by Bob Woodward
That Haig had these thoughts is perhaps not surprising. That he would commit them to a long memo is. Within the military officer corps there is both written and unwritten doctrine requiring political neutrality. It was the central reason Butterfield had resigned as an Air Force colonel before joining the Nixon White House staff. If the Haig memo were to leak, it would at minimum discredit him and brand him a sycophant. At the maximum, he could have been removed from the White House, tarnishing and likely ending his career.
Butterfield was surprised that Haig would take that risk, though it reflected the White House atmosphere of all-for-the-cause, the prevailing sense that the normal rules and restraints did not apply. There was an expectation that nothing so sensitive as EYES ONLY would get out.
Butterfield sent Haig a “Dear Al” letter on September 7, 1972, congratulating him on his promotion to general, four stars, and appointment as vice chief of staff of the Army. He noted that General Eisenhower had gone from two to four stars in 11 months. Haig had done it in six months, perhaps the most rapid rise in history, leapfrogging 182 more senior two-star generals, and all 46 three-star generals.
“Al, I couldn’t be more pleased,” Butterfield wrote. “The Vice Chief’s slot and the four beanies that go with it are nothing more than just rewards for your years of dedication and labor above and beyond, and for your maintaining through it all a perfect balance. I feel good just knowing you.”
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Butterfield developed a close working relationship with Steve Bull, the president’s personal staff assistant and aide-de-camp, the man responsible for keeping the president on schedule. Bull, a trim, athletic figure with a positive, can-do attitude, escorted the president’s visitors and along with Butterfield moved Nixon through his official day.
Butterfield had a name for the president that he shared with Bull—Richard “I’ll-Get-Those-Sons-of-Bitches” Nixon.
Bull, a stalwart Nixon defender, told me in a 2015 interview, “I think he carried some baggage from growing up a poor guy who had to overcome adversity and maybe he didn’t know when he had to stop fighting.”
In Butterfield’s view, Nixon was controlled by “his various neurosis, the deep, deep, deep resentments and hatreds—he seemed to hate everybody. The resentments festered. And he never mellowed out.”
From his early months and on, Butterfield carried enforcement directives from Nixon. Richard Dudman, who had written critically of the situation in Vietnam in the St. Louis Post–Dispatch, was a “violent leftist,” and Ziegler had been ordered “not to permit our people to talk to the Post-Dispatch, the New York Times, or the Washington Post . . . all contacts with these news agencies (no matter how slight or how infrequent) be terminated immediately.”
On the subject of public television, Butterfield reported, “The president wants to use every possible but discreet means to insure that public funds of this obviously leftist outfit are dried up.”
Butterfield, on Nixon’s orders, sent a memo to Attorney General Mitchell that the president wanted to “go after” the government’s own eyewitness against Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa. Nixon was trying to woo Hoffa to support him and in 1971 commuted his prison sentence.
To a report that the Nixon administration was not being as open as promised, the president ordered “ignore this kind of criticism. The fact of the matter is that we are far too open. If we treat the press with a little more contempt we’ll probably get better treatment.”
Even in moments of triumph, Nixon could not let go. His finest moment as president was surely the opening to China. Not only did he establish relations with the Chinese Communists but he leveraged the new relationship against the Soviet Union. It was a large global strategic move, and he was rightly pleased with himself. It should have been a moment of almost pure joy.
In his memoir White House Years Kissinger said the announcement of the trip by Nixon shook the world. “Not only was it a sensation for the media; overnight it transformed the structure of international politics.” The president had been decisive, Kissinger said, noting that, “Nixon had an extraordinary instinct for the jugular.”
During one planning meeting for the China trip with Haldeman and Butterfield, Nixon asked, “Who are the news guys going?” About 2,000 had applied to go and the list had been tentatively cut to about 100.
“I’ve got a list right here,” Haldeman replied.
“Of news people?” Nixon said. “Good. Bring it in.”
