After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  It would not, as it turns out, have been “perfectly proper” to accept a campaign contribution from a foreign national. It would have been illegal. But the sum itself is so trivial, $30,000. One wonders why Stans testified at such length about it. Hugh Sloan, the Finance Committee treasurer, testified at length about it, too. It is not until four volumes later, in the records of the Ervin Committee hearings, that one finds any correspondence that deals with this transaction. It occurs in support of the testimony of Fred Larue, who had paid some of the hush money to the burglars, and who was by then negotiating his plea. Stans had not asked Larue to return any money to any source, it turns out, until May 9, 1973—more than a year after the Finance Committee had accepted it; but less than a month before the Ervin Committee hearings began. And even in his letter of May 9, 1973, Stans did not specify to whom the money was to be returned. Larue simply wanted to return the CREEP money in his possession. His counsel did specify, more or less. The $30,000, Stans’s attorney finally wrote, in acknowledging a letter dated May 16, 1973, from Larue’s attorney, was “paid” to Anna Chennault, for “return to foreign nationals”—nationality, Philippine or other, unspecified.

  The only reason this trivial amount, this $30,000, came to light at all was that it was part of $81,000 in cash that Hugh Sloan was stuck with when the source of the cash in the possession of the Watergate burglars had been traced to those checks endorsed by the Mexican lawyer Manuel Ogarrio. And that, one recalls, was the cash that had interested the Patman Committee. At first, Stans had told the committee staff that the money came from Ogarrio; then, that he could not disclose whom it came from, since they were Texans to whom he had promised anonymity; finally, that he did not know who the donors were. The Patman Committee staff, having coincidentally discovered, at about the same time, that $700,000 in cash had come to CREEP, in a suitcase, from an American corporation by way of Mexico, was at first misled into thinking that the story had to do not with contributions by foreign nationals but with donations by American corporations and citizens (illegally and in secret) by way of foreign banks. As it turned out, the story was both: Americans and foreign nationals. But the committee, lacking its subpoena power, never got Stans or any other CREEP official under oath—as the Ervin Committee, so many months later, did. And that petty $30,000, within the $81,000 (which remained of the original Ogarrio $89,000), came back to haunt Stans, Sloan, Larue, CREEP, Mrs. Chennault, and the country as a whole. On June 23, 1972, Stans had instructed Sloan to give the $81,000 to President Nixon’s personal attorney, Herbert Kalmbach, who gave it to Larue, who happened to use it as part of the hush money. And Larue plea-bargained. So, in whatever disjointed form, the $30,000 had to be accounted for. And it was foreign.

  And thinking foreign, there are anomalies great and small, everywhere one looks. Hugh Sloan explained to the Ervin Committee that he had been unable to give a proper accounting of CREEP funds between April and July 1972, because Kalmbach had been “abroad.” Abroad. There is no reason why the President’s personal attorney and principal fund-raiser should not travel abroad. The height of the political campaign just seems an odd time for his holiday. In his own testimony, Kalmbach always insists, and when he does, elicits sympathy, that he was deceived and “used.” In the memorandum of June 16, 1972, however, there is Kalmbach, returned from abroad, requesting assignments that are “tough and dangerous.” Within days, he was raising, from domestic sources this time, the cash for the hush money. Kalmbach had already raised more than $12 million for the 1972 campaign. A political-matters memorandum as early as October 7, 1971, says, “Kalmbach keeps asking for tough, interesting assignments.” On February 1, 1972, he is reported to have declared himself “willing to run the very high risk of violating the criminal provisions” of campaign-spending legislation.

