Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Attorney General Mitchell was carefully noncommittal, only mumbling, “Mm-hmm.”

  The President plunged ahead, once again harking back to the Hiss case, which was exposed by his gay accuser, Whittaker Chambers. “Hiss and Chambers, you know, nobody knows that, but that’s a fact how that began,” Nixon recalled. “They were both—that way.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Mitchell mumbled once again.

  “That relationship sometimes poisons a lot of these things,” the President explained.

  “Homosexuality destroyed” the Greeks and Romans, Nixon had lectured his aides a few months earlier: “Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates. You know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags.

  “Now, I think Anderson—I’m just guessing—but if there’s any possibility of this, John, that can be key.” After all, Radford “may be under blackmail” to Anderson.

  Ehrlichman obediently offered to “slide into” the topic of homosexuality during the yeoman’s next scheduled interrogation. “You never know what you’re going to find,” the President pointed out.

  The next day, White House aide Young summoned Pentagon investigator Stewart to the Plumbers’ office in the basement of the Executive Office Building. There, Stewart said, Young ordered him to interrogate Radford “at once” in order to “establish” that he had a “homosexual relationship with Anderson.” Young “told me he wanted me to develop and prove that there was a homosexual relationship between Jack Anderson and Radford,” Stewart recalled.

  The Defense Department security agent was no friend of Anderson: for nearly a year, Stewart had relentlessly used interrogations and polygraphs in an effort to track down “traitor” Anderson’s sources and stop that “bastard” from publishing classified information. Nevertheless, the Pentagon investigator refused the order to delve into Anderson’s sex life. Stewart complained that the White House had instructed him “not to see what might be there, but to ensure that I found a homosexual relationship. When I said I wouldn’t do it, Young got mad. ‘Damn it, damn it, the President is jumping up and down and he wants this and we’re always telling him everything can’t be done. The President is mad at us and we’re telling him it can’t be done.’ ” Stewart said that Young was so upset that he, too, literally jumped up and down: “This came from the President. It’s the President’s order.” But Stewart refused to budge and his Pentagon supervisors backed him up; Nixon’s order to investigate “homosexual tendencies,” said Stewart’s boss, was just too “far out and ridiculous” to pursue.

  Ehrlichman called Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to complain—and secretly recorded the conversation. The Pentagon chief pointed out that “there’s nothing to indicate homosexuality” and argued that if Radford invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and “goes out and tells the press that that’s what we’re running here, I think we just get in a hell of a lot of—we blow the lid.”

  But Ehrlichman countered that the Chief Executive was adamant: “The President has instructed me to go on this.”

  “On the homosexuality?” Laird asked incredulously.

  “Yes sir, he certainly did,” Ehrlichman responded. “It was his idea.”

  Laird warned that “this will be an embarrassment for the President” and that it would be a public relations disaster “to break [in the media] on the basis of this guy refusing to answer questions on homosexuality.”

  “Mel, I see your point,” Ehrlichman responded, “and I appreciate the hazard that you’re suggesting and I will take it up with the President.”

  Nixon, however, would not back down. He quizzed aides about hooking up Radford to a polygraph “to check on a possible homosexual angle” and instructed Attorney General Mitchell to be sure investigators were “tailing Anderson” and “surveilling [Radford’s] house to see whether Anderson’s still calling.” The fact that the reporter continued to meet with the sailor even “after he knew that [we] were onto him,” Mitchell observed, “would indicate that Anderson has a pretty strong hold on this boy.”

  Two days later, Ehrlichman recommended “keeping [Radford] under surveillance in the hope of catching him in bed with Jack Anderson sometime.” The President approved the plan.

  So the Plumbers followed orders and doggedly investigated Anderson’s sex life. Young interrogated Radford with “an obsessive line of questioning that had to do with homosexuality,” according to a government official who saw the still-classified transcript: “I got the impression that, well, maybe they felt this would explain the kid’s [motivation].”

