The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  If the repetition of pattern means anything, Nixon-watchers might have divined more meaning in his next move. Once again, Nixon faced east, as if sensing that his fortune and destiny were there and not in his native western wilderness. In May 1963, he announced that he would join the distinguished New York law firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, and Todd—now to become Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander. The firm announced that Nixon would concentrate on labor law, a rather unlikely prospect unless the firm thought that several years on a congressional labor committee more than fifteen years earlier gave the new partner special expertise.45

  It was somewhat late in the day for Nixon to seriously assume a full-time career as a Wall Street lawyer. The Nixon literature generally attributes his move to a wish for financial security and to satisfy his family’s needs, especially its desire that he abandon politics. But a fifty-year-old man, in the prime of life, who had come so close to the pinnacle of his ambition, simply could not abandon the very life that sustained him. Nixon may not have liked the last shuffle or two, but he liked the game.

  Nixon’s real value to his new law firm was the prospect that he would lure clients who, unlike California voters, would covet his international connections and reputation. Still, Nixon needed to make some mark as a lawyer. Appropriately, he soon found a case that allowed him to do so and had the added advantage of national prominence—the case even gave him the limelight of a Supreme Court appearance. In 1966, he represented the plaintiff in an invasion-of-privacy suit against Life magazine. Nixon lost the appeal, largely on First Amendment grounds, but he advanced some telling arguments on behalf of individual privacy. Reports generally praised his performance before the Justices. Leonard Garment, Nixon’s law partner and chief of litigation in the firm, had prevailed in the case in the lower courts. For the appeal, Garment worked closely with Nixon on the preparation of the briefs, and the two spent a great deal of time together in the office and on planes discussing the First Amendment. “He worked like a horse and learned the law,” Garment recalled, comparing Nixon’s effort to starting “athletic life by doing the Olympic decathlon.” Perhaps moral victories meant little to Nixon, however. He told Garment that he never wanted to hear of the case again, and he did not mention it in his memoirs. Nixon also told Garment he never would be permitted to win “against the press.”46

  Politics never strayed far from Nixon’s thoughts. He realized that he had little claim on the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. The California debacle was still fresh in memory, underlining an emerging theme: Nixon was a loser. Nixon also may have believed that Kennedy would be too popular to overcome. In the event, 1964 belonged—especially after Kennedy’s assassination—to the growing polar forces in the Republican Party: Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. Goldwater’s eventual nomination alienated many within the party, but Nixon proved to be the loyal soldier. (He scoffed at Eisenhower’s stumbling and indecisive endorsement of Goldwater, privately calling Ike a “senile old bastard.”) Nixon introduced Goldwater at the Republican Convention and forthrightly supported the Arizonan. More important, Nixon paid special attention to the needs of other Republican candidates. After the election, Nixon dutifully touched base with President Johnson, congratulating him on his victory and also taking the occasion to urge support for an official residence for the Vice President. Johnson, in turn, urged Nixon to join him in mobilizing national unity. “You can do much,” he told Nixon, “in making that unity a firm reality.”47 Nixon wasn’t about to become a nonpartisan unifier. It was time to restock the political capital for Nixon’s inevitable claim to an inheritance denied—or stolen, as he believed. After Goldwater’s rout in the 1964 election, someone had to pick up the Republican pieces. Nixon was there.

  III

  “BRING US TOGETHER”: 1965–1968

  Richard Nixon’s years in political limbo thinly veiled a calculated “long march” in his ongoing quest for the presidency. The journey began in the ashes of his agonizing defeat in 1960; the California debacle proved only a temporary setback and, given the events of 1964, a most fortunate one for Nixon. New York became his Yenan, the base from which he mounted carefully orchestrated operations designed to gain his cherished objective. As befitted his isolation and weakness, Nixon first staged a series of guerrilla forays, meanwhile carefully planning the sustained drive that would eventually award him the ultimate prize.

  The march quickened as Nixon beat the campaign hustings for the 1966 congressional elections. A little luck and a lot of ineptness on the part of his enemies spurred the pace. As Nixon prepared for a trip to Waterville, Maine, to campaign for Republican candidates, a CBS reporter interviewed him and recorded the predictable remarks: Johnson was growing unpopular; the 1964 election had produced an exaggerated Democratic victory; and Republicans would make significant gains in the November elections. At the same time, the New York Times ran a feature on Nixon. It was too much for the increasingly harassed and ever-thin-skinned Johnson. When asked about Nixon’s remarks, he denounced him as a “chronic campaigner … who never did really recognize what was going on when he had an official position in the government.” Walter Cronkite promptly gave the former Vice President an opportunity to respond on the CBS evening news broadcast. Thanks to Johnson, Nixon was news.1

  Nixon smelled blood and reverted to form. He stepped up his attacks on the President’s Vietnam policies, contending that the war could last another five years and cost more casualties than Korea. While he repeatedly said that he would not attack Johnson personally—only his policies—he referred to the President as “that master political operator in the White House,” who used the eighty-ninth Congress as his “lapdog.” Johnson “barks and it barks,” Nixon said. “He tells it to roll over and it rolls over. He tells it to play dead and it plays dead. In fact, he doesn’t even have to pick it up by the ears.” The President’s staff replied in backgrounders to reporters that Nixon talked out of both sides of his mouth, one moment advocating escalation of the war, the next talking about peace. His complaints about Johnson’s peace efforts, they said, were “dirty pool,” reminiscent of Nixon’s earlier allegations that Truman and Speaker Sam Rayburn were traitors. The staffers adroitly contrasted Nixon’s attacks with the loyal support for the President tendered by Eisenhower and Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen.2

