by Tim Weiner
“Let’s not have any illusions,” he told Kissinger and Haldeman. “We talk about patriotism, loyalty, principle, and the rest, and we say we hope to God there’s enough of that in the country … enough to support the bombing of the North.”
“It’s the hope thing,” he said. “The China thing was important from one standpoint only: hope.” His fellow citizens loved the Ping-Pong diplomacy and the pandas: “Getting to know you—all that bullshit.”
“The American people are suckers,” Nixon said. “Gray Middle America—they’re suckers.”
But he needed their support to win reelection—and to end the war without a retreat or a disguised defeat. The “suckers” Nixon sneered at were his core constituency: dedicated patriots who despised the pacifists and peaceniks in the Democratic Party. Nixon’s potential opponents in the presidential election already were forming a circular firing squad as their first primaries approached. His political strategists already were working to ensure that the weakest candidate would be the last man standing against the president.
But for Nixon, the worst problems lay within his administration. He was barely on speaking terms with Secretary of Defense Mel Laird and Secretary of State Bill Rogers; he was sure that Laird had had a hand in the Joint Chiefs’ spy ring, and he was unsure that Rogers had a shred of diplomatic judgment. He had no faith left in Gen. Creighton Abrams, his top commander in Saigon. All this made a strategy for exiting Vietnam difficult at best.
Nixon sensed that the man who would replace John Mitchell as attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, was lacking in political wisdom. Right again: Kleindienst lied at his confirmation hearings. He did not disclose Nixon’s blunt order to withdraw a Justice Department brief in an antitrust case against International Telephone and Telegraph, one of the world’s biggest conglomerates and a major contributor to the Republican National Committee.
Kleindienst did not know, of course, that the order was on tape.
“That brief has to be filed tomorrow,” Kleindienst had told the president. “Your order is not to file?”
“My order is to drop the Goddamned thing, you son of a bitch! Don’t you understand the English language?” the president shouted. “Is that clear?”
“Yeah,” Kleindienst said with a nervous laugh, “I understand that.”
He eventually was confirmed as attorney general. For his testimony, he became the first Cabinet officer since 1929 to be convicted of breaking the law. He would not be the last.
* * *
The miscreants gathering under John Mitchell as he prepared to take command of CREEP should have given pause to all concerned. They were putting together plots that would lead to far greater personal and political disasters.
The prelude was “Operation Sandwedge,” a twelve-page plan written at Haldeman’s command and under John Dean’s supervision. Its author was Jack Caulfield, the former New York City police detective who served officially as a White House liaison to law enforcement, but unofficially as undercover gumshoe for Ehrlichman and Dean.
Caulfield proposed setting up a private company based in New York City to create a “covert intelligence-gathering capability” against Democratic candidates for president that would serve as a “critical contribution to the re-election of Richard Nixon.” This cover organization, to be called Corporate Security Consultants International, would be financed, to the tune of four hundred thousand dollars, entirely by “lucrative consulting contracts” with “trustworthy Republican corporate giants,” disguising any connection with the Nixon administration or the campaign.
Caulfield’s plan specifically called for “black-bag jobs”—though he insisted later that this meant carrying covert campaign cash, not carrying out break-ins, burglaries, and bugging, as the term was used by the FBI. His spy network would set up “surveillance of Democratic primaries, conventions and meetings,” to supply the Nixon campaign with “derogatory information” on the Democrats. And it would take care of security (including electronic countermeasures against bugs and taps) at CREEP headquarters. Caulfield had just the man for the job, recommended by Al Wong, the Secret Service agent who oversaw the White House taping system. The man was James McCord, a wiretapping specialist just retired after twenty-one years at the CIA.
