Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Indeed, thanks to Anderson, the record was now embarrassingly clear, and that was precisely the problem. “My credibility as a briefer is destroyed,” Kissinger fretted to the President, and “the press will never believe me again.” “I think that’s pure bullshit,” Nixon told Press Secretary Ziegler, who agreed: “Anderson doesn’t have that many people in the press that really respect him.” Still, for the first time in his career, Kissinger was the object of sustained public attack for his two-faced hypocrisy. If “my moral integrity” was besmirched, Kissinger huffed to a White House colleague, then “there is no point in doing my job.” Haldeman reported that Kissinger’s “staff got him all cranked up on the basis that [Anderson’s reporting] had totally destroyed Henry’s credibility and there was nothing left for him to do but quit . . . Henry’s now at a point where he’s so emotional about the issue that he’s not really thinking it through clearly.”

  Kissinger’s paranoia, already considerable in the best of circumstances, deepened. He feared that “the Nixon palace guard had deliberately arranged” the leak to Anderson to undermine Kissinger’s position and that it was “done with Presidential connivance.” In truth, it made no sense for the White House to give embarrassing classified documents to its longtime journalistic enemy, but Kissinger so distrusted Haldeman and Ehrlichman—and, for that matter, the President himself—that he saw conspiracies everywhere. “I have been acting as a lion-tamer,” Kissinger told an administration ally, “and now they smell blood.” Former defense secretary Robert McNamara advised Kissinger to “cut off [the] head” of Anderson’s source. Another friend urged Kissinger to “get the guys who are leaking and hang them by their thumbs from the Washington monument.” Kissinger agreed.

  The strain between the President and his top foreign policy advisor now reached the breaking point. Nixon already envied Kissinger’s popularity with the Eastern establishment and shared the view that his high-maintenance aide was “deceitful, egoistical, arrogant and insulting.” Angered by the negative publicity produced by Anderson’s exposé, the President stopped meeting Kissinger or returning his phone calls. “I am out of favor,” the White House staffer realized, and once again threatened to quit. But Nixon was tired of Kissinger’s “tri-weekly demand to resign” and wanted to call his bluff: “Maybe we have to let him go,” the President told his closest aides. “Henry’s problem is a deep emotional insecurity. He is . . . a deeply emotionally disturbed man.”

  According to Ehrlichman, “Henry’s mood swings” so troubled the President that “Nixon wondered aloud if Henry needed psychiatric care.” Kissinger was legendary in the White House for verbally abusing subordinates even while brazenly flattering the President with what Kissinger himself admitted was “obsequious excess.” Since his days as a graduate student at Harvard, he had been nicknamed “Henry Ass-Kissinger,” and Oval Office tapes recorded his repeated, shameless fawning over Nixon: “Mr. President, without you this country would be dead”; “It has been an inspiration to see your fortitude in adversity”; “You are a man of tremendous moves”; “You were absolutely spectacular!” At the same time, Kissinger belittled Nixon behind his back, calling him “that madman,” “the meatball mind,” a “maniac,” and “our drunken friend.” Ehrlichman believed that Kissinger was “very insecure” and that behind “a protective façade that was part self-deprecating humor and part intellectual showboating” Kissinger “cared desperately what people wrote and said about him.” After publication of the Anderson papers, Ehrlichman recalled, “I’d never seen fingernails bitten so close to the quick as Henry’s were during that time.”

  The President, no stranger to psychological troubles, took note of how Kissinger “ranted and raved” and decided that he must have a “suicidal complex.” Nixon recommended that his aide read a self-help book by the President’s own psychotherapist, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Nixon also directed Haldeman to “make extensive memoranda about K[issinger]’s mental processes for his files” and instructed Ehrlichman to tell Kissinger that he should get professional counseling. But Ehrlichman ducked the unpleasant task. “I could think of no way to talk to Henry about psychiatric care,” Ehrlichman recalled. “I had no confidence that that was what would help Henry nor could I bring myself to confront Henry with the President’s apparent lack of confidence in his mental ability.”

