The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  —President Nixon, as Watergate broke on him with full force, April 1973

  It did not rain on the inaugural parade, but the day was cold and damp. “We shall answer to God, to history, and to our conscience for the way in which we use these years,” Nixon proclaimed in his address. He seemed upbeat, and the theme was triumphal.

  The Philadelphia Orchestra crashed out Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the celebratory concert, its opening four notes the Morse code for V, as in “victory.” It closed, at the president’s personal request, with the bells and kettledrum cannons of the 1812 Overture.

  On the evening of the inauguration Nixon took to the floor at all five balls, astonishing everyone. A song written for the occasion promised “A Wonderful Day Coming for a Wonderful U.S.A.” He danced with Pat to the tune of “People Will Say We’re in Love.”

  The undertones of the occasion were less festive. “Pat did not kiss me,” Nixon recalled of the swearing-in ceremony. “I am rather glad she didn’t. I sometimes think these displays of affection are very much in place. . . . Other times, I don’t think they quite fit.” Robert Bork, soon to be solicitor general, thought Pat looked deeply unhappy that day, her face “a death mask.”

  As the presidential limousine rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, Secret Service agents had batted away garbage thrown from the crowd. “Some jerk broke through the police lines of the parade and charged at my car,” Nixon snarled to John Dean afterward. “I want the bastard prosecuted, you understand?” Told the man had been harmless, Dean did nothing.

  One group of spectators had watched the parade from an unusual vantage point. These were the jurors in the Watergate break-in trial, sequestered in the U.S. District Courthouse and peering from a designated window.

  All the burglars, soon to be convicted, had until then kept their mouths shut. One of them, though, CREEP electronics man James McCord, was mulling an explosive decision. Before sentencing, he was to tell the judge that perjury had been committed during the trial, that his comrades had kept quiet because of “political pressure.”1

  A key component of controlling them had been hush money—first paid within weeks of the break-in—funneled by Nixon’s personal lawyer Herbert Kalmbach to one of the White House detectives and from him on to the burglars. The detective, Tony Ulasewicz, made the deliveries in standard pulp fiction style, using code names for communications. Hunt was “the writer”; his fellow burglars were “the players”; the money was “the script.” Ulasewicz stashed an envelope containing twenty-five thousand dollars and hid in a phone booth nearby until it was safely collected. He left forty thousand dollars in a locker at an airport, with its key taped under a ledge. More than four hundred thousand dollars—over one and a half million dollars at today’s rates—were paid out in the first eight months after the arrests.

  Nixon would claim as late as 1990 that the notion that he “personally ordered” the hush money payments was a “myth.” As president he stated flatly that he knew nothing of such payments until mid-March 1973.2 His representations were untrue, as documented by the dialogue on a recently released tape, dated six weeks after the Watergate arrests:

  HALDEMAN: It’s worth a lot of work to try to keep it from blowing.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Oh, my, yes . . .

  HALDEMAN: . . . everybody’s satisfied. They’re all out of jail, they’ve all been taken care of. We’ve done a lot of discreet checking to be sure there’s no discontent in the ranks, and there isn’t any . . . Hunt’s happy.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: At a considerable cost, I guess?

  HALDEMAN: Yes.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: It’s worth it.

  HALDEMAN: It’s very expensive. It’s a costly . . .

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Well . . . they have to be paid. That’s all there is to it.

  Another tape, also unknown during the Watergate investigation, is equally incriminating. “Goddamn hush money,” Nixon exclaimed in a January 1973 exchange with Colson. “How are we going to . . . how do we get this stuff?”

  In fact, obtaining it was no problem. Later, when John Dean told him further hush money payments might amount to a million dollars, the president replied: “We could get that . . . you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten . . . no problem. . . . The money can be provided.”

