The Arrogance of Power
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9. During the Watergate investigation, Rebozo would produce a hundred thousand dollars in cash from a safe deposit box and say it was the Hughes money, and that it had been undisturbed and unused in the box since he had received it. A complex study of the banknotes involved led the Senate Watergate Committee to doubt this claim. (E, Report, p. 944–; FBI 62-112974.)
10. The Hughes man alleged by Meier to have delivered the million dollars was Ken Wright, head of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. (Meier, op. cit., p. 46.)
11. Two men appear to have been involved in the first introduction: Getty associate John Pochna and Nixon friend John Shaheen, also in the oil business. (Int. Adnan Khashoggi, and see Paul Michel to Files, Aug. 13, 1975, re: int. Khashoggi, Box 95, WSPF.)
12. Jonathan Aitken, favored Nixon biographer and former British Conservative MP (jailed for perjury in 1999), reported that Khashoggi was one of several entrepreneurs who explored “private business deals overseas” with Nixon after his resignation. (Aitken, it should be noted, has a connection with Khashoggi’s family: He fathered a child by Soraya Khashoggi.)(One of entrepreneurs: JA, p. 540; perjury: NYT, Times [London], June 9, 1999; fathered child: London Sunday Times, Jan. 10, 1999.)
13. In the United States Demetracopoulos sustained himself principally not as a journalist but as a consultant for a Wall Street stockbrokerage. He has told the author of his run-ins with both Greek and U.S. officialdom over the years, backing up his claims with copious documentation. Concern about him in the Nixon administration and attempts to silence him are covered in Chapter 30, Note 20. At least two overt smears of Demetracopoulos were demonstrated to be false, first when columnist James Kilpatrick published a humiliating retraction in 1972 and later when a 1977 story by David Binder of the New York Times proved baseless. Binder cited a CIA source and CIA records, but after a battle by Demetracopoulos to clear his name the agency admitted that the information was inaccurate. (Kilpatrick: Washington Star, July 30, Aug. 10, 1972; Binder: NYT, Dec. 6, 1977; London Guardian, Jan. 5, 1978; WP, Jan. 5, 1978; Sept. 3, 1979; Newsday, May 7, 1984, and see Hearings and Appendices, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Subcommittee on Oversight, 95th Congress, 1st and 2d Session, Dec./Jan./Apr. 1978, and see Joseph Goulden, Fit to Print, New Jersey: Lyle Stuart, 1988, p. 292–.)
14. His Greek contacts aside, Pappas made no secret of the fact that he collaborated with the CIA. His Pappas Charitable Trust of Boston was identified in early 1967 as a conduit for CIA money into Latin America. “I have worked for the CIA anytime my help was requested,” he told a pro-junta Greek newspaper in the summer of 1968. (Trust: Boston Globe, Oct. 31, 1968; “I have worked”: WP, July 16, 1975, referring to a Pappas int. in Apogevmatini, July 18, 1968.)
15. Tasca, whom Nixon had known for years, regularly entertained Pappas and was close to the junta. In 1975, when Nixon had fallen and Tasca was no longer ambassador, he was interviewed by an attorney for the House Select Committee on Intelligence, primarily on other matters. In the course of the interview, the attorney told the author, Tasca said that “the Colonels were nervous by 1968 that the Democrats would win and that American policy would be set against them. They wanted to contribute to the Nixon campaign. How to do it? It had to be filtered, and that’s what Pappas did—and in doing so cemented his own relationship with the Nixon administration. “Nixon’s people,” Tasca told the House attorney, “were happy to have the money.” Further corroboration of the allegation that junta money went to Nixon was obtained by the author Seymour Hersh in an interview with a senior State Department official. (Tasca background: Kutler, Watergate, op. cit., p. 206; Boston Sunday Globe, Nov. 14, 1971; State Dept. Source: Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power, New York: Summit, 1983, p. 138–; author’s conv. Seymour Hersh.)
16. The O’Brien aide most involved in the exchanges, according to Demetracopoulos, was Ira Kapenstein. He was present at the two meetings with O’Brien and, in part as a precaution against telephone taps, repeatedly visited Demetracopoulos at the Fairfax Hotel.