  Nixon also approached the national security advisor’s top aide, Alexander Haig, in an effort to manage Kissinger. “He’s personalizing this India thing,” the President told Haig. “His judgment is so warped” because he was “too emotional and . . . he just starts to wear himself out and crack up.” Nixon told Haig to “get Henry out of the press” and “keep him out of it . . . It’s time to forget this bullshit!” The President was in no mood to indulge what he viewed as Kissinger’s “childish tantrums.” “Henry was full of the usual charges of nobody on the staff defends him,” Haldeman wrote in his diary. “We jumped on him pretty hard on the point that he couldn’t go out to the press and defend himself and his credibility” without making matters worse. Nixon “told him the same thing,” Haldeman said, “not to do anything now and not to talk to the press.” The President advised against “overreacting” to the “Anderson papers” and instructed Kissinger, “Do not expose yourself to any reporter, don’t attack Anderson, lay off anything in this area.” Even one of Kissinger’s most loyal aides warned that his desire to “take the press on” was “very dangerous, especially in light of the fact that [we] knew Anderson had more” classified documents in his possession.

  But Kissinger ignored this advice and solicited support from friends in the media, whom he had assiduously cultivated during the past three years. “Henry started calling journalists and putting his side out,” one of Kissinger’s aides recalled. “He was talking to people and threatening to resign. He would use that threat to get good coverage. He was extraordinary.” Ehrlichman, too, marveled at Kissinger’s success: “Henry massaged the press as no one else in the White House did,” using “blandishments” and “shameless self-congratulation.” Kissinger played “host to the reporters and columnists who were invited to his office in a steady parade . . . so many that Henry often took them three at a time . . . It surprised me that veteran journalists would let him get away with using them as they did. But [they] came and went, congratulating themselves on having been the guests and confidants of Kissinger.”

  It did not take long before these friendly media pundits began weighing in on Kissinger’s behalf. Publisher Walter Annenberg’s exchange with the national security advisor—transcribed by a White House secretary secretly listening in on the phone call—typified the fawning treatment Kissinger received in public and in private:

  “Henry,” Annenberg said, “you have worked as hard and as diligently with the President as anybody and I regret the journalistic abuse you have been subjected to recently.”

  “That means a lot to me, Walter,” Kissinger replied.

  “All you have to do,” Annenberg added, “is look at Mr. Anderson on TV—and TV is very revealing in terms of character—there is a sneaky, sleazy rat who just deals in hate.”

  “Well,” Kissinger said, “I have spared myself taking a look at him so I don’t really know.”

  “I hope you’re not going to let this upset you,” Annenberg counseled.

  Eventually, after more than a month of ignoring Kissinger, Nixon decided to normalize relations with his national security advisor. The President believed that his aide had finally learned a lesson in humility “because he took such a horrible beating from his erstwhile friends” in the media over “the Anderson Papers.” The result, Nixon told Haldeman, was to “put Henry in his place a little more about leaks.”

  Fittingly enough, the President marked his rapprochement with Kissinger by using him to plant a story to undermine Jack Anderson. Nixon informed Kissinger that “it was a good time” to leak to “a competitor” of Anderson selected portions of classified CIA intelligence that buttressed the ad
ministration’s actions during the recent India-Pakistan War. Two days later, columnist Joseph Alsop, a Kissinger friend, cited “the CIA’s daily reports to the White House” to justify the administration’s covert support for Pakistan. “It can be stated on positive authority that the U.S. government had ‘conclusive proof’ of India’s intention to crush” and “dismember” Pakistan, Alsop wrote. The columnist, who was frequently wrong but rarely in doubt, stated that this “unchallengeable” CIA intelligence virtually compelled the administration’s tilt toward Pakistan.