  A good deal of the money, the tapes indicate, came from the Greek-American millionaire Thomas Pappas, and Nixon and Haldeman discussed how convenient it was that Pappas was “able to deal in cash.” To keep the tycoon sweet, the president cheerfully acquiesced to his request that a U.S. ambassador sympathetic to the Greek dictatorship stay on in Athens. He worried nonetheless that Pappas’s role might be discovered, for exposure of Pappas might in turn bring exposure of the illegal funding Nixon had received from the Greek colonels in 1968.3

  As the president sought to wriggle off the Watergate hook, he alluded repeatedly to another murky episode: the Republican subversion of the Vietnam peace talks in 1968. Time after time, the tapes reveal, he brought up the fact—or what he initially believed to be a fact—that President Johnson had had his campaign plane bugged on the eve of the election.

  Citing what FBI Director Hoover had told him, Nixon claimed “Johnson knew every conversation I had . . . you know where [my plane] was bugged? In my compartment . . . every conversation I had for two weeks Johnson had it.”4 Twice, before the 1972 election and again in early 1973, Nixon tried to get proof of the alleged eavesdropping. He seemed to hope that, armed with such proof, he could either get it exposed in the press or, covertly, bring pressure on the Democrats to cut off investigation of Watergate.

  He first tried to get information out of Johnson through George Christian, a former aide who had since come to favor the Republicans. Johnson responded in conciliatory fashion, denying the alleged bugging and indicating that it was best to let lie the matter of whatever either side had done in 1968.

  In early 1973, with Watergate an ever-increasing threat, Nixon tried again to approach Johnson on the subject through Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, the former Hoover aide who had personally handled Johnson’s order to probe the sabotage of the 1968 peace initiative. This time the former president’s reply was curt and contained a warning, as a handwritten Haldeman note makes vividly clear: “LBJ got very hot & called Deke deL . . . J said to DeL if people play w/ this—direct threat he’d release intercepted cable from Emb. To Saig saying our side asking things be done. . . .”

  Haldeman’s diary entry, expanding on the notes, repeats that this was “a direct threat from Johnson.” If Nixon persisted in his inquiries, Johnson intended to make public a cable sent in October 1968 from the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington to President Thieu in Saigon and intercepted by U.S. intelligence. It would be a message showing that the Nixon side had encouraged Thieu to boycott the peace talks.5

  The threat of exposure was serious but became moot when Johnson died two weeks later. A month after that, when Ehrlichman was looking for ways to frustrate congressional investigation, Nixon returned to the idea of using the alleged Democratic bugging to counterattack. Too late.

  The staff of the House Banking Committee had been on the trail of the money found on the burglars within days of the arrests. Under the committee chairman, seventy-nine-year-old Wright Patman, they had made quick progress. Nixon, fearing their discoveries might damage him before the election, had demanded that Republican congressmen, including a “very smart fellow” named Gerald Ford, “get off their asses” and stop the Banking Committee. Its investigation had indeed been blocked, not only by predictable Republican votes but also—mysteriously—by six Democrats from whom Patman expected support. White House work behind the scenes, including bribery, was suspected but never proved.

  For a while it seemed that the Washington Post, still plugging away on the Watergate story, might be all the president had to fear. The Post was “going to have damnable, damnable problems,” Nixon fulminated, and Bebe Rebozo and other Nixon supporters would scheme—not for the f
irst time—to ensure that the newspaper lost its valuable Florida television franchises. Post publisher Katharine Graham, as John Mitchell put it in a late-night conversation with Carl Bernstein, was “going to get her tit caught in a big fat wringer. . . .” Soon Mrs. Graham’s neck was adorned with a tiny model of a clothes wringer and a small silver breast, and the Post, pressed on undaunted.

  In the Senate, meanwhile, Edward Kennedy and his Judiciary subcommittee had begun a preliminary probe of Watergate, what he called “a holding action.” “I know the people around Nixon,” he told Bernstein. “They’re thugs.”

  Two Senate veterans, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, aged seventy, and Senator Sam Ervin, seventy-seven, met after the election to discuss what could or should be done. Then Mansfield announced that he was asking Ervin to form a special committee of investigation.

