The President considered personally arguing the case before the Supreme Court “to indicate the importance” of the matter. Nixon told aides that this was “one of those fights” the administration “had to make, and by God, it’s one I enjoy. These bastards have gone too far this time.” The President directed Attorney General Mitchell to draft “strong” legal language—using terms such as irresponsible and a massive breach of security—to condemn the newspaper: “Use some really high flown adjectives.” Nixon instructed his aide Charles Colson to “pour it on . . . the main thing is to cast it in terms of [the Times] doing something disloyal to the country” that “risks our men” and gives “aid and comfort to the enemy.” The President’s order to Haldeman was even more explicit: “Do everything we can to destroy the Times.”
The federal injunction effectively gagged the nation’s leading newspaper. But as its legal appeal wound its way through the courts, Ellsberg once again took matters into his own hands and began leaking the Pentagon Papers to other news outlets. First The Washington Post, then The Boston Globe and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, then more than a dozen other newspapers began publishing the classified documents in a crescendo of defiant journalistic solidarity that made the administration’s attempted censorship impossible to sustain. It was the single most concerted act of media resistance to the government in American history. “A newspaper industry that for thirty years and more had been living happily . . . on government handouts was suddenly in widespread revolt,” Ellsberg marveled. “One paper after another was clamoring for its chance, not just to get a piece of a story but to step across the line into radical civil disobedience.” On July 1, the Supreme Court ruled against the Nixon administration and for the press: publication of the Pentagon Papers could continue.
The dramatic events stoked both Nixonian rage and media righteousness, helping lay the foundation for the Watergate scandal that would force the President from office three years later. The Pentagon Papers “energized the press and endowed it with a new confidence and sense of legitimacy . . . as the people’s paladin against the impersonal, devious forces of government,” historian Stanley Kutler wrote. It also “heightened the Administration’s already substantial suspicions of the media” and further “intensified the adversarial relationship” between the presidency and the press, “a relationship that was to deteriorate still more sharply” in the future.
The Supreme Court’s rebuff incensed the President. He blamed not his own overreaching but the news outlets that had opposed him. “Those sons of bitches are killing me,” he angrily told his staff. “We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They’re using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?” Nixon’s Justice Department indicted Ellsberg for espionage, conspiracy, and theft; he faced life in prison if convicted. Day after day, the President pressured his staff to attack Ellsberg: “Kill him in the press . . . play it gloves off. Now, goddammit, get going on it.” And “convict the son of a bitch in the press. That’s the way it’s done.” White House aide Colson duly complied by spreading word that Ellsberg was a spy who helped pass classified documents to the Soviet embassy; the false report was published by conservative columnist Victor Lasky, who was secretly on the Nixon campaign’s payroll—“our man,” as Colson called him.
Henry Kissinger also did his part to undermine Ellsberg. Nixon’s national security advisor denounced his former Harvard colleague with calculated vehemence, telling presidential aides that Ellsberg was a bisexual drug-user who copulated with his wife in front of their children. “Henry had a problem because Ellsberg had been one of his ‘boys,’ ” Haldeman observed. The President agreed: “Every one of these people that are involved in stealing the papers and then publishing them were either students of [Kissinger] or associates of his.” Many, like Kissinger, were also Jews; and in the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the Nixon White House, Kissinger repeatedly turned on Jewish colleagues if he felt they might endanger his standing with the President. (The President already called Kissinger—behind his back and sometimes to his face—“my Jew boy.” Nixon also referred to Ellsberg as “the Jew” and compared him to Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg: “The Jews are born spies. You notice how many of them are just in it up to their necks?” The New York Times, too, was filled with “those Jews,” the President complained: “I just wanna cool it with those damn people because of their disloyalty to the country.”)
