Some tricks were intricate. On the assumption that a third-party Wallace candidacy would hurt Nixon more than any Democratic candidate, various projects were undertaken to sabotage Wallace’s American Independent Party. One of the more fantastic of them, masterminded by Mitchell and Jeb Magruder, involved paying the American Nazi Party $10,000 to persuade AIP voters in California to change their registration. The rationale behind this was that if enough voters switched, Wallace’s party would have too few registrants to qualify for the ballot. It failed; the AIP actually gained 6,500 members during the period.
Another plot was directed at Ted Kennedy, the most formidable vote getter among President Nixon’s possible challengers. Here the reasoning was that since young Kennedy’s popularity was a reflection of John Kennedy’s charisma, reducing the late President’s appeal would hurt Ted. At a press conference on September 16, 1971, Nixon was asked about a recent statement by Senator Henry Jackson to the effect that the Saigon regime would be stronger if it were more democratic. Nixon replied, “If what the senator is suggesting is that the United States should use its leverage now to overthrow Thieu, I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing Diem, and the complicity in the murder of Diem, and the way to get out of Vietnam, in my opinion, is not to overthrow Thieu.” This was the first time anyone in the government had accused the Kennedy administration of connivance in Diem’s death, and it gave Howard Hunt an idea.
Hunt had been poring over the Pentagon Papers. He told Colson that a Kennedy role in the Diem assassination might be assumed “inferentially” from State Department cables of the time. According to Hunt, Colson suggested that he “improve on them”—doctor them. Using a razor blade and a photocopier, Hunt forged two cables. One, dated three days before the Diem assassination, began: AT HIGHEST-LEVEL MEETING TODAY, DECISION RELUCTANTLY MADE THAT NEITHER YOU NOR HARKINS SHOULD INTERVENE IN BEHALF OF DIEM OR NHU IN EVENT THEY SEEK ASYLUM. Colson referred a Life reporter to Hunt, saying of Nixon’s accusation, “There’s a big story there,” but the reporter suspected duplicity and didn’t bite.
The failure of this intrigue was Hunt’s second disappointment that month. The other, the more bitter of the two, dated back to the previous April. On the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Hunt had flown to Miami for lunch with a Cuban-American named Bernard L. Barker who had been his principal subordinate then and was now a successful Florida real estate man. It was the opening link in a historic chain of events. The second was Ellsberg’s massive leak of the Pentagon Papers. The third began with four men—Nixon, Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman—on a helicopter ride between Los Angeles and San Clemente. The four leaders raged over the leak, which the President equated with the Alger Hiss case, and discussed bypassing the FBI with an undercover operation to learn more about it. The decision was made to detach David Young from Kissinger’s National Security staff to work full-time with the Plumbers. Young then put the Ellsberg ball in Hunt’s court; Hunt put it in Barker’s.
But not right away. In the beginning the Plumbers explored what appeared at the time to be an innocent area. Toward the end of July they discovered, from an FBI report which was routinely routed through their office, that for two years Ellsberg had been psychoanalyzed by a Dr. Lewis B. Fielding of Beverly Hills. Two of Hoover’s agents had attempted to grill the psychiatrist, but he had demurred, invoking the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. Hunt remembered that the CIA had a psychiatric section which drew up analytic profiles of men whose personalities were of special interest to the government. Under the CIA’s congressional mandate the subjects were supposed to be foreigners—the most successful had been an analysis of Nikita Khrushchev, prepared just before President Kennedy’s Vienna summit with him—but there had been one exception: Captain Lloyd Bucher of the Pueblo. Young asked CIA Director Richard Helms to make Ellsberg a second exception. Helms agreed. Early in August the finished profile was forwarded to the CIA.
