a deal with Jackson. “The payoff is afterwards. Give him about $10,000 per percentage point. He gets 20 per cent of the vote, he gets $200,000. That’s a personal payment, after the election.”11

  Nixon welcomed the underhanded scheme. “Put that down for discussion,” he responded when it came up, “not for discussion but action.” Politics, as ever, had taken precedence over principle.

  _____

  The tapes were rolling on the morning of May 5, 1971, as Nixon and Haldeman discussed the latest wave of Vietnam War protest. Demonstrations had continued unabated for weeks, and not all of those on the streets were students. Seven hundred veterans had gathered in front of the Capitol to throw away their decorations in disgust. Police and troops had arrested eight thousand people in Washington alone.

  Today, Haldeman told the president, there would “very likely” be more trouble. “Good,” came Nixon’s response. “. . . These people try something, bust ’em.” As the tapes silently rolled, the two men discussed ongoing dirty tricks: sending food to the demonstrators, purportedly from one of Nixon’s Democratic opponents but in fact from the White House, as a ploy to smear the Democrat as an extremist sympathizer; and using “hard hats and [American] Legionnaires to provoke fights with the demonstrators.”

  Then came the following conspiratorial dialogue:

  HALDEMAN: What I suggested . . . and I think that they can get away with this. Do it with Teamsters. Just ask them to dig up those, their eight thugs.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Yeah. . . . They’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off.

  HALDEMAN: Sure. Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do. Like the Steelworkers have and—except we can’t deal with the Steelworkers at the moment.12

  PRESIDENT NIXON: No.

  HALDEMAN: We can deal with the Teamsters . . .

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Yeah.

  Both men had reason for confidence that they could “deal” with the Teamsters, for they were already doing so. The union’s acting president, Frank Fitzsimmons, had been at the White House just a week earlier meeting with Charles Colson. Alrea
dy, the White House had been pressuring the Justice Department to ease up on prosecutions of crooked Teamsters, as a way to ensure the union’s backing in the coming presidential election. Now the president and Haldeman discussed with confidence how the Teamsters could deal with the war protesters:

  HALDEMAN: . . . It’s the regular strikebuster types . . . they’re gonna beat the shit out of some of these people. And, uh, hope they really hurt ’em. You know, I mean go in with some real . . . and smash some noses . . . some pretty good fights.

  The president, brought up to espouse nonviolence, had not demurred but enthused.

  The conversation then turned to the TV coverage of the protest, and the ringleaders:

  HALDEMAN: I think getting Abbie Hoffman and . . . the other . . . they got . . . Uh [tape noise] . . . but they got him. . . .

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Aren’t the Chicago Seven* all Jews? . . . Hoffman, Hoffman’s a Jew. . . . About half of these are Jews.

  HALDEMAN: They got one shot of a policeman clubbing a guy. . . . It doesn’t do us any good. But, you know, you can’t avoid that. . . .

  PRESIDENT NIXON: . . . inevitable, Bob. How the hell do you expect the poor goddamned policemen? . . .

  The tape of this conversation lay undiscovered for ten years. When it finally surfaced, with its talk of smashing noses and knocking heads off, so did other information: Two days before the Oval Office conversation Abbie Hoffman’s nose had been broken. He had suffered multiple fractures of the nose and a split lip, during a confrontation with the police near Washington’s Dupont Circle.