Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Liddy agreed: “Too iffy again. It would be only one out of 50 or even 100 tablets” that would be poisoned, “and months could go by before [Anderson] swallowed it.” Not to mention the “danger that an innocent member of his family might take the pill” instead. So, Liddy said, like LSD on Anderson’s steering wheel, aspirin roulette was “discussed and discarded” as well.

  Finally, Liddy had enough pussyfooting around. Anderson “should just become a fatal victim of the notorious Washington street-crime rate,” Liddy declared. “He would be assaulted, his wallet and watch removed” to make it appear that the motive was robbery. No one disagreed. “Drastic problems,” Liddy later explained, “sometimes demand drastic solutions.”

  On this happy note, the men ended their lengthy lunch at the Hay-Adams. “I gave Dr. Gunn a hundred-dollar bill, from the Committee to Re-elect the President intelligence funds, as a fee for his services,” Liddy recalled. The payment was made “at Hunt’s suggestion . . . to protect Dr. Gunn’s image as ‘retired’ ” from the CIA.

  But who would actually do the dirty deed and fatally mug Anderson?

  Hunt decided to subcontract the job to soldiers he had previously signed up for the CIA invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, men who were now working for the Nixon campaign. So “the assassination of Jack Anderson,” Liddy said, would “be carried out by Cubans already recruited for the intelligence arm of the Committee to Re-elect the President.”

  But there was a gigantic problem: the ubiquitous Anderson was so well connected in the netherworld of covert operations that he actually knew two of the Cubans selected to execute him. More astonishing still, one of these intended assassins actually turned out to be a longtime friend and source of the columnist who had even stayed in the Anderson home as a houseguest. Nixon’s operatives pondered their dilemma. What should have been a simple task—bumping off Anderson—was turning into a colossal headache.

  Hunt explained the problem to Liddy: the White House might not “think it wise to entrust so sensitive a matter” as killing Anderson to his Cuban friends.

  Liddy’s response was unhesitating: “If necessary, I’ll do it” myself. After all, Liddy said, “if the Cubans were ruled out, I was the best man for the job, considering my own FBI and martial arts training. We didn’t want to make it look like anything more than another Washington street-crime statistic, remember, so no sophisticated weaponry could be employed” anyway.

  Although Liddy owned an untraceable 9-millimeter pistol designed for use “when White House superiors tasked me with an assassination,” he decided instead on a low-tech approach: to “knife” Anderson or break his neck. It would be “justifiable homicide,” Liddy believed, because Anderson was “one of those mutant strains of columnist” whose “systematic leaking of top-secret information rendered the effective conduct of American foreign policy virtually impossible.” Simply put, the columnist had “gone too far and he had to be stopped.”

  “I know it violates the sensibilities of the innocent and tender-minded,” Liddy explained, “but in the real world, you sometimes have to employ extreme and extralegal methods to preserve the very system whose laws you’re violating.”

  Did the White House really plot to assassinate Jack Anderson? The story seems almost too outlandish to be true and several Nixon aides questioned whether it ever occurred. But both G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt admitted their involvement in the conspiracy. To be sure, Liddy was an outrageous character, a flamboyantly mustachioed macho man who thrilled to the radio speeches of Adolf Hitler and enjoyed showing off his testosterone-addled manliness with such feats of daring as eating a wild rat and holding his hand over a candle flame until his “flesh turned black” and the air filled with “the scent of burning meat.” Still, as Nixon aide Leonard Garment acknowledged, “Liddy has been one of the truth-tellers among the Watergate survivors.” No less a critic than Bob Woodward of The Washington Post called Liddy both “credible” and “meticulous.”

  Hunt had a more devious reputation but no obvious incentive to implicate himself needlessly in a murder conspiracy. His testimony about Jack Anderson, like Liddy’s, seems consistent with the rest of the available evidence. “I was a little astonished to think that they were focusing on a correspondent, however unpopular he might be,” Hunt later said of the Anderson plot. But in the Nixon White House, Anderson “was regarded as the enemy,” Hunt explained. “Colson just hated him . . . And the more that Colson knew about Anderson, the more resolved he was to put an end to it by whatever means.” Still, any order to murder Anderson, Hunt believed, must have come “directly from the President . . . If Nixon said ‘Chuck, I want you to do this,’ he would do it or he would find people to do it for him.”