Sandwedge aimed above all at the “penetration of nominees’ entourage and headquarters with undercover personnel.” Its primary target was a skilled politico, Lawrence O’Brien, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a Kennedy man to the soles of his patent-leather shoes. This was catnip for Nixon. He hated O’Brien with a passion—the man had run JFK’s campaign headquarters in the 1960 election—and he would be happy to destroy him by any means necessary. The Sandwedge proposal suggested exploiting O’Brien’s financial ties to the billionaire Howard Hughes, the inventor, film producer, Las Vegas hotel-and-casino magnate, and increasingly notorious lunatic. An IRS investigation of the reclusive Hughes, its existence known to very few people, had revealed that he had a secret $180,000-a-year contract with O’Brien as a lobbyist.*
Sandwedge looked promising at first. Haldeman had sent his twenty-eight-year-old aide Gordon Strachan to supervise work on the program with Mitchell, who was, awkwardly, still the attorney general and starting work as the chief of CREEP. Strachan had sent Haldeman talking points for a meeting on Sandwedge with Mitchell: “From the campaign funds I need $800,000—300 for surveillance, 300 for polls and 200 for miscellaneous.” Sandwedge, and the $300,000 for surveillance, were templates for Watergate.
But when Dean took Caulfield to see John Mitchell on November 24, 1971, the White House cop got a brush-off and a vague offer of something better later on. (He became assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at the Treasury Department.) Caulfield left the attorney general’s office alone, and as he walked out he saw none other than G. Gordon Liddy waiting to go in. Caulfield did not know it, but Liddy was about to hijack Sandwedge.
Caulfield took on another politically sensitive job the following week: wiretapping the president’s ne’er-do-well brother Donald Nixon and monitoring his son Don Junior. Watching over Donald the elder was one of Caulfield’s long-standing assignments at the White House; Donald was a miscreant, a magnet for con artists and “wheeler-dealers,” as Caulfield wrote to Dean. Fifteen years before, Howard Hughes had loaned Donald Nixon Sr. $205,000 to underwrite a restaurant in Nixon’s hometown, Whittier, California. The loan was a skeleton that kept peeking out of Richard Nixon’s closet.
Now Donald was dealing with a far shadier financier, a world-class swindler named Robert Vesco, who had given $200,000 to Nixon’s campaign coffers. Vesco and Donald Senior were trying to buy a failed and fraudulent bank in Beirut, Lebanon, whose major creditor was the U.S. government, using Don Junior as a front man.
“Donald Nixon’s son—the President’s nephew—came to Beirut with an entourage which included an American wheeler-dealer,” namely Vesco, in December 1971, recalled Robert Oakley, then a State Department officer in Lebanon, later U.S. ambassador to Pakistan under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “They wanted to buy the bank,” but “we didn’t like the smell of it. We knew that the bank had been corrupt and that the man accompanying Nixon’s nephew also did not have a savory reputation.”
In short order, the American ambassador to Lebanon, William Buffum, received a message from Attorney General Mitchell requesting “favorable consideration to the Nixon offer. There was also a call from Haldeman’s office in the White House, making the same request,” Oakley recalled. The embassy declined, and its refusal “hit a sore spot,” he said. “We heard a lot of squawking and noise; we understood that the Attorney General’s office denied that Mitchell had ever been involved,” he said. “We had created a huge flap in Washington”—the first among many in 1972.
* * *
The office of the attorney general of the United States is an enormous room exuding the grandeur of the rule of law. On January 27, 1972, the nation’s chief law enforc
ement office, John Mitchell, convened with another one of Haldeman’s baby-faced aides, Jeb Stuart Magruder, who had cut his teeth running Don Rumsfeld’s campaign for Congress a decade before and now served as Mitchell’s deputy at CREEP. The president’s counsel John Dean sat alongside, representing the White House.
The meeting was run by G. Gordon Liddy. Technically, Liddy’s role was CREEP’s in-house lawyer, but that was a cover for his real job: the White House plumber in chief. Liddy was regarded by many of his colleagues at the time, and thereafter, as a sociopath, a man to be feared.
The former FBI agent had prepared an elaborate plan code-named Gemstone—Sandwedge on steroids—which he now formally presented to Mitchell and Dean, along with seven separate flow charts propped up on easels. Gemstone was a conspiracy to violate federal laws including kidnapping, burglary, and warrantless wiretapping, all in the name of the reelection of the president of the United States.