  And even in what remains of the records of CREEP itself—on file, as required under post-Watergate law, at the Federal Election Commission—one finds both foreign and domestic oddities. What was still until last year the Committee to Re-Elect the President is now called the 1972 Campaign Liquidation Trust. It reports an interest income of $80,000 a year, with this income annually exceeded by expenses—as might be expected in a fund that wants to liquidate. It is only that campaigns normally end with deficits, and that an interest income of $80,000 reflects a lot of capital—which raises the question of who or what has that money now, and by what right. Some domestic curiosities: Until October 1976 the Campaign Liquidation Trust still had on its books a suit against John Dean and his attorney—for the return of $15,100, paid “on or about April 12, 1973.” (The suit was settled with the return of that money to the Trust.) On a single day, May 3, 1973, six months after the President had, after all, been overwhelmingly reelected, the Committee to Re-Elect listed on its books seven separate payments of $3,000 and one of $2,500 to Maurice Stans, as “Salary”—making his salary for that day $23,500; four days later CREEP paid him another salary of $3,000. It paid Stans that sort of salary on a lot of days. More surprisingly, perhaps, CREEP was still paying Hugh Sloan—who made such an issue, before the Ervin Committee and elsewhere, of his resignation on the grounds of conscience, in July 1972, on account of Watergate—considerable sums every month until at least spring 1973. In January 1973, Sloan was still carried on the books as “Treasurer”; but his salary had become “Consulting Fee.” By February, his title had become “Consultant.” On February 15, 1973, Sloan’s consulting fee was $1,320; on February 21, 1973, $1,080, and so on. Unlike John Dean, Sloan was never sued by the Committee to Re-Elect. But Sloan had, after all, handled enormous cash contributions, as treasurer to the Finance Committee, in the 1968 campaign as well; and, unlike Dean, he could be presumed to know in 1972, although he never really told, about the sources of the cash.

  In the records of CREEP on file at the Federal Election Commission, there are only slim indications of contributions from any foreign source. On February 27, 1973 (again, months after Nixon’s reelection), something called “Committee of United States Citizens in Asia for Nixon” did file a registration form. In answer to question (a) “Will this committee operate in more than one state?” the committee replied, “No—only internationally, outside the U.S.” In answer to (d) “Will it support a candidate for President or Vice President in the aggregate amount of $1,000 or more during the calendar year?” the reply was “Yes.” For (e) “Does this committee plan to stay in existence beyond the current calendar year?” another “Yes.” And in answer to (f) “If so, how long?” there is “Perpetually.” Under “Name of bank, repository, etc.,” the reply is “None.” And “List all reports required to be filed by this committee with states and jurisdictions” elicits another “None.” Under a question asking the identity of the committee’s “custodian of books and accounts,” there is “Marshall Hendricks, Lewis Burridge, Anna Chennault.” In its Statement of Affiliated and Connected Organizations, the committee listed “(a) Committee of United States Citizens in Hong Kong for Nixon (b) Committee of United States Citizens in Japan for Nixon (c) Committee of United States Citizens in Korea for Nixon,” and so on.

  There is, on the surface, no absolutely obvious reason why—in late February after the November in which a President, who is constitutionally precluded from serving more than two terms, has already been elected to his second term—citizens should not establish as many Asian branches for his reelection as they like, even listing no “bank, repository, etc.” and with an intention (although this might suggest an echo of the Narrow Escape theory) to remain in existence “perpetually.” But within a month—by March 22, 1973, in fact—the Asia Committee of CREEP and its affiliated committees found themselves, all together, unable to claim contributions in excess of $1,000. Having planned to stay in existence “perpetually,” they nonetheless asked to be allowed to cease to report. The Asia Committee wrote to the Office of Federal Elections, seeking “the approval of your office to cease reporting, until such time in the future as we may have receipts in excess of $1,000,”
That a Nixon campaign committee in Asia should reserve to itself the possibility of such receipts at a “time in the future” raises questions about which one does not care to speculate.

