The re-election, then, produced nothing but contradictions. Where confidence should have abounded, confusion reigned; instead of joy, resentment surged through the White House; and whereas “peace abroad and justice at home” should have dominated the President’s concerns, the “sour note” of Watergate was to echo through the remainder of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Still, victory did, naturally enough, generate a measure of optimism, and some in the President’s entourage looked forward to four more years of achievement. As Nixon began his new term on January 20, 1973, he presented his chief aides and Cabinet members with a four-year calendar in-scribed: “The Presidential term which begins today consists of 1,461 days—no more, no less.… [T]hey can stand out as great days for America, and great moments in the history of the world.”
The cloud of Watergate and the unknown mocked that note of optimism. On Christmas Day 1972, James McCord, indicted for his role in the Watergate burglary, ominously threatened to implicate the White House. Presidential speechwriter Patrick Buchanan had warned Nixon that Watergate was a growing problem, although he probably did not realize the extent of the President’s own involvement. Meanwhile, Leonard Garment, a White House aide and former law partner of Nixon’s, had his own sense of foreboding. Quoting José Ortega y Gasset, he wrote: “ ‘We do not know what is happening, and that is what is happening.’ ”4
Richard Nixon knew.
BOOK ONE
OF TIME
AND THE MAN
DISCORD, DISORDER,
AND RICHARD NIXON
I
BREAKING FAITH: THE 1960S
The Age of Watergate witnessed the nation’s most sustained political conflict and severest constitutional crisis since the Great Depression. Attention centered first on the role of the Committee to Re-elect the President in the break-in at the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The burglary at the Watergate complex not only raised questions about the integrity of the political process, but eventually made an issue of the President’s personal role in the event and its aftermath. And subsequent revelations uncovered what Nixon’s key political lieutenant, former Attorney General John Mitchell, characterized as the “White House horrors”—the numerous instances of officially sanctioned criminal activity and abuses of power, as well as obstruction of justice, that had preceded and followed the Watergate break-in.
These events all fall under the “generic term of ‘Watergate’,” as Congress labeled them in a 1974 law. History is disciplined by context, and the Watergate affair cannot be bounded by the flurry of events from the burglary on June 17, 1972, to the President’s resignation on August 9, 1974. Watergate involved the political behavior of the President and his men, and the critical assault on their authority, that began during Nixon’s first term. Some of that behavior, and some of that critical assault, had its roots in the tumultuous events of the 1960s.1 The struggles in that decade over civil rights and over the control of the cities, and above all over the war in Vietnam, brought dramatic divisions and violence to American society and resulted in the destabilization of both civil and social institutions. Furious protests swirled initially around President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a symbol of and a scapegoat for the nation’s ills and anxieties. A tidal wave of political and media criticism eventually swept Johnson from the White House, discredited, despised, and desperately searching for historical vindication.
Richard Nixon promised the nation in 1968 that he would “bring us together.” But during his watch, the divisions persisted and even widened. He, even more than Johnson, became a focal point for the furies and frustrations that wracked American society. “Watergate” increasingly defined his Administration, and it provided the “sword,” as Nixon himself characterized it, for dissident interests to use in successfully mounting their challenge to vested power and authority. Nixon had unfortunately inherited a vastly weakened and increasingly vulnerable presidency. That institutional crisis, together with his own political past, which made him one of the most divisive figures in America, culminated in his unprecedented resignation as President.
We must also look to Nixon’s long public career to explain his conduct as President. His personality, his lengthy tenure in the political arena, and his behavior in prominent events of the previous quarter-century clearly conditioned much of his presidency. Those years were ones of preparation for his ambition; they also molded and shaped those special qualities that anticipated the disaster that befell him. With Richard Milhous Nixon’s election to the presidency in 1968, the times and the man came together—and Watergate was the result.
John F. Kennedy heralded a new public perception and involvement with the presidency, personalizing it with carefully crafted mannerisms. His vigor, wit, and candor quickly captured the imagination of the nation, despite his razor-thin margin of victory in 1960. The young President appealed to the nation’s emerging youth, forcefully identifying with their hopes and aspirations. Americans found themselves riveted to the President as the center of public life, particularly as the media emphasized the glamour and vitality of Kennedy, his wife, and his family.
The underside of the Kennedy years—the President’s extramarital affairs, his compromises with segregationists, his ineffectiveness in dealing with Congress, his Administration’s plots to assassinate foreign leaders, and the growing combat involvement in Vietnam—was either hidden or studiously ignored. Kennedy and his advisers skillfully managed to convey the impression of a leader who was at once a liberal and a conservative, a hard-line anticommunist and a statesman genuinely committed to new directions for reducing Cold War tensions.
Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963 elevated him instantly to demi-sainthood, leaving both his admirers and his enemies to vent their wrath and frustrations on his successor. Kennedy’s death began a mystique that grew through much of the 1960s, a mystique which, however distorted, haunted Lyndon B. Johnson. There was no escape for Johnson. Beginning with his surprise selection as John F. Kennedy’s running mate in 1960 and continuing through Johnson’s sorrow-laden succession in 1963 and Robert F. Kennedy’s challenge in 1968, the Kennedys hung like a brooding omnipresence in Johnson’s sky, alternately shaping and paralyzing his presidency.