Nobody there liked it. It wasn’t at all what the Plumbers had in mind. The CIA psychiatrists seemed to admire Ellsberg. (“There is no suggestion that the subject [saw] anything treasonous in his act. Rather he seemed to be responding to what he deemed a higher order of patriotism.”) On August 11 Young and Egil Krogh sent a minute on the study to Ehrlichman, rejecting it as “very superficial” and underscoring their belief that the CIA could do a better job. They wrote: “We will meet tomorrow with the head psychiatrist, Dr. Bernard Malloy, to impress upon him the detail and depth we expect.” They then crossed the line into contemplation of criminal activity. “In this connection,” they continued, “we would recommend that a covert operation be undertaken to examine all the medical files still held by Ellsberg’s psychiatrist covering the two-year period in which he was undergoing analysis.” At the bottom of the memorandum were the words “Approve ____ Disapprove _____.” After “Approve” Ehrlichman scrawled his initial. He added: “If done under your assurance that it is not traceable.”
It was this condition, stipulating that the Plumbers must use undercover operatives with no White House ties, which prompted Hunt to recruit Barker and, through him, two fellow Cubans, Felipe DeDiego and Eugenio R. Martinez. All Hunt told Barker was that he needed him to explore a “national security matter” on authorization from officials “above both the CIA and the FBI.” The job, he said, concerned a traitor who was passing information to the Soviet embassy. Except for the fact that the Russians subscribe to the New York Times, this was untrue. Later, in prison, Barker found the deception unforgivable. Morality apart (and none of the principals seemed to see any moral issue at the time), Hunt was guilty of incredible carelessness. He failed to tell Barker not to carry in his pocket a telephone number and abbreviated address (“W.H.” and “W. House”) linking him with Hunt. He didn’t even check to be certain that Barker’s men were free of government connections. In fact one of them, Martinez, was on the CIA payroll as a Cuban informant.
Meanwhile Hunt and Liddy, his partner in this strange venture, were being outfitted by the CIA—another violation of the provision in the agency’s charter forbidding domestic activity. Ehrlichman phoned Marine General Robert E. Cushman Jr., Helms’s deputy, asking him to do all in his power to help Hunt, whom he identified as “a bona fide employee, a consultant on security matters.” Ehrlichman didn’t specify the nature of the mission. During their subsequent meeting Hunt told Cushman that he had been “charged with quite a highly sensitive mission by the White House to visit and elicit information from an individual whose ideology we aren’t entirely sure of” and that he needed “flash alias documentation,” “pocket litter of some sort,” and “some degree of physical disguise, for a one-time op—in and out.”
With the approval of Helms, the CIA’s technical services division provided Hunt with a social security card and a driving license, both made out to “Edward Joseph Warren.” Liddy was given identification in the name of “George Leonard.” Hunt was issued a reddish-brown wig and a device, resembling false teeth, to alter the sound of his voice when telephoning. In addition Liddy received a tiny camera hidden in a tobacco pouch. On August 25, 1971, the two Plumbers flew to California on a preliminary reconnaissance mission. They didn’t achieve much. After taking a picture of Liddy standing outside Dr. Fielding’s office at 450 North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, Hunt entered the office, told a cleaning woman that he was a physician, and photographed the room. Both men timed a drive from there to the doctor’s home. Then they flew back to Washington, where the plane was met by a CIA messenger who took the films from Hunt and had them developed. At the White House the two Plumbers persuaded their superiors that burglarizing the psychiatrist’s office was justifiable. Young brought Ehrlichman up to date and proposed in a new minute that a committee on Capitol Hill be persuaded to look into the leak of the Pentagon Papers: “We have already started on a negative press image of Ellsberg. If the present Liddy/Hunt project is successful, it will be absolutely essential to have an overall
game plan developed for its use in conjunction with the congressional investigation.”
D-day for the Beverly Hills break-in was September 3, 1971; H-hour was 9 P.M. The operation was staged with all the meticulous attention to detail which had marked Hunt’s participation in the Bay of Pigs, and it was just about as successful. Shortly before zero the Cubans checked in at the Beverly Hilton Hotel under assumed names. Two of them donned delivery men’s uniforms and took a huge suitcase plastered with labels reading “Rush to Dr. Fielding” to North Bedford Drive. The cleaning woman admitted them and they left the bag with her, unlocking the door as they departed. Liddy was driving around outside, watching for suspicious policemen. Hunt was outside the Fielding home with a walkie-talkie to flash the alarm if the psychiatrist emerged and headed for his office.