  Indeed, Colson’s blind allegiance to his president was as legendary as his ruthlessness. Haldeman called Colson “the President’s personal ‘hit man’ ” who “encouraged the dark impulses in Nixon’s mind and acted on those impulses instead of ignoring them and letting them die.” At Nixon’s behest, Colson had already ordered subordinates to firebomb a Washington think tank and forge documents to implicate President Kennedy in the assassination of a foreign leader. “I would do anything Richard Nixon asks me to do—period,” Colson said. “I had always followed Nixon’s order . . . whatever the cost.” According to Ehrlichman, Colson was the one aide the President could count on to “do this or that dastardly deed. Someone who would salute him and say, ‘Yes, Mr. President, sir,’ and get it done.” Nixon agreed: “He’ll do anything,” the Chief Executive marveled, “I mean anything.”

  The exact role of President Nixon in the Anderson assassination plot may never be known. So far, no White House tapes have emerged to demonstrate that Nixon himself ordered the murder of his longtime journalistic enemy. But in the past, the President had shown no hesitation to sacrifice innocent lives abroad, from Vietnam to Pakistan to Chile, or to order numerous illegal acts at home in explosions of fury that his staff could disregard only at their peril.

  In short, it is difficult to imagine Nixon’s closest advisors plotting to execute America’s leading investigative reporter without at least the tacit approval of their president. Hunt, for one, believed that Colson simply didn’t have the “balls” to order Anderson’s assassination without Nixon’s prior authorization. Historian Stanley Kutler described Colson’s role in the Nixon White House in similar, if more tactful, terms. “Colson rarely acted on his own initiative,” Kutler wrote. “His deeds, like Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s, correlate with his notes of his regular meetings with the President.” Nixon was a micromanager who hired zealous younger subordinates to ensure that they would carry out his will. The chain of command was clearly established, Haldeman said: “Nixon tells Colson, Colson orders Hunt, Hunt executes.” Thus “Colson only fed off Nixon,” Haldeman realized, for “if there were no Nixon, there would have been no Colson in the White House.” Ultimately, Kutler concluded, when it came to the darkest crimes of his Praetorian Guard, “Richard Nixon commanded the patrol and dictated its missions.”

  At the end of March, after meeting with the CIA’s poison expert, Hunt and Liddy reviewed the strengths and weakness of various methods of bumping off Anderson. A paper outlining the full range of deadly options “was written up in a memo and sent to the White House,” Liddy said.

  A few days later, at lunch with Hunt, Liddy again “brought up the matter of killing Jack Anderson” but this time Hunt “told me to forget it,” Liddy recalled. Hunt explained that he had delivered his report briefing Colson on their recommendations for getting rid of the columnist, but that the White House decided it would be “unproductive” to do so at that time. The worst of the ITT scandal was at last starting to blow over and Hunt thought that Colson “was by now involved in other far more important matters.” Liddy, accustomed to following orders, inquired no further. “That was the end of the affair,” Hunt concluded.

  No matter. Liddy and Hunt now had a more urgent assignment: bugging the Democratic Party h
eadquarters in the Watergate office building.

  15

  WATERGATE

  As the Senate wrapped up its hearings on the ITT scandal, President Nixon’s men decided to break into the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington. This secret bugging was just part of a much larger espionage and sabotage operation instigated by the President himself against his adversaries that included burglary, forgery, surveillance, infiltration, and hate-filled anonymous letters and phone calls. The “true beginning of Watergate,” Senator Edward Kennedy believed, was the ITT scandal that had just preceded it; and Jack Anderson’s incriminating memo proved to be “the first ‘smoking gun’ of the long Watergate affair.”

  Nixon decided to target Democratic Party chairman Lawrence O’Brien, who had been attacking the White House about ITT in what the President feared was “only the beginning of a much greater assault” before the election: “I told my staff that we should come up with the kind of imaginative dirty tricks that our Democratic opponents used against us and others so effectively in previous campaigns.” Nixon regarded O’Brien as the Democrats’ “grand master” of political wizardry, “a partisan in the most extreme and effective sense” who had been “tutored in the Kennedy political machine” and would “hit hard” against Republicans in the upcoming race. Indeed, said White House counsel John Dean, O’Brien was “second only to Jack Anderson as a target of ugly thoughts—bitterly resented, even feared.”