  Young and Ehrlichman also zeroed in on the subject of homosexuality while interrogating Radford’s commanding officers, suggesting that the yeoman’s “best friend” in the Pentagon was “quite effeminate” and that “Anderson might have a handle on him” because of “sexual deviation.” One navy supervisor was astonished by the suggestion: “Homosexuality? Oh, absolutely not. And I think that after nearly 30 years in the navy of watching men at extremely close range that I could spot them.” Said another of Radford’s commanding officers: “Chuck is not the big manly type or anything, but nine-tenths of the navy yeomen are that way. Who else wants to be a typist?”

  Finally, Defense Secretary Laird made a special trip to the White House to meet with the President and persuaded him to withdraw his written request for “one more polygraph” of Radford about “homosexual relations.” But Nixon’s staff continued to investigate whether “any homosexual activity” occurred between Anderson and the yeoman. The President’s sexual obsession was “bullshit,” Laird later said, but Nixon got “carried away” and “wanted heads to roll” no matter what.

  In some ways, the Nixon administration’s probe of Anderson’s sex life was poetic justice. After all, over the years the muckraker himself had investigated allegations of homosexuality involving Haldeman and Ehrlichman, J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and aides of Ronald Reagan. Still, Anderson actually published only what he could document, and he lacked the coercive power of the state to wiretap, polygraph, or jail his targets.

  In the end, of course, Nixon’s men found no evidence of homosexuality by Anderson or his source. But the fact that the President himself had ordered government agents to investigate such intimacies demonstrated just how far Nixon was now willing to go in pursuit of his quarry. Indeed, in the basement office of the White House Plumbers, operatives posted the name Jack Anderson on a cork bulletin board to inspire them on against their foe, who had assumed the role of a kind of Nixonian public enemy number one.

  Meanwhile, the interrogation of yeoman Radford continued. Ultimately, investigators did extract a confession, but not the one they expected. The navy clerk eventually admitted that he had been spying on the White House but claimed that he was doing so not for Jack Anderson but—amazingly—for the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, which distrusted Nixon and Kissinger for their clandestine foreign policy initiatives. In all, Radford said, he stole more than five thousand pages of highly classified documents, secretly removing them at night from interoffice envelopes in the White House mailroom and from “burn bags,” the contents of which were supposed to be destroyed. On one trip with Kissinger to New Delhi, the stenographer stated, he grabbed so many secret files that his suitcases could not hold them all, so he sent them back to Washington by diplomatic pouch, tightly sealing the envelopes and marking them on the outside with a concealed code to ensure that nobody tampered with them. Radford even admitted swiping documents from Kissinger’s briefcase while they were flying together aboard the presidential airplane, Air Force One.

  The yeoman insisted that he was operating at the behest of his supervisors in the Defense Department, to whom he turned over the purloined papers. He said Pentagon higher-ups repeatedly complimented him on his efforts and provided him with shopping lists of what records to steal next. The sailor also stated that his superiors showed him how to cover his tracks by removing telltale signs from the filched documents that might giv
e away their espionage operation. “Be careful,” Radford’s commanding officer warned, “and don’t get caught.”

  In the Oval Office, Ehrlichman informed the President and his top advisors of Radford’s incendiary allegations. The yeoman “turned out to be, in effect, a reverse agent,” Ehrlichman explained, working not only for Anderson but also “for the Pentagon inside” the White House. Ehrlichman reported that Radford admitted that he “has systematically stolen documents out of Henry’s briefcase, [out of] people’s desks—anyplace and everyplace in the [White House] he could get his hands on—and has duplicated them and turned them over to the Joint Chiefs.”

  The President was alarmed but also wondered if Radford had concocted the story to try to wiggle out of trouble for leaking to Anderson. Nixon instructed Ehrlichman to interview the yeoman’s military superiors to see if his claim could be verified.