Haldeman brought in a long list that was typed on thin onionskin paper. The press was going to have its own plane. Lots of the bureau chiefs and television anchors were going. It was going to be a big deal for the newspeople who could say they went to China with the president.
Nixon read down the list.
“What is this son of a bitch doing here!” Nixon said as he got to about the 12th name. Not waiting for an answer, he violently crossed it out, tearing the thin paper. Haldeman came over to look at the name, which was barely legible because Nixon had obliterated it.
“Don’t you remember that son of a bitch?” Nixon asked Haldeman. “The article he wrote after the ’62 governor’s race?” Nixon had lost that race and had declared to the media, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
Haldeman had been the campaign manager.
“He’s the assistant bureau chief someplace now,” Haldeman said. “Do you really want to—”
“Yes, I do!” Nixon meticulously went down the list and crossed out another six or seven names. Stanley Karnow, The Washington Post’s veteran China watcher and Vietnam War expert, was excised. “Under no circumstances,” Nixon wrote, indicating that only one newspaper from cities the size of Washington could send a correspondent. As a cover he said they could say a coin had been tossed, and The Washington Star, the afternoon rival of the Post, had won.
In all about 87 would go on the trip, including the TV stars Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Barbara Walters and Dan Rather.
Later, on April 3, 1972, for a Soviet Union trip to sign an important arms control agreement, Haldeman sent Ziegler a memo on the press contingent. He wanted some who had not gone to China. “If it is hard to go,” he said reflecting Nixon, “it will mean more to be on the trip.”
Referring to the upcoming presidential election, Haldeman directed that they should “first take the cities we need in the major states” such as New York, Chicago, Los Angles, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati. “Then offer places to our good friends who missed the China trip” and “We should drop” several papers and columnists, including the conservative William F. Buckley.
Buckley had severely criticized the normalization of relations with China. Given the barbarity of the Chinese leaders, he had written, “We have lost—irretrievably—any remaining sense of moral mission in the world.”
• • •
“Last weekend we put a naked girl in his bed,” Bebe Rebozo told Butterfield
“A naked girl?”
“Well, it was a life-size blow-up doll,” Rebozo said, smiling as he recounted a prank he and Robert Abplanalp, the inventor of aerosol spray and a wealthy Nixon friend, had played on Nixon down in the Caribbean.
Perfect, thought Butterfield. “He’d be the guy you’d want to put the naked woman in his bed. Because of the reaction you’d get. . . . Like a bunch of high school boys.”
Butterfield also thought it was good that Nixon had friends close enough to him, confident enough to feel comfortable with such a prank. Perhaps it provided a moment of comedy and much needed relief, though Rebozo never described Nixon’s reaction to Butterfield.
Nixon had been pals with Rebozo, a Florida banker and businessman, since 1951. They traveled and vacationed together, watched weekend sports on television, spent time just hanging out, apparently not really talking much about politics.
Butterfield was frequently reminded that Nixon was awkward and lonely, the real-life embodime
nt of the hunched, brooding figure of cartoons. The Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post cartoonist Herblock regularly portrayed Nixon as an isolated, devious loner.
For Butterfield, the quest for solitude made Nixon all the more impenetrable.
• • •
Haldeman wanted to spend time with his family and so he did not like to go to Camp David with Nixon on the weekends. Butterfield drew that duty. Nixon also wanted a secretary there in case he had dictation or some other secretarial chore. Butterfield had a pool of five secretaries cleared for the task including Rose Mary Woods.
“He clearly liked one secretary better than the others,” Butterfield recalled. “And that was Nell Yates. But he didn’t know how to say, have Nell come up. . . . He wanted to say Nell.” But he simply couldn’t bring himself to reveal his preference.
Imitating Nixon, Butterfield said, “ ‘Om, hmm, who’s available again?’ Nixon would stand there. It was painful. Eventually I just started using Nell almost all the time if she was available.” And Nixon seemed to appreciate that.