  “I don’t see how the Senate can destroy us,” Nixon told Ehrlichman as the probe got under way. Recently released tapes show that he deprecated Ervin as an “old fart,” a “senile old shit,” “unpatriotic,” a “slick southern asshole,” an “old ass.” For all his quivering jowls and flyaway eyebrows, the senator in fact proved highly effective. In a time of confusion he seemed a rock of fairness and old-fashioned morality.

  Nixon quickly concluded that the senior Republican senator on the committee, Howard Baker, was “off the reservation,” not ready enough to fight in the president’s corner. “Baker may not realize it,” he said vengefully, “but by getting on the wrong side of this we will destroy . . . his chances ever to move into a leadership position.”

  Baker was a loyal Republican, but he was also inconveniently interested in discovering the truth. Nixon denounced him in private as “a simpering asshole” with a “character flaw,” who would “never be in the White House again, as long as I am in this office. Never, never, never . . .”

  Nixon dismissed Baker and another Republican member of the committee, Lowell Weicker, as men who “run around in the social set, and want to be hotshots.” When Weicker began charging that higher-ups were involved in Watergate, the tapes show, Nixon urged the same sort of action against the senator as he had against Democratic foes. “We’ve got to play a tough damn hard game on him,” he told Haldeman. “. . . Is his income tax being checked yet?”

  During a week in which the president raged in this vein day after day, there was a break-in at Weicker’s office. In the now-familiar pattern, documents were tampered with but valuables left untouched.

  The “only good friend” on the Senate committee in Nixon’s estimation, was Edward Gurney, a Florida senator whose financial supporters that summer included Bebe Rebozo, Murray Chotiner, and Charles Colson’s best friend and law partner. Gurney would try to discredit key witnesses and insist that the hearings were damaging the presidency and the nation.

  Committee chairman Ervin meanwhile set a high moral tone. “If the many allegations made to this date are true,” he declared, “then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were in effect breaking into the home of every citizen of the United States. And if these allegations prove to be true, what they were seeking to steal was not the jewels, money or other precious property of American citizens, but something much more valuable—their most precious heritage: their right to vote in a free election.”

  As the senators worked on, Nixon’s world began to implode. The spring of 1973 saw his once-buoyant coterie of aides fall one after the other. John Dean, fatally for Nixon, defected.

  It was Dean, as White House counsel, who had implemented the cover-up, devising legal strategies, liaising with the Justice Department, coordinating cover stories, supervising hush money payments. The president had praised him to his face as “very skillful” for “putting your fingers in the dikes every time that leaks have sprung . . .” “Dean,” he told Haldeman in a fine oxymoron, “is an absolutely innocent accomplice . . . he gave good advice. . . . He was holding the pieces together. . . .”

  In April 1973, realizing the danger in which his complicity had placed him, Dean went to the prosecutors seeking immunity. He was to testify before the Senate committee at vast length and with myriad details, damaging Nixon more than any other witness. “Goddamn him,” the president now raged, “. . . one disloyal President’s counsel . . . we must destroy him.” Dean was now “a Judas and a turncoat” who had “deceived us all.”6

  As his own position was increasingly threatened, however, Nixon himself proved to be no pillar of loyalty. “We can’t let Mitchell get involved,” he had said of his steadfast colleague early in the year. “It just can’t be done. We have to protect him.” Yet two months later, when Ehrlichman suggested Mitchell be told “the jig is up,” that he step forward and admit he is “both morally and legally responsible,” the president just said, “Yeah.” John Mitchell should assume responsibility, he told Haldeman.

  By the spring of 1973 Mitchell’s patience had been strained to the limit. His inebriate wife, Martha, had been prone to sensational outbursts since the Watergate arrests, hinting to reporters that she was privy to dark secrets, claiming her husband was being made a scapegoat. So bizarre a figure did she cut, though, and so well known was her weakness for the bottle, that she caused only limited damage.