  The next day, Radford’s commanding officer, Admiral Robert Welander, was summoned to Ehrlichman’s third-floor office in the West Wing of the White House, directly above the Oval Office. A bulky audio machine with a giant spool of tape sat on a coffee table between the two men, a large microphone sticking out from its stand to record the interview. Initially, the admiral tried to blame his typist for the spying. But under Ehrlichman’s deft questioning, Welander corroborated and expanded upon Radford’s “extraordinary account of his career as a thief in the employ of the nation’s military commanders,” as Ehrlichman later put it. The admiral confirmed that his assistant had “surreptitiously” pocketed “important and significant” paperwork—including crumpled rough drafts and discarded carbon copies—from trash bins and burn bags at the White House. Welander acknowledged that he not only knew about this pilfering but personally directed Radford to target sensitive records intended for the President’s eyes only, such as confidential minutes about troop withdrawals from Vietnam and notes of Kissinger’s clandestine meetings with Chinese premier Chou En-lai. Welander even admitted that he carefully hand-delivered these purloined files to his boss, Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then locked them in a special Pentagon safe outside Moorer’s office. “I’m obviously not happy about having to relate that,” Welander confessed, because it was “very personally embarrassing to me and I think it could be potentially embarrassing to Admiral Moorer.”

  Moorer’s involvement greatly increased the gravity of the scandal. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was a hard-liner who opposed Nixon’s withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and disparaged Kissinger as being soft on Communism. Was Moorer’s spying part of a larger military cabal to thwart the policies of America’s civilian leaders?

  Less than an hour after securing Welander’s confession, Ehrlichman rushed to brief the President in the Executive Office Building. Moorer’s deputy “confirms practically everything that the yeoman testified to,” the White House aide announced. “I would say that there’s no question that this yeoman was encouraged” to go through wastebaskets and fish out whatever documents he could find.

  “And they knew that he was stealing from Kissinger?” the President asked.

  “Oh, they had to!” Ehrlichman replied. “They had to.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Nixon exclaimed.

  The President was especially aghast that Radford had taken documents out of Kissinger’s briefcase during flights aboard Air Force One. “I’ve got stuff in my briefcases that are—that, that I don’t think that [anyone] should ever see,” Nixon said. “Never. All my notes and things, you know. Things you just think about and then discard . . . Oh my God.”

  The Chief Executive was incensed by Admiral Welander’s betrayal: “Can him. Can him. Can him. Get him the hell out of here.”

  Nixon and his advisors now began to question who else was involved in this military spy ring. They were particularly suspicious of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the blunt-spoken naval commander of the Joint Chiefs, who had complained that his men were needlessly put at risk by the President’s sudden decision to send a navy armada to the India-Pakistan front. “Zumwalt was the recipient of some documents” stolen by Radford, Ehrlichman informed Nixon, and Attorney General Mitchell agreed that “Zumwalt was involved” in the spying as well. The Joint Chiefs were all “a bunch of shits,” the President decided, and Zumwalt was “the biggest shit of all.”

  Nixon also wondered about General Alexander Haig, who worked as Kissinger’s deputy but who kept close ties with the Joint Chiefs. Widely regarded as the Pentagon’s man in the White House, Haig was also known to inform his old military colleagues about sensitive matters that Kissinger tried to keep hidden. “I am afraid that Haig must have known about this operation,” the President thought. “It seems unlikely he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t have known.” Nixon pondered what to do. “Is Haig wiretapped?” the President asked. “Why not?” Haldeman responded, suggesting that a tap on Haig might be a good idea. “It’s not going to hurt anyone at all,” Mitchell agreed. “We can do that.” “I would do that,” Nixon instructed. Haig “knows damn well something’s going on,” the President realized. “The fact that we’re not talking [to him about it], see, it’s gonna worry him more [than a direct confrontation]. I think the strategy is to let it simmer [so] everybody [will] worry . . . Just let it rot.”