The first of its components was Diamond. Liddy planned to kidnap anti-Nixon demonstrators at the Republican National Convention, drug them, and take them to Mexico. Had anyone present had the requisite sense of humor, he might have suggested that the hippies who were Liddy’s targets might actually enjoy being drugged and taken to Mexico, but Liddy had set a grimmer tone by entitling this chart “Nacht und Nebel” (“Night and Fog”), a term used by Nazi storm troopers for disappearing people.
Opal was a series of black-bag jobs for planting bugs at key Democratic headquarters. Emerald was electronic eavesdropping on Democrats’ campaign planes. Quartz was listening in on microwave telephone traffic. Topaz was photographing documents at the candidates’ headquarters in Washington and the Miami Beach convention halls and hotels. Ruby would place spies in the field organizations and headquarters of the Democratic candidates for president. Turquoise would employ Hunt’s compadres from the Bay of Pigs to sabotage the air-conditioning at the convention. Then came Sapphire, in which a houseboat docked in Miami Beach would be used by prostitutes who would lure politicos; and Crystal, which would record and photograph their liaisons for blackmail. Finally came a plan to finance the long-shot campaign of Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for president. Its intent was to divert black Democrats from their likely nominee; its code name, Coal, indicated Liddy’s political and racial sensibilities.
Hunt said he could finance the entire operation for under one million dollars.
The attorney general said this was not quite what he had in mind as a campaign intelligence operation. He told Liddy to scale the plan back, come back with a more modest proposal—say, half a million—and, by the way, burn the charts.
* * *
Richard Nixon had been contemplating a plan to destroy Lawrence O’Brien for almost two years. Haldeman wrote in his diary on March 4, 1970, that Nixon wanted “to move hard on Larry O’Brien now that he’s back as DNC chairman,” starting by going after his income tax returns. Haldeman was warned by Tom Charles Huston, whose playbook of dirty tricks had just been printed, that “making sensitive political inquiries at the IRS is about as safe a procedure as trusting a whore.” Haldeman quickly sent an “eyes only” order to John Dean to have the IRS back off an inquiry involving none other than Howard Hughes: “As you probably remember there was a Hughes/Don Nixon loan controversy years ago, and the prosecution of this case could reopen that entire issue which could be very damaging politically.” Caulfield had warned Dean from the start that digging into Hughes risked a “counter-scandal.”
But the White House soon discovered, through the IRS, O’Brien’s secret retainer as a lobbyist for Howard Hughes. Someone made that contract disappear. “Concerning Howard Hughes,” Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s deputy assistant, wrote to Chuck Colson on December 12, 1970, “his retainer with Larry O’Brien was cancelled as a result of the latest escapades.”
So Nixon had inside information on O’Brien. But what did O’Brien have on Nixon? Did he know Nixon himself had received secret contributions from Howard Hughes? That Bebe Rebozo was holding one hundred thousand dollars in cash from Hughes for Nixon? Or that Hughes had made another secret campaign contribution to Nixon in February 1972?
Nixon’s commerce secretary, Maurice Stans, left the Cabinet that month to become the reelection campaign’s finance chairman. In his first days as CREEP’s chief fund-raiser, Stans flew to Managua, Nicaragua, where he met with none other than Howard Hughes. Increasingly irrational and drug-addled, Hughes had fled from a hideaway in the Bahamas, finding refuge by renting the entire top floor of Managua’s best hotel. His move to Nicaragua came with help from the notorious American ambassador and Nixon crony Turner B. Shelton—and from Maurice Stans: “The Secretary of Commerce came down and cleared the way for him to be there,” said Bob White, then the number two man in the American embassy. Few plausible reasons brought Stans to Nicaragua; it is implausible that he left with an empty briefcase.