17. In 1975, in the wake of renewed press allegations, Agnew denied knowing of any contributions to the 1968 campaign by the Greek junta. He offered to testify to the Senate Committee on Intelligence but, reportedly because of pressure over the entire matter by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, never did. In interviews in 1988 and 1989 Agnew claimed he did not know Demetracopoulos or anything about Greek money for the 1968 campaign. In the 1989 interview he did admit having met Demetracopoulos. (NYT, Aug. 1, 2, 1975; Miami News, Aug. 2, 1975; NYT Magazine, Oct. 26, 1975; Stanley Kutler notes and transcripts of ints. Spiro Agnew, Kutler Papers; int. Demetracopoulos.)
Chapter 23
1. Latest available figures indicate there were 47,357 U.S. battle deaths and 10,796 nonbattle fa-talities: 58,153 U.S. dead in total. The wounded in action numbered 153,303. A spokesman for Vietnam’s Washington embassy cited his government’s report of 1996 as giving “more than 3,000,000” as the figure for Vietnamese war dead. Reuters suggested “about 3,000,000.” (Spencer Tucker, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, vol. III, Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1998, p. 1093, and figures supplied by National Archives, Defense Dept., and Vietnamese embassy, Washington, D.C.)
2. The Cambodia location was rendered in the autograph dealer’s catalog as “Phumi Kriek.” The spelling on maps seen by the author is “Phumi Krek.”
3. This citation is from the fullest version of the Kimmons story, compiled by autograph dealer Mark Vardakis from his conversations with Kimmons. Along with the original of the Nixon inscription, it is available at the Forbes Gallery in New York. Vardakis paid Kimmons one hundred dollars for the inscription, sold it for five hundred dollars to another dealer, Paul Richards, who sold it to the Forbes Gallery for twenty-five thousand dollars. (Ints. Mark Vardakis, Gabrielle Kimmons [second wife], and Gerard Stodolski, colleague of the late Paul Richards.)
4. In response to a written inquiry enclosing the New York Times report on the matter, the Nixon Library told the author in 1998 there was “no confirmation of [the] report in files available here.” (Archivist Susan Naulty to author, Feb. 2, 1998.)
5. Nixon visited two villages in the Mekong Delta near Saigon, Tan Anh and Phu My (Not to be confused with the Phu My many miles north of the capital). (LAT, Apr. 3, 1964; Pacific Stars & Stripes, Apr. 5, 1964.)
6. It is not clear just what did happen when Dunn sought to board the helicopter with Nixon on April 2. Dunn, a lieutenant colonel with an otherwise unblemished career record, was later charged with telling Lodge “with intent to deceive” that Westmoreland had refused to let him join the Nixon party. The army inspector general cleared him of this and another unrelated allegation. Westmoreland’s memoirs and Dunn’s correspondence indicate that Lodge forbade the army command to take reporters by helicopter to cover the overt Nixon visits to villages. It is clear there were serious differences between U.S. officials and senior army officers at the time. (Dunn charges: Lodge to Dunn and Advice to Dunn on Rights under Article 31b; Lodge to General Harold Johnson, July 2, Lodge to Dunn, July 2, Dunn to Lodge, Dec. 16, 1964, Colonel Victor Baughman to Lodge, undated, General Johnson to Lodge, Feb. 26, Lodge to General Johnson, March 10, Lodge to Dunn, Nov. 30, 1965; Zalin Grant, Facing the Phoenix, New York: Norton, 1991, p. 213; ints. Mary Dunn [widow] and Alan Dunn [son], and Oral History int. John Michael Dunn, LBJL; row over press: Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976, p. 67; differences: ibid., p. 67–; Karnow, op. cit., p. 341.)
7. Hughes recalled pinning on his flak jacket an old 1960 Nixon-Lodge campaign button he happened to have with him in Vietnam. He and Nixon joked about it, as pilot Paul Schreck also recalled in his notes about the episode. (Int. John Hughes; Paul Schreck’s draft account, supplied by his son Terry.)
8. Out of OPLAN-34A, issued by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in December 1963, grew the largest clandestine military unit since World War II’s OSS. It operated as
the Special Operations Group, or SOG, an acronym it kept for security reasons when its name was changed to the euphemistic Studies and Observations Group. (Plaster, op. cit., p. 23.)
9. According to Defense Department records, sixty-two Americans went missing in Southeast Asia between 1961 and April 1964. While some returned alive over the years and some bodies were recovered, the published records list no prisoner handover between January and May 1964. One man who did get out alive is listed as an “escapee.” (Dept. of Defense Prisoner of War, Missing in Action Office Reference Document, U.S. Personnel Missing, Southeast Asia, March 1998.)