  Nixon’s obsession with O’Brien had festered for the past dozen years. According to a White House operative, the President’s advisors “blamed O’Brien for leaking the story” of the Howard Hughes loan scandal to Anderson on the eve of the 1960 presidential election. Now Nixon learned that the hated O’Brien was himself secretly on Hughes’s payroll. The President was outraged at what he felt was the Democrat’s double standard. “We’re going to nail O’Brien on this, one way or the other,” Nixon vowed. “O’Brien’s not going to get away with it [because] we’re going to get proof of his relationship with Hughes.” According to John Ehrlichman, the President pounded his desk in the Oval Office and announced, “I want to put O’Brien in jail. And I want to do it before the election.”

  In truth, the motive for bugging O’Brien was as much defensive as offensive. The President also feared that O’Brien’s link to Hughes would enable the Democratic strategist to learn about the billionaire’s most recent $100,000 gift to Nixon, which the President had already partially spent and desperately wanted to keep hidden. “Having been badly burned by my exposé of the Hughes loan,” Anderson recalled, “Nixon was particularly sensitive about [his] Hughes connection. He didn’t want to be burned again.” Yet the muckraker had once again discovered—and reported—the President’s latest Hughes payment, writing in his column that there was “documentary evidence” of the cash transaction and suggesting it was a bribe for favorable administration decisions. “That goddamned Hughes thing,” Nixon exclaimed a few hours after Anderson’s revelation was published. Well, “Larry O’Brien—he was on the payroll,” too.

  On March 30, 1972, Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, approved the plan to break into the Democratic National Committee and bug O’Brien’s phone. According to Mitchell’s deputy, Jeb Magruder, the President personally authorized the spying, telling Mitchell, “You need to do that.” The “primary purpose of the break-in,” Magruder said, was to discover what O’Brien knew about the Hughes cash that Nixon had received—and to make sure that the secret was kept “under wraps” so it wouldn’t interfere with his reelection. White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman thought it was “absurd” to “take such a risk” as burglary. “But on matters pertaining to Hughes,” Haldeman knew, “Nixon sometimes seemed to lose touch with reality.”

  Amazingly, just two weeks later, while Nixon’s men were still planning the Watergate break-in, Anderson found out in advance about the bugging scheme. A New York journalist who sometimes collaborated with Anderson passed on a thirdhand rumor about a Republican espionage operation against O’Brien. The columnist made a few phone calls but was unable to confirm the allegation. He assigned a legman to investigate further, but suspected that it was a “bum tip” because his source’s information was vague and in parts garbled. Besides, Anderson figured that anyone who eavesdropped on O’Brien’s telephone calls would merely get “an ear full of bullshit” because O’Brien was “too smart to talk strategy on the phone.” In the end, Anderson wrote, “unable to score a breakthrough and too busy to spend more time chasing phantoms, we let the thing drop.” If he had pursued the lead more aggressively, perhaps the Nixon campaign would have postponed or canceled its ill-fated break-in. Anderson’s investigative failure would prove more effective in destroying his longtime political enemy than all his exposés from the previous two decades.

  Just days after plotting Anderson’s assassination, Nixon operatives E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy took charge of the Watergate operation. Hunt used four Cuban American undercover men from Miami—the same intended to execute Anderson—to carry out the bugging. Coincidentally, Anderson had long ago befriended one of them, a swarthy soldier of fortune named Frank Sturgis, whose unsuccessful efforts to topple Fidel Castro had been sympathetically portrayed by the reporter in the early 1960s. The gun-toting, muscular Sturgis once even spent several nights in Anderson’s guest room during a visit to Washington.