  But it is hardly new that there were irregularities everywhere in the finances of the 1972 campaign. Detail only obscures the logic of historical events. In thinking about international political contributions, the logic has normally gone the other way—contributions by the American government or by American corporations to officials, or parties, or governments abroad. But with the by now almost weekly revelations of payments by American companies to foreign officials in Europe, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, it began to seem highly probable in the very nature of secret cash transactions that some of that money was going to find its way back, and/or that some foreign interests rich enough to afford it were going to lobby, with cash, in America. Taking only defense matters, there was for instance Lockheed: With payments in Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands, the cash seemed to flow in only one direction. In June of this year, however, there were signs that it had, for years, been traveling the other way. The Special Prosecutor’s office revealed that a citizen of Saudi Arabia, having received over the years more than $100 million from Lockheed for his influence in selling aircraft to the Saudis, had contributed $50,000 to Nixon’s 1968 campaign; in May and November 1972, the Saudi citizen withdrew $200 million from his account in Bebe Rebozo’s bank. Because of a “burglary” in Las Vegas, which was reported within a week of the start of the prosecutor’s investigation, the Saudi lobbyist could produce no records of how that $200 million was spent. Or Grumman. On September 13, 1976, there was the former president of Grumman International testifying, under oath, that in 1972 a White House official had suggested that Grumman contribute $1 million to CREEP for the President’s “assistance,” on a forthcoming trip to Honolulu, in getting Japan to buy Grumman fighter planes. In April 1972, a Grumman official had visited the White House to discuss sales of fighter planes to Iran; a month later, on a trip to Iran, Nixon agreed for the first time to sell Iran virtually any weapon it wanted. Signs, anyway, of a rich foreign country that could afford to pay to influence an American decision now and then.

  Looking further back, however, at the Patman hearings on secret foreign bank accounts, one finds, as early as 1968, premonitions of what I think must have happened in 1972. In 1968, well before Nixon’s first inauguration, the Patman Committee already had found “kickbacks by Vietnamese importers to American exporters, involving a huge U.S. corporation. Again, Swiss bank accounts were used.” Assistant Attorney General Fred M. Vinson (who, in 1973, was the attorney for Fred Larue in his tractations, over the $30,000 from a foreign national, with Maurice Stans) testified, in 1968, as the Justice Department expert on these illicit foreign deals. But the scale, then, was different, and the purpose was different. No one suggested, in 1968, that the Vietnamese kickbacks, through foreign banks, went into American politics.

  As, by 1972, I think they clearly did. Turning away from detail, one is struck by the logic overall. It does not make sense, for example, that the President’s fund-raisers would put by far the greatest pressure of any political campaign in our history on so many sources, individual and corporate, and reject a contribution from the most logical of them all: the administration of South Vietnam, which had the most to lose if the President’s opponent (who had announced a willingness to go, it must be remembered, to Hanoi on his knees for peace) actually won. And although the President might have liked to announce the war’s end before any ordinary election, by the time he sent Haig to undo Kissinger’s late October accords, he knew he did not need, in 1972, any peace to win. At the same time, Nixon never seems to have felt any diminution of need for campaign contributions. In the fall of 1968, the South Vietnamese had only to dig in their heels and wait, while the war cost Humphrey the election. By the fall of 1972, if they wanted the support of the administration, I think they had to pay.

  And even the structure of the underlying proposition had occurred, minus only cash, in another context, at least once before: in the secret bombing of Cambodia. The rationale for lying to the American people, and to their elected officials, about the bombing of Cambodia was, it was said at first, national security. But that made no sense. Since the enemy knew, and certainly the Cambodian people who were being bombed would know, Americans were the only people it was being kept secret from. It was then that the entire logic advanced a step, and the circle closed. Sihanouk, the administration said, had invited or acquiesced in the bombing of Cambodia. In order that he could conceal this complicity from his own people, our administration had to keep it secret, too, from ours. It is the logical substructure that matters here. A pact can be arrived at, secretly and therefore deniably, between our leaders and theirs, which entails the killing of their people, in their own country, in their own ignorance of their leader’s consent; and which entails the loss of our pilots’ lives, in their country, without our knowledge of our leader’s consent. That logic requires only the addition of money, money contributed by South Vietnamese officials to an American President, to explain why peace was not quite at hand in October 1972.

  If one accepts, for a moment, the proposition that the awful secret that underlay the Nixon administration was money, from that source and for that reason, there is the question of what would have happened to the money, and how the former President could reach it now. John Wilson, the attorney for Haldeman and Ehrlichman, was the lawyer who, more than twenty years ago, won the major settlement which left the secrecy of Swiss bank accounts inviolable, even if—as in the case of the German investors in IG Farben, which became the American company General Aniline—the depositors in those accounts were likely to be former Nazis, who were precluded from access to their investments, under American law. At secret foreign bank accounts, the trail always ends. As for how Nixon could reach the money, however, there are several possibilities. There is, for instance, Rabbi Korff.