Anti-Semitism aside, Nixon admitted being “a paranoiac or almost a basket case with regard to secrecy.” Even J. Edgar Hoover was “not going after [Ellsberg] as strong as I’d like,” the President complained. “If we can’t get anyone in this damn government to do something,” Nixon vowed, “then, by God, we’ll do it ourselves.” The President literally pounded his desk in frustration, his face red, as he bellowed his orders to his staff: “I don’t give a damn how it’s done, do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further unauthorized disclosures. I don’t want to be told why it can’t be done . . . I don’t want excuses. I want results. I want it done, whatever the cost.”
The result would be one of the most fateful, and fatal, of Nixon’s presidency: the creation of a special White House secret police force, a covert dirty tricks operation that would lead directly and inexorably to resignation and ruin. “The Plumbers”—so called because their original mission was to plug leaks—would enlarge their mandate to include burglary, forgery, wiretapping, and sabotage: “horrible things,” the President told aides, “but they’ve got to be done.”
Nixon wanted “somebody just as tough as I am” to run the venture, “a son of a bitch . . . who will work his butt off and do it dishonorably.” Someone who “will know what he’s doing and I want to know, too. And I’ll direct him myself.”
Charles Colson knew just the man for such an operation, someone “hard as nails.”
“What’s his name?” the President asked.
“His name is Howard Hunt,” Colson replied. “He just got out of the CIA . . . Kind of a tiger.” Hunt had already participated in surreptitious break-ins overseas, as a spy. “The beauty of this type of CIA guy,” Haldeman explained, is that “he’s working outside [so] we can just hire him as a consultant” to hide his connection to the administration. Nixon liked the idea: “Bring him over.”
Hunt was paired with former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, who had also been trained in assassinations and illegal “black bag” jobs. Their office was housed in the Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, and contained elaborate security measures: a fireproof safe to guard sensitive documents; “sterile” telephones that could not be traced; voice scramblers to foil wiretaps; and a ceiling device that emitted ultrasonic waves to thwart electronic bugging. Liddy, a devotee of Germanic culture, literally played Nazi songs as the Plumbers devised various forms of mayhem: forging documents to implicate Democrats in crimes; spying on Senator Edward Kennedy to try to catch him in extramarital liaisons; firebombing the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank, to capture information that would undermine Democrats; burglarizing the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in search of evidence to discredit the antiwar whistleblower; and, most infamously, the Watergate break-in, which would ultimately force Nixon to leave the White House in disgrace.
In retrospect, the fact that the Pentagon Papers proved to be the catalyst for these crimes—and ultimately for the President’s downfall—was incongruous; after all, they were only historical records about Vietnam from previous administrations that were far less sensitive than the classified documents about Nixon’s ongoing offenses that Jack Anderson had just disclosed a few weeks earlier. In any case, the muckraking columnist would soon expose a new batch of secret documents that would make the Pentagon Papers seem tepid in comparison, unleashing a scandal that would intensify the President’s paranoia by revealing an espionage operation aimed at the White House itself.
8
THE ANDERSON PAPERS
President Nixon’s
needless prolonging of the Vietnam War may have been his most obvious foreign policy failure, but it was not his only one. In 1971, he secretly intervened in another Asian conflict, the India-Pakistan War, helping fuel bloodshed that would kill more than two million people. Once again, Jack Anderson played a crucial role in exposing the White House machinations behind the carnage.
The origins of this catastrophe were rooted in the global rivalry between the world’s two atomic superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In what was one of many Cold War proxy battles between the international giants, the United States supported Pakistan while the Russians backed India during their war. In the midst of it all, Anderson disclosed that President Nixon secretly staged “his own nuclear showdown” with the Soviets and “brought the United States to the edge of another world war.” It was not the muckraker’s usual hyperbole: Anderson had once more obtained top-secret contemporaneous government documents that verified his incendiary claims.