  In an even more remarkable coincidence, just a few hours before Sturgis and his gang broke into O’Brien’s office, Anderson stumbled upon them at Washington’s National Airport, where they had flown in from Florida for the operation. The chance meeting occurred as Anderson was racing to catch a plane to Cleveland to speak to a college journalism fraternity. The burglars, eavesdropping equipment in tow, were on their way to the Watergate and their rendezvous with infamy. “Frankie,” Anderson called out to his old friend, who turned his back in an unsuccessful effort to hide from the prying newsman. Anderson went up to Sturgis and extended his hand, forcing him to reluctantly introduce his co-conspirator, Virgilio Gonzalez, who was carrying luggage filled with the tools he would soon use to pick the lock of the Democrats’ office door. “What are you doing in town?” Anderson asked. “Well,” Sturgis stammered, “I’m going to visit friends.” Anderson realized that Sturgis was “chagrined to meet me, so I suspected something was up. ‘Private business. Top secret. Top secret,’ he explained tersely, with a conspiratorial smile.” The columnist did not have time to chat further—he was running late as usual—but he “made a mental note to check up” when he returned to Washington.

  Eight hours later, Sturgis and his felonious Cuban compadres were arrested at gunpoint by police inside the Democratic Party headquarters. Their equipment for wiretapping, lock-picking, and surreptitious photography was confiscated as evidence, along with their walkie-talkies, canisters of Mace, and cache of sequentially numbered hundred-dollar bills. The scandal that would become known as Watergate had begun.

  The next morning, Anderson read about the burglary in the newspaper and realized “what Frankie’s ‘private business’ had been.” The columnist rushed to D.C.’s old red-brick jailhouse, where he gained entrance by signing a prison logbook claiming that he was a “Friend” on a “Social Visit” to see one of the inmates. Although the burglars had given aliases to police, Anderson asked to speak to the men arrested at the Democratic National Committee and eventually found himself talking to Sturgis through the jail’s glass partition.

  “Frank,” Anderson asked solicitously, “what happened?”

  “Jack, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you,” Sturgis replied.

  Anderson figured he would have better luck if he could get Sturgis out of the jailhouse and away from his partners in crime. “Frankie, you’re always getting into trouble when I’m not around to watch over you,” Anderson gently chided. “Why don’t you come home and stay with us?” The muckraker offered to post bond for Sturgis and put him up once again as a guest in the Anderson home. Sturg
is was amenable, Anderson remembered, if only to avoid the jail’s “disagreeable bugs and cockroaches.” But the Cuban soldier of fortune warned his friend that he would not talk about Watergate because “we swore not to discuss this” and “we’re sticking together.” Anderson “didn’t push it,” he said, because “I figured I’d get him in my house [and] work him over. I’m smarter than he is and I’ll know all he knows about it before he leaves, probably before breakfast” the next morning.

  The columnist filed a motion in court to have Sturgis released into his custody. “Sitting in front of the judge, I could barely keep a straight face,” Anderson later confessed. He testified that Sturgis posed no risk to the community and would not flee while staying at his home. “It was only a cheap burglary,” Anderson argued. “I hate to see him in jail.” “[An] audible groan of cynicism rolled through the press ranks,” the muckraker later wrote. “The Justice Department, distrusting my charitable intentions, suspected I might pump him for more answers and vigorously objected to releasing Sturgis in my care.” The presiding judge decided that “it wouldn’t be a good idea for Frankie to waltz out of jail on the arm of Jack Anderson,” and denied his motion. The newsman left the courtroom empty-handed.

  Meanwhile, the President and his men quickly moved to suppress the scandal. In the hours after the Watergate arrests, Liddy rushed to Nixon’s campaign headquarters and began shredding documents. Hunt destroyed incriminating materials at his home and fled town. The Plumbers’ White House safe, filled with extensive evidence of their criminality—including a “large volume of material” about their various plots against Jack Anderson—was emptied out, its sensitive paperwork burned. The burglars’ remaining eavesdropping equipment was thrown in the Potomac River.

  At the same time, Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler dismissed it all as a “third-rate burglary” and cautioned reporters that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is.” The President told television cameras that the “White House has had no involvement whatever” in the crime. “We never set out to construct a planned, conscious cover-up,” Haldeman later wrote. “We reacted to Watergate just as we had to the Pentagon Papers, ITT, and the [Vietnam] operations. We were highly sensitive to any negative PR, and our natural reaction was to contain, or minimize, any potential political damage.”