Yates, 48, had worked in the White House since the end of Harry Truman’s administration and knew the ropes as well as anyone. Slender, her hair in a tight bun, she was a fixture of quiet authority. Nell was Dwight Chapin’s secretary and frequently was in and out of the Oval Office.
One Saturday night in May 1972 at Camp David, Butterfield recalled, “Well, he called her over. Called her on the telephone. She thought, well, I guess I’m going to go do some typing. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to come over and have dinner.’ So she told Butterfield, ‘I’m going over the president’s to have dinner.’ ” That was in Aspen Lodge.
“She came back about three hours later. She was a pretty cool person to be really distraught, openly distraught, but said, ‘Ugh, the most painful, uncomfortable evening of my life.’ ”
“What! Did he make a move or something?” Butterfield asked.
“An awful lot of starting to make moves and then withdrawing,” he recalled her saying. “And not knowing what to say. I was just, every moment, I was alert to what was going to happen next. I was just very uncomfortable. And then he said, ‘Let’s go see my office.’ So we walked back to see his office.” It is behind the living room at his Aspen Lodge. “It was awful, and we stayed back there. I got the idea that when we went back to the office . . .” She said she was worried when they went back there because it’s a little more isolated.
“Well, nothing happened,” she said. “Nothing happened . . . it was awful, the conversation didn’t flow well. He didn’t know what to say.”
Butterfield recalled, “He clearly had her over there for her company and I guess he got something from that. It was just another example of a lonely man. I don’t know how else to interpret it. Nothing happened. She was just worn out when she came back from holding herself uptight for so long.” She was afraid she was going to have to say no to the president. “It was traumatic in a way for her. She said it was the worst three hours of her life.”
Yates declined to comment in 2015.
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The morning of Wednesday, May 17, 1972, Nixon was at Camp David for talks with Kissinger and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.
Beverly Kaye, a 42-year-old White House secretary, had drawn duty for the brief trip there. She was one of the five in the Camp David secretarial pool.
Nixon showed an unusual, polite interest in her, according to a tape. Secret taping at Camp David had just been installed earlier in the month, Secret Service records show. A single microphone had been placed in Nixon’s study plus two on his phones.
“Been here before?” Nixon inquired, according to the tape.
“No, sir,” Kaye replied in a sweet, young voice.
“What cabin are you in?”
“Right up here in Maple,” she answered.
“Did you come up last night?”
Yes, Kaye said, in a “helicopter from the Pentagon.”
He had a memo to Haldeman he wanted typed and sent back to Washington. There was another project, he said. He had underlined portions of two briefing books and he wanted the underlines typed out.
“You just want plain paper, sir?”
“I just need the paragraphs that are underlined.” Put the pages in a separate folder. “So I know what I have here. They’re things I want to concentrate on.”
“I see,” Kaye replied.
“Just do it at your leisure. I don’t need it today. . . . Walk around, see a little of the place.”
“All right. I’ll do that. Thank you.”
“Take a swim,” Nixon suggested.
Kaye laughed. “All right.”
“All right,” Nixon repeated. “Okay.”
“Well, take care,” she said.
“Bye,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Bye,” he repeated, and she left.
Nixon’s daily records show that he went to Kaye’s Maple Lodge at 4:08 p.m. and then he walked through the Camp David grounds until 4:20 p.m. (Butterfield did not know if Nixon took this walk with Kaye.)
The official records show that evening at 6:40 p.m. “The president had dinner with Beverly J. Kaye” until 7:33 p.m. The next morning, May 18, the president went to the Maple Lodge at 10 a.m. for five minutes.
At a later time Butterfield and Rebozo were also there at Camp David with Nixon, and boarded a helicopter for the return to the White House
“It was an awfully interesting 20 minutes,” Butterfield recalled.
The trio were joined by three Secret Service agents, a military aide, the president’s physician and Beverly Kaye.