  Nixon concluded that the entire affair was “a federal offense of the highest order,” nothing less than a Pentagon “espionage system” with the military “setting up their own Gestapo” and “spying on the President.” Attorney General Mitchell agreed and thought it raised the “specter of [a] military takeover.”

  “If it was in a movie, you wouldn’t believe it,” Nixon marveled.

  The President and his advisors wondered if the leak to Anderson originated with the military command itself.

  They “knew he knew Jack Anderson,” Ehrlichman pointed out.

  “Who?” Nixon asked.

  “Both [of Radford’s navy superiors] knew that he had a social relationship with Jack Anderson” well before his exposés were published, Ehrlichman clarified.

  “It’s almost as if they, they meant to do something,” Haldeman observed.

  “That’s what I fear,” the President agreed.

  “The Joint Chiefs,” Haldeman said. “Think of that story.”

  Nixon thought about it and did not like the implications: “Now wait a minute. Now wait a minute. I’m suggesting that it was Moorer [who has responsibility for the] Anderson column. It’s possible, right?”

  But in the end, the President’s men determined that Moorer had not authorized the leak to Anderson. After all, passing classified documents to the newsman would have needlessly jeopardized the Pentagon’s espionage operation. Haldeman pointed out that any possible benefit from Anderson’s exposés would have been “a poor substitute” for the unfettered access the navy clerk was already providing the Joint Chiefs.

  Simply put, the military had “trained” Radford in “how to steal,” White House aide Young concluded, “and he stole”—first for the Pentagon, then for Anderson—until it all spun “out of control.” Ehrlichman decided that Radford’s espionage for the Joint Chiefs had preconditioned the yeoman so that he likely “didn’t feel too badly about turning this stuff over to Anderson because [he already] was a spy” and probably regarded “the morals involved in one [a]s about the same as the other.” Thus “Anderson’s cultivation of the boy” meant “that both the Joint Chiefs and Jack Anderson were beneficiaries of Radford’s rummaging in Henry’s files and wastebaskets.”

  Clearly, Moorer would have to be confronted about his culpability in the spying. Attorney General Mitchell volunteered for the delicate task. The nation’s top law enforcement officer phoned the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and told him to “get his ass over to the Justice Department,” as Mitchell later put it. Moorer duly showed up in the attorney general’s office and did not deny that the spying took place but tried to blame his underlings for it. Mitchell concluded that “Moorer was up to his eyeballs” in the espionage.

>   But what should be done about it? One option, the President realized, would be to “use this as a device, of course, to clean out the Joint Chiefs.” Nixon’s Justice Department could even file criminal charges: “Prosecuting is a possibility for the Joint Chiefs,” the President allowed. “Now I have to think about it.” Yeoman Radford, “obviously, could be court-martialed” for his spying, Ehrlichman pointed out, or “given immunity” in exchange for his testimony against higher-ups. “Could we put him under some kind of arrest?” Haldeman asked. “We could,” Attorney General Mitchell replied, but Ehrlichman interrupted: “This is a little bit like trying to catch a skunk.” Nixon agreed: “That’s right. Exactly right.”

  The President seemed more focused on going after Jack Anderson than after the military officers engaged in espionage. “Let me ask this first,” Nixon said. “Is Anderson guilty of anything?”

  “Yes,” Mitchell stated.

  “What?” the President wondered.

  “He’s guilty of possession of these documents.”

  “Can we really prosecute?” Nixon pressed.

  “You can prosecute him—not for the publication but for the possession” of classified papers, the attorney general replied.

  Haldeman was enthusiastic. “We certainly have Anderson,” he declared.

  The President ordered his staff to investigate what laws Anderson may have broken. Young put together a memo reporting that “our favorite columnist” could be charged with theft of government property. “For obvious political reasons, I am not advocating the above at this time,” Young wrote; but if convicted, Anderson could be “imprisoned up to 10 years. The Statute of Limitations under this statute is 5 years.”