Stans was facing a crucial deadline. A newly enacted law required the public disclosure of campaign contributions to political candidates, effective April 7, 1972; the law’s intent was to keep suitcases crammed with cash out of the American political system. Corporate contributions were forbidden under existing law, but if they were in hand before midnight on April 6, no one would know. So Stans had ten weeks to collect as much cash as possible. He was greatly assisted by his deputy, the president’s lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach. Stans worked the corporations and the executives. Kalmbach played his field of expertise: millionaires seeking ambassadorships. One, W. Clement Stone, pledged $3 million. Unfortunately, Stone wanted London, which already was occupied by Ambassador Walter Annenberg, who gave $254,000 in order to stay on. In all, Kalmbach collected $706,000 from thirteen contributors who were given ambassadorships by Nixon after the 1972 election. Together, the finance chairmen collected about $20 million for CREEP before the deadline. Campaign headquarters, and the White House itself, were awash in cash.
Nixon still worried: Did the Democratic National Committee know who had contributed to CREEP, and how much? Did O’Brien know?
* * *
John Mitchell, his campaign deputy Jeb Magruder, John Dean, and Gordon Liddy reconvened at the attorney general’s office a week after their first Gemstone conference, on February 4, 1972. All four eventually went to prison for the events that resulted from this meeting. Here is where Watergate was born. No one can prove its paternity, but its progenitor was Richard Nixon, who at that date was preparing for his momentous visit to China.
Liddy presented Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean with a scaled-down version of Gemstone. The plan still focused on the bugging and wiretapping of President Nixon’s political opponents. Its targets specifically included the offices of Lawrence O’Brien and the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel.
They did not get an immediate decision from Mitchell. He was in a state of misery; his wife, Martha, whom he loved dearly, had been an alcoholic and an emotional basket case for several years. He had reason to fear that she was becoming mentally ill. He was disengaged, drinking, still running the Justice Department, dreading the campaign to come. He didn’t focus on the plan before him. He did not say yes or no.
Enraged, Liddy told his colleague Howard Hunt to arrange a meeting with Nixon’s hard-as-nails aide Chuck Colson. They gathered in Colson’s grandly appointed suite at the Executive Office Building. Liddy wanted action and he knew how to get it. He knew that Magruder, who was running CREEP during Mitchell’s mental absence, was mortally terrified of Colson. He also knew that Colson had been hammering Magruder about the need for better political intelligence on the president’s enemies. So he explained the impasse to Colson, who immediately picked up the telephone, called Magruder, and told him to get a decision on Liddy’s plan.
“This Watergate thing kept coming back—clearly because of the Howard Hughes issue: O’Brien,” Magruder recounted in an oral history recorded years later, after he had done his time in prison and become a Presbyterian pastor. “O’Brien was a
consultant to Hughes; they wanted to know if Hughes knew anything that would prove negative.” He finally presented the plan for Mitchell’s approval seven weeks later, during a weekend at the Rebozo retreat in Key Biscayne. “Mitchell signed off on the Watergate break-in in Key Biscayne; I think we all reluctantly signed off. None of us were interested in it at the Committee; we were pushed, first by Colson, then by Haldeman. We were continually told that the president wanted it done.”
All this is confirmed on a White House tape recorded on December 10, 1972, when it still seemed impossible that these plans would ruin Richard Nixon.
“I knew we were bugging the other side,” Haldeman said.
“Perfectly legitimate,” the president said.
“Obviously what happened,” Haldeman said on this difficult-to-discern tape, “Mitchell set this apparatus up.… Then we started pushing … Mitchell was pushing on using them. There was this—”
“—paper,” Nixon said.
“Secret papers,” Haldeman said. “And financial data that O’Brien had.”
That was the reason for the Watergate break-in: a pure product of Nixon’s obsession. “If this obsession … seems irrational,” John Dean wrote in 2014, “there was little about Watergate that was otherwise.”
But Nixon tried his best to explain it in one of his last televised interviews, not long before he died. “1972, as you know, was a very big year,” he said. “We went to China. We went to Russia.… And here was a small thing, and we fouled it up beyond belief.”
“I would advise all that follow me in the position as President: do the big things as well as you can, but when a small thing is there, deal with it, and deal with it fast; get it out of the way,” Nixon said. “If you don’t, it’s going to become big, and then it may destroy you.”