10. While he may privately have approved Kennedy’s decision to send advisers to Vietnam, Nixon did his best as president to blame Kennedy for the U.S. involvement. In September 1971 he said at a press conference that “the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing Diem and the complicity in the murder of Diem.” He told Billy Graham, a recently released White House tape shows, that Kennedy “started the whole damn thing. He killed Diem, and sent the first 16,000 combat people there himself. . . . You see, Billy, the key thing here was Kennedy’s, and—I must say—our friend Lodge’s agreement to murder Diem. That’s what opened the whole damn thing.”
Nixon’s comments were typical of his spleen against the Kennedys but distorted the facts. President Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been maneuvered into office by the CIA in 1954, had been supported by the Eisenhower administration, which sent in the first 700 U.S. military advisers. The Kennedy administration also backed Diem initially, but the 16,000 military advisers were not combat troops, and only 195 had died by 1963. No combat troops were deployed until 1965. The burden of the evidence, reflected in most of Kennedy’s public statements on the subject, is that he wished to avoid further U.S. involvement and bring the advisers home. In the fall of 1963, with South Vietnam slipping into chaos and the autocratic Diem losing control, Kennedy aides concluded the United States could no longer work with him. President Kennedy and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge did collude with the Vietnamese generals who toppled him on November 2, 1963. In a tape intended for his memoirs, released in 1999, Kennedy admitted that “we must bear a good deal of responsibility.” He deplored the way he and his colleagues had handled recent contacts with Saigon. There is no evidence that Kennedy approved or encouraged the murder of Diem and his brother, news of which left him shaken and dismayed.
Nixon, whose Whittier College classmate John Richardson was CIA station chief in Saigon at the time, was outraged by news of the coup. In September 1971, just days after the outburst on the subject reported above, Nixon’s confidant Charles Colson began trying to get Life magazine to run a story on Diem’s murder. Life was never sufficiently convinced by the evidence to do so, but its reporter was shown “cables” suggesting Kennedy gave orders refusing Diem asylum, effectively sealing his fate. The cables were in fact fakes concocted by White House consultant, later Watergate burglar, Howard Hunt. Nixon later disclaimed all knowledge of the forgery attempt, but a recently released White House tape shows Ehrlichman disagreed. “My recollection,” he told Nixon, “is that this was discussed with you.” (“the way we got into Vietnam”: Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency. op. cit., p. 262, citing NYT, Sept. 17, 1971; “started whole damn thing”: WP, Dec. 27, 1998, citing WHT, March 8, 1971; maneuvered by CIA: Sheehan, op. cit., p. 134; Eisenhower support: ibid., and Karnow, op. cit., p. 235; and John Newman, JFK & Vietnam, New York: Warner, 1992; advisers: Manchester, op. cit., p. 918, but see Karnow, op. cit., p. 267; 195 dead: Dept. of Defense statistics, NA; combat troops: Karnow, op. cit., p. 431 [they were two Marine battalions, deployed to defend Da Nang airfield]; JFK’s intentions: Newman, op. cit.; Robert McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect, New York: Times Books, 1995, p. 86; Kennedy aides, coup: ibid., p. 41–; Wise, Politics of Lying, op. cit., p. 175–; Ball, op. cit., p. 370; Henry Cabot Lodge, The Storm Has Many Eyes, New York: W. W. Norton, 1973, p. 208–, and see especially fresh account at Grant, op. cit., p. 191; JFK admitted: San Francisco Examiner, Nov. 29, 1998; JFK memoir entry, Nov. 4, 1963, Cassette M, Side 2, Pres. Recordings, JFKL; Kennedy dismayed: ibid.; McNamara and VanDeMark, op. cit., p. 84; Karnow, op. cit., p. 326; Richardson: Prados, op. cit., p. 246; RN outraged: Postscript to RN to Dwight Eisenhower, Nov. 5, 1963; Post-Presidential Special Names Series, Box 14, DDEL; Reader’s Digest, Aug. 1964; AMII, p. 30–; Colson, Life: E, Final Report, p. 125–, and Vol. 9, p. 3672; WP, July 19, 1974; Nixon insisted: May 8, 1973; AOP, p. 416, and see MEM, p. 844; Ehrlichman disagreed: WHT, Apr. 28, 1973, AOP, p. 371.)
11. Nixon did make the “pledge” remark, to a New Hampshire audience. A memorandum in Republican National Committee files indicates that he also told a reporter, “I have a plan to end the war.” The allegation that he said he had a “secret” plan was apparently made in a UPI report out of Boston. (See analysis at Parmet, Nixon, op. cit., p. 506–.)