When Johnson, on assuming the presidency, said, “Let us continue,” he meant to realize the fallen Kennedy’s promise of renewed energy and purpose in government. Johnson understood the need to assuage the sense of national grief, yet he instinctively sensed as well the opportunity to capitalize on the memory of the late President to attain desirable political results and create his own memorial. Within days, Johnson revitalized his coalition-building talents and organized a new national consensus on behalf of longstanding and innovative liberal agendas. Like the creatures entering Noah’s Ark two by two, they called or came to the White House: Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, Martin Luther King, Jr., and George Wallace, Senators Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen, the heads of the AFL–CIO and the National Association of Manufacturers, and then, of course, the world leaders—all anxious to gain the new President’s ear while he, just as eagerly, worked to bring them aboard his ship. Kennedy’s promises had stalled on the two shoals of civil rights legislation and tax-cutting. Johnson would not just jawbone, but deliver.
Deliver he did, and at a frenzied pace for the next six months, dazzling friends and dismaying foes. The Kennedy New Frontier program faded into memory as Johnson stamped his own Great Society brand on a breathtaking cascade of legislation. By the time of the 1964 presidential election, he had secured both the Tax Reduction and Civil Rights acts. New laws and new ideas abounded—urban mass transit, clean air, wilderness preserves, manpower retraining, and a variety of antipoverty measures. Lyndon Johnson had apparently never met a constituency he disliked.
The tax and civil rights laws appeared to assure Johnson’s historical reputation. Both had seemed hopelessly elusive during Kennedy’s short tenure; Johnson, however, moved deftly and surely through the f
amiliar congressional jungle and emerged with his original goals largely intact. As Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s, Johnson had repeatedly frustrated his liberal allies with what seemed to them an all-too-ready acceptance of half-loaves. But not during the halcyon early days of his presidency. The tax cut, co-opted in part by Keynesians from orthodox Republican doctrine, ensured a further takeoff for the reigning prosperity. Johnson’s civil rights legislation induced a national orgy of self-congratulation and raised hopes for a new era of peaceful racial relations. The Supreme Court’s invalidation of segregation ten years earlier at last had a legislative imprimatur and the blessing of a Southern President.
On every front, Johnson commanded and directed a succession of triumphs. The opposition—what there was of it—was in total disarray. “I am a fellow that likes small parties,” Johnson quipped, “and the Republican party is about the size I like.” The President’s power was immense, almost absolute. “He’s getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party,” James Reston wrote in the New York Times, “and he hasn’t tried that yet.”
And yet, despite Johnson’s triumphs, a White House aide noted, “something was wrong, drastically wrong.” Johnson himself acknowledged that his support was “like a Western river, broad but not deep.” Kennedy loyalists nipped at the President’s heels, snickered at his Texas roots and mannerisms, claimed he was succeeding only because of sympathy for the martyred Kennedy, and, most of all, complained about something they called “style.” The Pedernales did not flow through Camelot.
For the Kennedy-Arthurians, Johnson was the Black Knight, not fit to sit at the Round Table. Their contempt was publicly apparent, and the media dutifully reflected their mood. Jack Kennedy had been a favorite of press and television reporters as he successfully charmed and wooed them, despite his Administration’s candid advocacy of news management. Mocked, even shunned, by his supposed allies, President Johnson yearned for love and acceptance from those who counted most—the people. But a wary, even hostile, media made gaining the public’s affection a formidable task. Camelot, described by a British observer as an “idiotic Tennysonian fantasy” concocted by adoring Kennedy admirers in the media, symbolized the “resentful escapism” that bedeviled Johnson.2
The President had some tattered robes that lent substance to the criticism of his detractors. His successes paradoxically reinforced all the negative images of him as a wheeler-dealer, a conniving hustler, and a manipulator cloaked in deceit and secrecy—images that had haunted Johnson pitilessly throughout his career. Questions centered on the personal fortune he and his wife had amassed during his years of public service, particularly in the government-regulated television business; his association with Billy Sol Estes, a shady entrepreneur who lavishly supported Texas politicians, including Johnson; and, most harmful of all, the corrupt dealings of his Senate aide and protégé, Bobby Baker. The President insisted he hardly knew Baker—“one of the great whoppers of American political history,” as Johnson’s former Press Secretary described it.3
The master politician could not elude the questions and innuendoes regarding his moral character. The United States’ growing involvement in Indochina was intractable and unpopular enough, but Johnson’s lack of moral authority compounded the difficulty. The result was tragic for him, and for the nation.
President Johnson eagerly anticipated the 1964 election as a personal referendum, a plebiscite offering him a ticket of admission to the White House in his own right rather than as an “accidental president”; 1964 would release him from the Kennedy bondage. His wish seemed to be granted. Whatever his personal merits, Lyndon Johnson was lucky—blessed, it might seem—in having an opponent that year who politically and emotionally terrified a substantial part of the American electorate. The President’s triumph over Senator Barry Goldwater rivaled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936. Johnson’s victory was total, absolute, and, like so much else about him, excessive. The staggering dimensions of his election, with 61 percent of the popular vote, certainly gave him an exaggerated sense of his mandate. Ironically, however, the very scale of his victory served to heighten suspicions of him.