At about midnight the Cubans returned to the office, only to discover—an omen of what was to come at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee—that the cleaning woman had relocked the door. Forcing it, they removed a camera and a spotlight from the suitcase. The plan was to photograph Ellsberg’s medical history. Unfortunately they couldn’t find it. They dumped Dr. Fielding’s files on the floor, but there was nothing for them there. All they turned up was an address book with Ellsberg’s name in it. They took pictures of that and of the strewn files, to show that they had done their best. After four frustrating hours the team returned to the hotel, where Liddy phoned Washington to tell Krogh that it had been a “clean job”—Dr. Fielding would have disagreed, but Liddy meant only that they hadn’t been caught. That was putting the best possible face on it. Back in the capital Hunt had to tell the White House that the mission had been a failure. Ehrlichman, according to his subsequent testimony, said he didn’t want them to try again. Ehrlichman had another piece of bad news for Hunt. On instructions from Helms, General Cushman had called to say that while the CIA had been glad to help out, a repetition would be out of the question. The Plumbers were on their own now, and the pressure to produce something to justify their jobs was mounting.
***
The week after the first second-story job masterminded from the White House a tragic episode pointed up one of the issues deeply dividing Americans during the Nixon years. It lay between the holders of one set of values, who regarded their critics as illiberal and inhumane, and the critics, who scorned the liberals as “permissivists.” The incident was the bloodiest prison revolt in the country’s history. It occurred in an unlikely setting, amid the white clapboard homes, red barns, and tall silvery silos of western New York’s Wyoming County. There, surrounded by dense fields of sweet corn and goldenrod, stood a fifty-five-acre penitentiary compound enclosed by thirty-foot turreted gray concrete walls. Christened after the nearby town, it bore the classical name of the ancient Athenian plain: Attica.
The state called Attica a “correctional facility,” but not much correcting was done there. Under the stern administration of Superintendent Vincent Mancusi there was little vocational training and less compassion. Solitary confinement—“the box”—was the penalty for the slightest infraction of the rules, and inmates were systematically beaten in the elevator on the way there. They were allowed one bar of soap and one roll of toilet paper a month. If they worked in the hundred-degree heat of the metal shop, known to them as “the Black Hole of Calcutta,” they were paid as little as 25 cents a day. Ugliest of all was the regime’s naked racism. Of the 2,254 convicts, 75 percent were black or Puerto Rican, while all 383 guards were white. The keepers openly favored white prisoners, taunted the Negroes, and called their clubs “nigger sticks.”
Warden Mancusi’s reply to civil libertarians was that he was running a maximum security institution and that Attica’s inmates included some of the country’s most hardened criminals. It was true. It was also true, and an ill omen, that among them were many of a new convict breed, black militants who regarded themselves as victims of an imperialist society. Attica was, in fact, where other wardens shipped self-styled revolutionists who gave them trouble. Arriving, they smuggled in books by George Jackson and Eldridge Cleaver, held secret rallies when they were supposed to be at sports or in chapel, and circulated inflammatory pamphlets which they wrote in their cells. “If we cannot live as people, we will at least try to die like men,” wrote a convict named Charles “Brother Flip” Crowley, and a poem being passed around began:
If we must die—let it not be like hogs,
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
In July 1971 an organization of militant inmates calling themselves the Attica Liberation Faction sent a proclamation demanding reforms to State Corrections Commissioner Russell G. Oswald. It was a clever move. Oswald had been appointed by Governor Rockefeller because his sweeping improvements in Wisconsin’s prison system had been widely acclaimed by penologists, and though he had been in office only six months, he and Mancusi were already at odds on almost every administrative question. After Labor Day Oswald taped a message to the convicts asking for time to make profound changes. Among other things he pledged “meaningful rehabilitative methods, evening vocational programs, better law libraries.”