The crisis began in the spring of 1971, when impoverished Bengalis in eastern Pakistan, oppressed by the ruling elite of western Pakistan, started breaking away to form their own independent country. Pakistan’s military dictator, General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, had a simple solution: “Kill three million of them,” he declared, “and the rest will eat out of our hands.” The general was as good as his vow, imposing martial law and unleashing his troops in a massive genocidal purge that methodically rounded up and executed not only Bengali soldiers and activists but also women, children, and the elderly. Neighboring India became deluged with desperate families pouring over the border to escape the butchery—a hundred thousand exiles a day, ten million total, one of the greatest sudden mass migrations of refugees in history.
President Nixon was unsympathetic. Partly, it was personal: he preferred Pakistan’s military dictator, a short, fat, strutting, womanizing alcoholic who nonetheless showed Nixon proper deference, to India’s haughty fifty-three-year-old prime minister, Indira Gandhi, whom Nixon privately called “an old witch” and “that bitch, that whore.” Mostly, however, the President sided with Pakistan for reasons of geopolitical Realpolitik: he was trying to normalize relations with Pakistan’s ally, the People’s Republic of China, to counter the world’s other Communist colossus, the Soviet Union. So Nixon supported Pakistan as it squared off with Soviet-backed India. “We don’t really have any choice,” National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger told the President. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of Russia’s.” As a result, Nixon refused to condemn Pakistan’s atrocities or use his relationship with its ruler to stop the violence, which was carried out with the help of U.S.-supplied tanks and aircraft.
On December 3, 1971, after accusing India of stoking the Bengali rebellion, Pakistan launched a surprise attack against India. World opinion was almost universal in its condemnation of the Pakistani aggression, and Nixon informed congressional leaders that the U.S. would maintain “absolute neutrality” and would not become “physically involved in any way.” In fact, however, the President secretly plotted to rush arms to Pakistan. To circumvent a congressional ban on aid to the warring countries, Kissinger came up with a scheme to have intermediaries—Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—supply the weaponry, skirting the law and avoiding visible American fingerprints. “I like the idea,” Nixon responded. “Have it done one step away” so that if the truth leaked out, “we can have it denied.” State Department officials warned that such third-party transactions were illegal, but the President proceeded anyway, issuing a “directive” that provided Pakistan with covert shipments of U.S. fighter jets and other arms. Privately, Kissinger acknowledged the risk the White House was taking: “We are standing alone against our public opinion, against our whole bureaucracy at the very edge of legality.”
Unbeknownst to Kissinger, one of the bureaucratic functionaries upset by his manipulations was an informant for Jack Anderson. Just days after Pakistan attacked India, Anderson’s source—who, the columnist said, “could no longer abide the deception” of his bosses—used a prearranged telephone signal to set up a meeting with Anderson at a Dart drugstore near the White House. “Such Hollywood spy games are not my usual style,” the newsman conceded, but his informant had “learned that telephone conversations were not always private” and was caught up in the urgency of the moment. As Anderson’s source nervously stood in an aisle pretending to look over the season’s Christmas card offerings, he whispered that the administration had just dispatched a navy armada to the India-Pakistan front in what could set off “a nuclear powder keg” between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Anderson’s source was right. On December 10, just a week after Pakistan invaded India, the President ordered the navy’s Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal; a task force of eight warships carried one hundred fighter-bombers, two thousand Marines, and nuclear weapons. Two days later, at Nixon’s behest, Kissinger leaked word to the press that the U.S. naval armada was intended for “a possible rescue of American citizens” in war-torn eastern Pakistan. A State Department diplomat later acknowledged that this was a “transparently false cover story” because such a powerful arsenal was not needed to evacuate the handful of Americans who remained in the area. The reality was that the American flotilla was a deliberate provocation in support of Pakistan—a “pure power play” to “get the word out in order to put a little pressure” on India, the President privately admitted. Kissinger agreed that this “show of force” was necessary to “give the Soviets a warning” and recommended that the administration “brazen it up” to make their “bluff” sound more convincing. While there was “a high possibility” that the aggressive American maneuvers would ultimately fail, Kissinger added, “at least we’re coming off like men.” Nixon boasted that the policy would show that “ ‘the man in the White House’ was tough.”