Butterfield recalled, “We’re in the Marine chopper. Bebe was with us. The president’s in his very soft, cushioned chair. And he sees this miniskirted secretary, Beverly Kaye. The girls were wearing miniskirts then. And she is a little short. And she comes on to take her place back there and he sees her. And he says, ‘Oh, um . . .’ And I said ‘Sir, her name’s Beverly.’ ”
Nixon knew. “Beverly, why don’t you sit up here with us?” he asked.
“He saw the miniskirt,” Butterfield recalled. “It was very short. Her legs looked good I guess. So she came and I moved one way. So she sits between Bebe and me. And we strap in and off we go. And it’s dark.”
Butterfield makes helicopter noises. “You hear this thump, thump, thump. And we take off. And it’s all dark around where Camp David is, and it’s going to be dark for the next 20 minutes until we get into the Washington, D.C., area.
“But the way she’s sitting, with a miniskirt—when you sit down, the miniskirt comes up.” Her feet barely touched the floor.
Kaye was shy, quiet and known as a good worker. Wedged between Butterfield and Bebe, she seemed trapped. The helo lifted off smoothly and rotated to the right and headed south for the routine, 30-minute flight. No one spoke. Butterfield watched Nixon through the dim light. He could clearly see that Nixon was fascinated by the sight of her bare legs. He almost seemed excited by their proximity. Though, to Butterfield, the president seemed to be trying, he could not avert his gaze. He seemed transfixed.
The only sound was the whirring of the helo blades overhead. Still no one spoke. No one moved. A minute passed. It seemed to Butterfield that suddenly the darkness, the intense quiet, was an invitation for intimacy. A bond had formed. The normal rules did not apply. Nothing except the moment, a rare interlude, almost a space in time as they flew between Camp David and the White House.
“I can see him noticing her,” Butterfield said. “It’s very clear. And in truth, this is a natural reaction for a man. But to him, he was perhaps more fascinated than the average married man might be. He keeps looking over.
“And finally, just out of the blue sort of, he takes his hand . . . he takes his hand closest to the aisle and reaches over. And her legs are together, of course. And he starts patting her on the bare legs. Well, her legs are bare.
“In the manner of patting
a young girl, like a four-year-old girl.
“And he said, ‘Well, did you enjoy Camp David?’ ”
“Yes,” she answered. Butterfield could feel her almost freeze up next to him. Nixon is still patting her legs.
“I guess there wasn’t much to do,” Nixon said. “We didn’t have any work for you to do. I apologize for that. Because it can get boring up here.”
“He was covering as much skin as he could with his hand.” Butterfield and Bebe looked on silently. There was a power in the unspoken. Only one thing was going on, and no one spoke about it. “Bebe and I are just dying,” Butterfield recalled.
Butterfield glanced down at Kaye. She seemed defenseless, and was trying to smile, but said nothing as the president continued to pat slowly.
Butterfield recalled, “And he’s carrying on this small talk but still patting her. Because I can see now, Nixon being Nixon, he doesn’t quite know how to stop. You know, to stop is an action in itself. So he’s pat, pat, patting her. And looking at her. And feeling—I can see he’s feeling more distressed all the time now about the situation he’s got himself into.
“So he keeps trying to make this small talk, and I can see him saying [to himself], you know, when the small talk is over, what the hell am I going to do?” It was as if he took his hand away, that would draw attention to what he was doing.
“I can feel her shoulder right next—she has stiffened up like you can’t believe. She’s petrified. She’s petrified. She’s never had this happen before. The president of the United States is patting her bare legs.”
For how long?
“It seems like half the way to Washington but I’d say a long time, minutes. And when he stopped, he broke the whole chain.”
Finally, Nixon cleared his throat emphatically. “He stopped talking and he pulled his hand away, and turned his whole body toward the window and looked out into the darkness. And stayed in that position for quite a while.”
Butterfield glanced sideways at Bebe. The shadows of the night flight passed over the face of the president’s closest friend, and he looked pained.