12. The historian Joan Hoff has questioned whether Nixon really discussed a Madman Theory with Haldeman, surmising that the term originated with Kissinger. Hoff’s doubt seems overdone, given Haldeman’s characteristic precision and the further testimony along these lines cited in the next paragraphs of this book. Note meanwhile that Seymour Hersh misdates the Madman Theory exchange in his book The Price of Power. Haldeman made it clear in his memoirs, and later in an address to a discussion group, that the exchange occurred in the summer of 1968. (Hoff, op. cit., pp. 177–, 398; Hersh, op. cit., p. 52; Haldeman and DiMona, op. cit., p. 121; int. H. R. Haldeman in Miller Center, eds., op. cit., p. 82.)
13. Nixon noted in his memoirs, with apparent approval, that he was told by a returning U.S. prisoner of war that “the North Vietnamese really thought that the President was off his rocker—was totally irrational. He said that it was absolutely essential for them to think that.” (MEM, p. 864.)
14. Laird told the author that at the start of the presidency, Nixon believed he could win the war “without Vietnamization.” Nixon “had no program at all,” Laird said, adding that he convinced Nixon to press ahead with Vietnamization in March or April 1969. (Int. Melvin Laird, and see AMII, p. 277.)
15. Thieu’s reasons for eschewing involvement in the 1968 talks are neatly summarized by Professor Stephen Ambrose in the second volume of his Nixon biography. Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, would strive to make the case that the Thieu regime could have survived—even after the 1973 settlement and the American pullout—if only the U.S. Congress had not vetoed the use of American power and cut back on military aid. (Ambrose: AMII, p. 215; Nixon-Kissinger case: MEM, p. 889; Kissinger, White House Years, op. cit., p. 1470; Kissinger, Upheaval, op. cit., ch. 8.)
16. Gallup gave Nixon a 44 percent to 36 percent lead over Humphrey on October 21. By November 2, two days after the bombing halt, his lead had fallen to only two points, 42 percent to 40 percent. According to the Lou Harris poll, Humphrey actually overtook Nixon at this point. (TW68, p. 445–; AMII, p. 212; but see TW68, p. 446.)
17. In his memoirs Johnson would write that he had “no reason to think that Republican candidate Nixon was himself involved in this maneuvering, but a few individuals active in his campaign were.” The author agrees with historian Herbert Parmet, who believes Johnson was “dissembling” because he “knew more than he would or could, let on.” To be forthright, the former president would have had to have revealed what he had learned from intelligence sources, some of which remains secret to this day. In 1971, when the memoirs were published, to have exposed Nixon would have been to expose a sitting president himself still wrestling with the Vietnam impasse. (“no reason”: Johnson, op. cit., p. 518; “dissembling”: Parmet, Nixon, op. cit., p. 521.)
18. The most thorough study is “Woman of Two Worlds: Anna Chennault and Informal Diplomacy in U.S.-Asian Relations, 1950–1990,” a 1997 doctoral dissertation by Catherine Forslund, then at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. A Tangled Web, the 1998 book by former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs William Bundy, was also groundbreaking. The contents of
the “X” envelope were referenced by Professor Robert Dallek in his 1998 biography of Lyndon Johnson, Flawed Giant (New York: Oxford University Press). (Bundy: William Bundy, op. cit.; ints., corr. Bundy; FBI documents: FBI 190-HQ-1204905, released with redactions, Dec. 1999.)
19. Lieutenant General Claire Chennault in 1941 founded American Volunteer Group, the corps of American fliers known as the Flying Tigers, who helped defend China and Burma against the Japanese. The group merged in 1942 with the China Air Task Force, which eventually became the U.S. 14th Air Force under Chennault’s command. In retirement after the war, the general had an honorary role with the Flying Tiger freight line. His wife, Anna, was the line’s vice president of international operations.
20. In a 1966 letter from Hong Kong, Anna Chennault wrote that when asked by State Department contacts about her “job,” she had replied that she was a tourist. A subsequent inquiry by her “U.S. connection,” however, had “made ‘The Agency’ very unhappy.” (The CIA is widely referred to by cognoscenti as the agency.) In a recent publication and in a conversation with the author, Chennault recalled that her late husband had a relationship with the CIA. She denied, however, ever having worked for the CIA herself. (1966 letter: Anna Chennault to “Tom” [almost certainly Thomas Corcoran, Washington political fixer and Chennault’s constant companion], Aug. 10, 1966, obtained by author; husband: World Journal (Taiwan), Apr. 21–26, 1994.)