  In fact, this “unchallengeable . . . conclusive proof” turned out to be nothing more than propaganda supplied by an unreliable CIA informant named Moraji Desai, a right-wing Indian politician who was a bitter enemy of Prime Minister Gandhi and whose political and personal bias should have automatically rendered him suspect. Gandhi had fired Desai from her Cabinet two years earlier and he was now a member of her political opposition who retaliated against her by circulating disinformation calculated to undermine her rule. In exchange, the CIA paid him twenty thousand dollars a year. Career professionals in the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department discounted Desai’s dire warnings as exaggerated. But not Nixon and Kissinger. The President believed that Desai’s report was “one of the few really timely pieces of intelligence the CIA had ever given him” and Kissinger continued to praise Desai years later—even after his “intelligence” had proved false—as “a source whose reliability we had never had any reason to doubt and which I do not question today.” Indeed, Kissinger said that “these reports of Indian deliberations” were “among the most important reasons for our policy.” But according to a top diplomat involved in the case, “Nixon and Kissinger were virtually alone in the U.S. government in interpreting [this information] as they did.”

  As happened earlier in Vietnam and would later happen in Iraq, career professionals in the government were ignored or demoted for their dissent, while facts were shaped by politics rather than the other way around. The Desai “intelligence fitted right into a prejudice,” one administration official explained. “It gave Henry [Kissinger] and Nixon a chance to do what they wanted to do.” Meantime, leaks of classified material were orchestrated from the top when they buttressed administration policy—and condemned when they challenged it. As The New York Times dryly noted, unlike the leak to Jack Anderson, “there was no indication . . . that a security investigation had been ordered to determine the source of the ‘unchallengeable’ information cited by Mr. Alsop.”

  Nonetheless, despite all of the administration’s efforts—political, military, propagandistic—Pakistan’s army was quickly overrun by India’s vastly superior armed forces. Less than two weeks after instigating the war, Pakistan surrendered in a humiliating rout. Eastern Pakistan achieved independence as the nation of Bangladesh. General Yahya, who was in a drunken stupor throughout much of the fighting, resigned in disgrace and spent the next five years under house arrest. Military coups and political executions would continue to haunt Pakistan decades into the future.

  History ultimately vindicated Anderson’s warnings about the administration’s recklessness during the India-Pakistan conflict. The President made a “decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship,” Kissinger later acknowledged, and Nixon ultimately admitted that the United States had come “close to nuclear war.” Both men defended their belligerence as essential for courting China as an ally. In fact, however, what motivated the Chinese to seek closer ties to the United States was not America’s support of Pakistan but China’s need to counter the Soviet Union. “Through their misreading of the crisis, and their pro-Pakistan bias, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger succeeded in needlessly transforming a regional dispute into one which threatened to become a great power showdown,” one scholar wrote. “From any standpoint,” another analyst concluded, “Nixon and Kissinger’s policy” was “replete with error, misjudgment, emotionalism, and unnecessary risk-taking . . . No national interest remotely warranted the risks [they] ran.”

  After the confrontation ended, Nixon assured Kissinger that “the Indians will come around.” They did—but not as the President hoped. “The American decision to send a nuclear aircraft carrier task-force to the Bay of Bengal,” an advisor to Prime Minister Gandhi wrote, “led to an acceleration of the Indian nuclear programme and eventually to the testing of a nuclear device.” Pakistan inevitably followed by developing its own atomic arsenal and then supplied nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, rogue nations with ties to anti-American terrorists. The roots of this proliferation could be traced to the disastrous policies of the India-Pakistan War that Anderson had helped expose. “The Anderson Papers,” one scholar concluded, “were an appropriate postscript to a sorry chapter in U.S. diplomacy.”

  But the Anderson papers also represented a victory—of the columnist over the President, of the news media over the government, of disclosure over deception. “It is not the function of a secrecy system to shield public officials from accountability for their tantrums, folly or mindlessness,” historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote. “By outlining the ‘tilt’ policy only behind locked doors, the Nixon Administration deprived Congress and the electorate of the opportunity—one might say the right—to discuss President Nixon’s pro-Pakistan program on its merits. This was the unpardonable sin and some anonymous, disgusted and courageous bureaucrat, with the help of Jack Anderson, was trying to rectify the situation.”