Barry Goldwater, the junior Senator from Arizona, had captured the Republican nomination on the strength of a dedicated, resourceful organization, and because of his appeal as a genuine political alternative. He also promised to “get tough” with the “international Communist conspiracy.” In May 1964, Goldwater urged greater American involvement in the war in South Vietnam. Specifically, he called for the bombing of supply routes in the North. When told that the dense jungle cover hid many of the trails, he suggested the possibility of “defoliation of the forests by low-yield atomic weapons.” Two months later, Goldwater said that victory in Vietnam was assured if the military were given a free hand.
No matter the outcome in 1964, Goldwater had sparked a movement to make conservatism respectable, and it proved to be a movement that would not roll over and die as political pundits insisted it must or should. Yet Goldwater’s moment of triumph also sealed his fate. When he told his loyal followers at the San Francisco Republican Convention in July that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice [a]nd … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” many Americans regarded him as a moral monster commanding a pack of fanatics totally alien to the American mainstream.4 Actually, Goldwater’s words had a noble quality, but the context distorted the message into something sinister.
Goldwater’s hopes for upsetting the President in the 1964 election rested on his ability to persuade voters of Johnson’s moral defects. That image was ready-made and exploitable, but Goldwater could not overcome his own, larger negatives. Americans realized Johnson’s shortcomings, yet planned to vote for him. “Johnson leaves me cold, but I am going to ring doorbells for him,” said a St. Louis optometrist—hastily adding: “Goldwater is beyond belief.” Pollster Samuel Lubell described a Dayton, Ohio, precinct where early one-fourth of those who intended to vote for the President questioned his fundamental honesty. The eloquent voice of the Very Reverend Francis B. Sayre, Jr., of the Episcopal cathedral in the nation’s capital, a son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, seemed to speak for many Americans. He deplored the “sterile choice” confronting the electorate, a choice between “a man of dangerous ignorance and devastating uncertainty” and “a man whose public house is splendid in its every appearance, but whose private lack of ethic must inevitably introduce termites at the very foundation.”5
The 1964 election seemed simple enough, with its apparent ideological conflict. But in truth, the clash was more complex, pitting Republican ideological concerns against Democratic programmatic agendas. One side had ideology without program; the other, programs largely devoid of any coherent philosophical scheme. Neither proved wholly satisfactory in the 1960s—and the problem continued to especially plague the Democrats for the next two decades. Following the election, a Maryland housewife thought the country was domestically “mixed up.” She bemoaned the lack of direction. “I think it’s very, very confused. People have lost the old rules and values by which they lived, and they haven’t got any new ones to substitute.”6
The President was not “mixed up”; if anything, the election puffed his well-endowed ego. Press Secretary George Reedy noted the change. American elections, Reedy observed, had “elements of sanctification,” but Johnson had advanced the concept “to one of deification.” The President’s natural wariness—even fear—toward the press turned to contempt. “I’ve been kissing asses all my life and I don’t have to kiss them anymore,” he declared. As for holding press conferences, Johnson instructed Reedy to “tell those press bastards of yours that I’ll see them when I want to and not before.”7
The 1964 campaign was a referendum on the welfare state, now three decades old. It also focused on the issues of war and peace, particularly highlighting the ominous developments in Southeast Asia. Johnson had a veritable monopoly on the peace corner. Speaking in Eufa
ula, Oklahoma, on September 25, he could not resist gilding the lily: “There are those that say you ought to go North and drop bombs, to try to wipe out supply lines, and they think that would escalate the war. We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. We don’t want to get involved … with 700 million people and get tied down in a land war in Asia.”8 In the meantime, Barry Goldwater was the candidate who reputedly wanted to “lob one into the men’s room in the Kremlin.”
Johnson promised “peace for all Americans,” yet he repeatedly emphasized that what his predecessors and Congress had defined as vital national and world interests demanded an American presence in South Vietnam, as well as in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines. In other ways as well, his private actions did not match his public prudence. During the election campaign, Johnson approved numerous secret operations throughout Southeast Asia, including air operations against the North. On October 1, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy sent the President a memo acknowledging the probability that American forces would be engaged in “some air and land action in the Laotian corridor or even in North Vietnam within the next two months.”9
Johnson’s victory inevitably produced claims of a “mandate.” But as always in American politics, the question was, “Mandate for what?” For endorsing the President’s legislative record? Probably. For advancing the Great Society? Possibly. For sustaining the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing presidential retaliation for attacks on American personnel in Vietnam? Yes—at least, if such attacks were overt. For keeping American boys out of Asian wars? Certainly. Ironically, LBJ’s campaign rhetoric regarding the war established an image of apparent deception that would plague him in the years to come, as he led the nation deeper and deeper into the Vietnam quagmire.
The Wars of Watergate Page 2