  In April, John Mitchell had a scotch-laced conversation with White House correspondent Winzola McClendon, one she did not publish at the time. “Richard Nixon,” Mitchell said, “is lucky she [Martha] hasn’t blown it all the way.” Ehrlichman, he went on, had run “a whole espionage operation.” Dean was an honest man whose function had been merely “to protect people in the White House.” It was a rare lapse, never repeated. Mitchell would die in 1988 without having betrayed Nixon.

  On April 17 the president offered the Senate committee some partial concessions. There had been major developments in the case, he said, and no one should be granted immunity from prosecution. He would allow White House staff to testify. As Nixon spoke, a reporter noted, his hands were shaking.

  The gravest blow to the administration, and to Nixon’s confidence, was now imminent. The advice from the Justice Department was that the available evidence compromised both Haldeman and Ehrlichman and that they should resign. The president “knew by now that he had no running room left,” Len Garment recalled in 1997. “He described his feelings to me, rehearsing what he was going to say to Bob and John, that losing them was like losing his right and left arms. . . .”

  Nixon’s two closest aides were brought up to Camp David by helicopter and given the news separately. Nixon looked in “terrible shape,” Haldeman thought. He “began crying uncontrollably” in front of Ehrlichman.

  The president came closer to accepting his culpability that day than he ever would again. He said he was “really the guilty one,” Haldeman’s diary entry shows. “He said he’s thought it all through, and that he’s the one that started Colson on his projects. He was the one who told Dean to cover up, he was the one who made Mitchell Attorney General and later his campaign manager and so on. And that he now has to face that and live with it. . . .”

  As he and Haldeman stood on the terrace of Aspen Lodge, Nixon seemed to share a deeply personal confidence. “You know, Bob,” he said, “there is something I’ve never told anybody before, not even you. Every night since I’ve been President, every single night before I’ve gone to bed, I’ve knelt down on my knees beside my bed and prayed to God for guidance and help in this job. Last night before I went to bed I knelt down, and this time I prayed I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. I just couldn’t face going on.”

  At the time Haldeman was touched. Later, when he compared notes with Ehrlichman, he learned that Nixon had delivered precisely the same speech to him. He was hurt, for he had believed he had a unique emotional bond with the president. “Now,” Haldeman observed later, “I see that this was just a conversational ploy—a debater’s way of slipping into a different subject—used on both of us.”

  It is a measure
of Nixon’s discomfort in human relationships that, when he shook Haldeman’s hand that day, his closest aide realized that in seventeen years he had never done so before. Nixon and Haldeman would have occasional contact with each other in the future. Ehrlichman received one phone call from Nixon the following Christmas but never heard from him again. He was sent a signed copy of his former boss’s memoirs in 1978, but was less than delighted. “My name was misspelled,” Ehrlichman told the author, “the ultimate insult.”

  _____

  Nixon appeared on television on April 30 to announce to the nation that his top aides, as well as Attorney General Kleindienst and John Dean, were resigning. He accepted responsibility, but no blame, for the Watergate abuses. They had been concealed as much from him, he claimed, as from the public. Then he rambled on about how most people in politics were good people, how he loved America and wanted his remaining days in office to be the best in American history, and how he hoped everyone would pray for him.

  The president appeared wan and shaken, tearful as he stepped off camera. When he retreated to the Lincoln Sitting Room, some heard him say, as he had to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, that he hoped he would not wake up in the morning.

  Less than an hour later, however, he was on the phone complaining to Haldeman that only one cabinet member, Caspar Weinberger, had called to praise his speech. Nixon slurred his words as he said: “Goddamn it, I’m never going to discuss this sonofabitching Watergate thing again. Never, never, never, never.” Then, as the slurring grew more pronounced, he told Haldeman he loved him. He loved Ehrlichman too. He hoped his having ended the speech with “God bless America” had gone over all right.