  After years of covering others in relative anonymity, Anderson finally became a newsmaker himself, a celebrity who graced magazine covers and commanded soaring readership, lucrative lecture invitations, and lengthy profiles by other journalists. “Now, like the Pentagon, he has earned the distinction of having a sheaf of secret papers named after him,” The New Yorker observed, “and he is unquestionably an institution in his own right.” In the Oval Office, Kissinger complained to the President that “Anderson, who is a skunk, has become a hero.” The reason for the columnist’s success was simple, Newsweek reported: “Anderson has the largest and most varied network of sources in all of newspaperdom” and his latest “revelations capped a long series of blockbusters that have both infuriated and titillated the Washington Establishment.” According to The Washington Star:

  Television networks are vying for him as a guest on early-morning and late-night talk programs; his name and current exploits are spread across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers . . . Anderson’s patience, determination and non-stop muckraking have paid off . . . prov[ing] him the rightful heir to the country’s most popular syndicated newspaper column.

  The acclaim was not universal. Anderson engaged in “a breach of trust, and a breach of security, of the most profound implications,” conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick fumed, one that “goes beyond disloyalty; it sails close to the windward edge of treason.” Indeed, “Jack Anderson is not a journalist,” Kilpatrick declared, but “a sewer pipe”—a statement that brought laughter from the President when Haldeman read it aloud to him. Time called Anderson “Washington’s most persistent sensationalist [who] thrives on contention” and sometimes “takes cheap shots . . . Many of his fellow newsmen regard as frivolous his uneven mixture of muckraking and kiss-and-tell gossip.” Even The Washington Post, which published the “Merry-Go-Round,” mocked Anderson for being “bombastic, loud, [and] evangelical . . . The column, as we all know, shouts. It is abrasive, acerbic, dogmatic, didactic and sometimes a pain.”

  Still, as journalist Mary McGrory observed, Anderson had “surpassed his detractors in celebrity. More people read his secrets than their laments.” The pariah of the press, noted the National Observer, was clearly “savoring what must be the supreme achievement for a veteran newsman always a bit suspicious of and suspected by the Establishment press: Jack Anderson was the most quoted source in Washington.”

  None of it humbled the muckraker. “I didn’t get my information out of a Daniel Ellsberg, who belonged to anothe
r Administration and has been out of government two years,” Anderson bragged publicly. “I got my information from some of Nixon’s own boys.” Now the President and his “boys” were more determined than ever to hunt down Anderson’s source—and punish the newsman who had tormented them for so long.

  9

  SEX, SPIES, BLACKMAIL

  The White House Plumbers were back in business, and they had Jack Anderson to thank for it. President Nixon’s secret dirty tricks operation had lain dormant since the Labor Day weekend of 1971, when operatives broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an unsuccessful effort to find evidence of drug use and sexual perversion by the Pentagon whistleblower. After botching the job, the Plumbers had been given little to do for three months. But in the final days of the year, Anderson’s publication of highly classified documents about the administration’s secret tilt toward Pakistan led the President to try once again to plug embarrassing leaks. The order to bring the Plumbers back was issued at the highest levels of the White House.

  The leak investigation began less than twenty-four hours after Anderson’s first India-Pakistan column was published, when White House aide John Ehrlichman received an urgent phone call. The President and Henry Kissinger had learned of the Anderson exposé at an international summit and were “beside themselves with rage over the leak.” According to Ehrlichman, Kissinger persuaded Nixon to “launch a full-scale investigation of Anderson’s penetration” of their inner circle. It was not just that “Henry’s quoted tirades were . . . intemperate and embarrassing,” Ehrlichman explained. “Worse, this was evidence that someone had given Jack Anderson the secret minutes of the meeting[s].”