  Rabbi Korff did not even enter the story until July 1973, when he took out a $5,000 ad in The New York Times in the name of the National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the President. A genuine friend of Nixon’s since then, and truly committed to the former President’s vindication, Rabbi Korff has been an unusual figure all along. Every few months, Korff holds a press conference to announce that the contributions he has been receiving from all over the country (for what has now become the United States Citizens’ Congress and the President Nixon Justice Fund) are great, but not sufficient to cover the former President’s legal fees. Then, he journeys to San Clemente, to report on the former President’s frame of mind. It stands to reason that, although there may be contributions every time the rabbi calls a news conference (among the largest of them are those of the DeWitt Wallaces of Reader’s Digest, and strangely enough, those of Rabbi Korff himself, who is paid a salary by the committee, from which he contributes to the fund), citizens are not racing to send in their checks for the former President’s defense. Then one remembers that the argument for those contributions—compassion, legal fees—precisely duplicates the cover story for payments to the Watergate burglars. It may be coincidental. It is just a cast of mind.

  Whatever else is true, it is clear that Rabbi Korff has access to money, and both the opportunity and the explanation for conveying it to the former President. Korff’s background has always been international, not to say swashbuckling. In the early forties, he was, he says, raising money to buy passports in Paraguay for Jewish inmates of Nazi camps and, by means of contacts in Switzerland, paying money to Himmler to get those prisoners out. There follows a period in which, Korff says, he spent a lot of time abroad, raising money for the Stern Gang and the Irgun. When one asks raising money from whom, the rabbi becomes vague and laughs. In the fifties and sixties, Korff actually had a congregation, a small one, and wrote a lot of speeches, he says, for Democratic congressmen. He now travels a lot abroad. And it proves, of course, nothing more than that the former President has got a lo
yal, well-traveled, fund-raising friend, whose declared source of funds—citizens sending in a dollar here, a dollar there—would not amount to much or make much sense. It has also been probable from the first that those “loans” from Robert Abplanalp and Bebe Rebozo were never loans in any normal sense. They were not meant to be paid back. Nor were they gifts. What seems clear if one pursues the records and this line of reasoning is that the money Nixon’s friends have “loaned” him is in fact his own, which he cannot, for one reason and another, reach any other way.

  But the story, the inference really, is not concerned with now—but with the fall of 1972, in Washington and South Vietnam. As for who would know, the South Vietnamese, of course; but they have their own foreign accounts, and no one would believe them anyway. As for who else—all those international money-raisers, Stans, Kalmbach, Connally, perhaps. And Haig. At about the time of the Nixon pardon, President Ford kept making decisions, and then reversing them, about whether or not former President Nixon would have access to his own presidential papers; in the end, Ford let only one set of the presidential papers leave the White House: the ones belonging to Alexander Haig.

  As for Nixon himself, he would, I suppose, have managed to think that he made such a deal on patriotic grounds, in the interests of the free world. And it is not so bad to have been paid to do what one might have done out of conviction anyway. Except for this: that he was President of the United States. And that unlike Watergate, unlike Rebozo, or Hughes, or the CIA, or any previous administration in our history, such a bribe and the taking of it would have cost not just the American taxpayer’s money but his sons. And if the South Vietnamese government was bribing an American President, with American money, to keep our investment and our boys there any longer than was necessary, it is not to be borne. And that’s what I think they did. Like the underlying thesis of Moses and monotheism, the underlying proposition is what we have all, somehow, shared all along. It explains why all the many volumes produced by the inquiry, as Congressman Wiggins correctly pointed out, don’t contain enough of a case to fill a single pamphlet. It explains why, in spite of Nixon’s departure, nothing was resolved, or laid to rest. The impeachment inquiry did what it could, and the President was removed. But we were, I think, of legal and political necessity, at the tip of the wrong iceberg. The story that required the end of the Nixon presidency, I think, was not Watergate—or even “other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” It was Treason and Bribery. I don’t know what follows from it. I think it is the bottom line. It has brought a disorientation beyond reckoning. People died for it. We are going to have to live, I think, with that.