He may have been too late. After the revolt guards found enormous circles drawn around the date September 9 on cell calendars. In July the militants had told Oswald that they felt there was “no need to dramatize our demands,” but they changed their minds the following month. The decisive event seems to have been the death of George Jackson in San Quentin on August 21. At breakfast next morning Attica’s Negroes protested by fasting. “It was the weirdest thing,” a turnkey said afterward. “Nobody picked up a tray or a spoon, and nobody took any food. They just walked through the line and went to their seats and they sat down. They looked straight ahead and nobody made a sound…. Then we noticed that almost all had some black on them…. It scared us because a thing like that takes a lot of organization, a lot of solidarity, and we had no idea they were so well organized.”
The evangelical rhetoric of two revolutionists who were later identified as the key leaders, Herbert X. Blyden and “Brother Richard” Clarke, became more strident. Both were New Yorkers and Black Muslims; both had been convicted of armed robbery. Like George Jackson, Blyden was self-taught, a reader of history and philosophy who had been sent to Attica after leading a prison riot in the Tombs, Manhattan’s House of Detention. Clarke had been transferred to Attica from a medium security prison whose warden said he had been advocating “the violent overthrow of the institution.” His family had noticed that in Attica he was becoming increasingly bitter. Once when his wife was visiting him he said, “Feed the animals, feed the animals. That’s what they treat us like here—animals.”
On Wednesday, September 8, eighteen days after Jackson had been killed on the other side of the country, an Attica guard was punched by a convict while breaking up a fight in one of the prison exercise yards. That night the two who had been fighting were put in “the box.” Other inmates said they were abused as they were dragged away, and a Puerto Rican prisoner threw a tumbler at one of the guards, cutting his face. The riot exploded the following morning. Precisely what touched it off is unclear. According to one account, a work party refused to line up at the rap of keepers’ clubs. Another story put the responsibility on guards who, as a reprisal for the previous day’s events, arbitrarily canceled the prisoners’ exercise period. In a third version, Brother Richard led five convicts who were on their way to breakfast on a rampage, freeing Blyden, who was working in the metal shop, along the way.
However it started, the results were spectacular. Fewer than one hundred guards were on duty. They were overwhelmed, and many were captured. The prison school, the chapel, and the machine shop were put to the torch. While they were being reduced to smoldering debris, raiding parties of inmates raced through the galleries, gates, and catwalks of three of the four rectangular cellblocks—B, C and D. A
ccording to a Wyoming County deputy sheriff, they were armed with pipes which they had hidden under loaves of bread on trays in the mess halls. That may be apocryphal; the credibility of Attica’s authorities was to be severely damaged before the uprising was over. But even if the inmates lacked weapons at the outset, they soon equipped themselves with them. Using grinding wheels acquired while looting the shops, some of them fashioned spears from scissor blades and broom handles. Others turned out clubs and knives which, when the keepers tried to extinguish the fires, were used to shred the hoses. With tear gas, guards managed to regain control of cellblock C and part of B, but the prisoners retained the rest, locking gates and even welding some of them shut with shop equipment.
Four hours after the revolt had begun, the battlefront hardened along lines which would remain substantially unchanged over the next four days. Cellblock D, the farthest from the administration building and the nearest to the shop, was the rebel stronghold, commanded by Blyden and Clarke. Wearing football helmets or turbans, the rebels—there were 1,280 of them—sprawled under makeshift tents in D yard, and a crude bench at one end of the yard was the epicenter of the revolt. There a rebel secretariat, the People’s Central Committee, sat in continuous session, assigning work details, dictating defense measures, and even confining unruly prisoners in a “people’s jail.” Contacts between the convicts and state authorities were made in negotiating sessions at the table and in an A block corridor, a kind of no-man’s-land dubbed the DMZ. A point of special interest was the geographical center of the prison, “Times Square,” where catwalks leading to all four cellblocks met. It was held by the rebels. They had wrested it from a twenty-eight-year-old guard, William Quinn, who had battled them with a nightstick and had been overcome only after his skull had been fractured in two places. Some guards swore that they had seen him being brutally thrown from a high catwalk. There was no question that he had been gravely injured. When Clarke saw blood dripping from the unconscious guard’s ear he ordered him passed through the DMZ to the authorities. Quinn’s condition was a matter of great interest to both sides; if he died, every inmate participating in the uprising could be tried for murder.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 186