Although revealing the location of military ships is normally a violation of national security, the government decided to publicize its gunboat diplomacy to try to scare its adversaries into backing down. The administration now ordered the Seventh Fleet to travel “as much . . . as possible in daylight . . . in other words, in full view of the world,” recalled Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, chief of naval operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The deployment received prominent coverage by all leading newspapers and television networks. “Pentagon sources deliberately obliged newsmen by providing daily ‘backgrounders’ on the location of the warships,” a New York Times reporter wrote. “Nixon and Kissinger wanted New Delhi and Moscow to know exactly what the fleet was doing.”
Meanwhile, Anderson “needled” his source to hand over classified files that would back up his assertion that the United States was recklessly risking war with the Soviets. “I can’t even run the story without documentation,” the columnist insisted to his informant. “I’ve got to see the papers.” Anderson later recalled that he “wasted little time in soul searching over the issue of disclosing national security issues. The only thing holding me back was the need to get enough proof from my source so my word would not be questioned.” Anderson explained that he needed incontrovertible evidence to write an exposé that could withstand the inevitable administration denials. The newsman invoked Daniel Ellsberg’s recent leak of the Pentagon Papers and argued that only by documenting governmental deceit in a similar way could another U.S. war in Asia be prevented. When Anderson’s contact in the bureaucracy hesitated, the muckraker gently chided him: “You’ve got to decide whether you work for the country or for Kissinger.”
Anderson’s source “reluctantly” agreed. The two arranged to meet in a downtown Washington alley at midnight, where several manila envelopes filled with top-secret records changed hands. The investigative reporter then interviewed other officials from the White House, Pentagon, and State Department to try to gather more intelligence—and cover the tracks of his secret source.
On December 13, as the war between India and Pakistan reached
its peak, Anderson began the first in a series of articles based on his new cache of classified documents. But his initial story attracted little public attention, in part because he obscured its newsworthiness by gingerly backing into the column with an irrelevant birthday ode to his late mentor Drew Pearson. Anderson also repeated the mistake of his reporting on Vietnam a few months earlier by failing to ballyhoo the fact that he had actually obtained classified government files. It was not that the columnist lacked access to important and timely information: his hoard of paperwork on the India-Pakistan War included actual minutes of the secret deliberations by Kissinger and his advisors just days earlier that documented in detail the administration’s rash and duplicitous foreign policy maneuvers. But as Anderson later acknowledged, he was “cautious, even timid” in what he reported because his documents “were held so closely to the vest by the [Pentagon] that I feared to quote from them lest I pinpoint my source, cost him his job, and maybe land him in jail.” As a result, the newsman complained, his “story got about as much attention as yesterday’s horoscope.”
Except in the White House. There, the President and his advisors read Anderson’s column with alarm. “It’s very important to put Anderson” down, Nixon told his aides. “Say nothing. Don’t give any credibility to the story. Deny it all. Say he’s lying.”
The President’s strategy seemed to work and mainstream media outlets ignored the “Merry-Go-Round” column. Irritated by his story’s lack of impact, Anderson called his chief reporter, Les Whitten, into his office. “I never saw so many classified documents in my whole life,” Whitten marveled. “Jack had them sitting there in his office in a goddamned box. They were all there, the real McCoy.” To try to generate publicity for the story, Anderson and Whitten considered challenging White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler at his daily news briefing to deny that Anderson’s files were genuine. Under the plan, the columnist would publicly offer the President’s spokesman a deal: if Ziegler could prove the documents were phony, Anderson would give up his column—but if Anderson’s information was authentic, Ziegler would resign as Nixon’s spokesman. In the end, the muckraker abandoned the idea because he felt it would have been too nakedly self-promotional.
Poisoning The Press Page 18