  The Republicans made significant gains in the 1966 elections, substantially trimming Democratic majorities in both houses. And suddenly, Nixon was back. With the party’s polar wings at odds, and their leaders, Goldwater and Rockefeller, equally contemptuous of one another, Nixon emerged as the preeminent party spokesman. He campaigned in more than sixty congressional districts. The Washington Star reported that “his standing with the Goldwaterites is very good indeed, and though he is disliked he is not completely unacceptable to the moderates.” Nixon even received a little help from Eisenhower, who offered a belated explanation of his famous 1960 remark. He privately told Nixon that he “could kick” himself “every time some jackass brings up that goddamn ‘give me a week’ business. Johnson has gone too far.” Eisenhower then issued a public statement, flatly contending that any suggestion or inference that he “at any time held Dick Nixon in anything less than the highest regard and esteem is erroneous.”3 An attack from Johnson, a blessing from Eisenhower, an interview with Cronkite; truly Nixon’s cup was filling.

  For the next year, Nixon ran the old-fashioned way, beating the political bushes, touching base with party officials and contributors who would influence primaries and delegate selections. The apparent purpose was to aid and build the party; Richard Nixon himself, of course, was the primary beneficiary. The march was now the race.

  Johnson’s withdrawal in the spring of 1968 resolved Nixon’s future. But the future of the war itself and the nation’s political leadership remained unsettled and in doubt. The Washington Post, a Johnson supporter, praised the President’s “personal sacrifice in the name of national unity,” and thought him entitle
d “to a very special place in the annals of American history and to a very special kind of gratitude and appreciation.” Gratitude for what? For the promise of a presidential campaign “of less divisiveness and less bitterness than the one the country had expected.” The metaphors swirled in editorial ecstasy: “The President” had “lanced the boil of faction and opened the abscess of partisanship on the body politic,” the Post concluded; his “moving declaration” had restored “unity.”4

  But LBJ’s lame-duck actions only magnified frustrations with the war. When he announced his withdrawal as a candidate in March 1968 and promised his best efforts to the peace process, approximately 486,600 Americans were in South Vietnam. By August, the President had authorized a troop level of 545,500. Johnson talked of massive peace efforts, and his new Defense Secretary, Clark Clifford, advocated what later came to be called “Vietnamization”—that is, enlarging the Army of South Vietnam, equipping it, and giving it sole responsibility for the defense of the country. And yet the reality of the war hardly changed a ripple, accentuating the President’s image as a manipulator and deceiver. Most of all, the unity that the Washington Post had predicted would be the consequence of Johnson’s withdrawal remained elusive and illusory.

  Unity was not the only casualty. Johnson’s command of power steadily diminished. Johnson understood power: “I know where to look for it, and how to use it,” he said. But by the spring of 1968, there was little for him to use. The President’s own faults and shortcomings only partially explained his declining position. The Vietnam war, it must be remembered, was not the only cause for alienation and disaffection in American life. The rebellions in the northern black ghettos and in the white South, and among educated, middle-class young whites, as well as various other causes ranging from ecology to gay liberation, had little connection with Johnson’s lack of “style” or his conduct of the war. Altogether, the prevailing unrest was, as law professor Alexander Bickel noted, “an extraordinarily sustained experience of civil disobedience and conscientious objection.”5 Probably no regime could have survived, let alone turned back, such powerful tides.

  America seemed to be coming apart, and its President appeared so powerless, so unable to master events. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. sparked a new wave of urban riots in New York, Chicago, Newark, Baltimore, and saddest of all, in Washington, D.C. Looting was widespread, and police responded quickly and with decisive force, as if sensing a new mood that demanded such a reaction. The sight of flames in the nation’s capital, only blocks from the White House and Congress, offered another blow to the Administration’s pride and reinforced its appearance of isolation. What was worse, the flames seared the consciousness of significant portions of the nation, spelling new trouble for powerholders. Protests had been heard in the land for nearly three years; but now, new voices of counterprotest emanated from what, unscientifically but not without reason, would be dubbed the “Silent Majority.”

  The important, sustained revolution came from within the ranks of what had been the dominant political coalition. The “risen” middle class, the blue- and white-collar workers, and ethnics who had nourished the growth of the Democratic majority, now found themselves unhappy with the young protesters who were the new cohabitants of its political home. The protesters’ challenges to cherished views of the American way of life, the criticisms of what was wrong with America, left the “old-fashioned Democrats” confused, shaken, and above all frightened, especially as events took a violent turn. Whatever their own disenchantment with the Vietnam war, they hardly identified themselves with the public expressions of outrage by disaffected groups. A political alliance between protesters and conventional Democrats simply was improbable. The latter had little sympathy for the blacks and dispossessed who, in their minds, had not worked to achieve the American Dream. Their disdain, even contempt, for the alienated young campus radicals was as powerful. After all, these were the spoiled, pampered, comfortable children of those above—or even their own ungrateful offspring.6

  America had changed. The long-familiar assets that historically had characterized American society—vast space, mobility, available and abundant capital for technological development, sophisticated communications techniques, “grassroots democracy”—now emerged as liabilities. Their negative effects multiplied and rippled into waves of irritation and mutual distrust that threatened the harmony and delicate balance of American life. Perhaps the pluralist wars that raged just beneath the surface of life no longer could be contained.

  The counterrevolutionists questioned long-prevailing liberal dogma that crime, poverty, and other social disorders reflected cultural and social wrongs. The standard liberal response to social ills was money, programs, and empathy—“bleeding hearts” and “doing good,” in the terms of unfriendly commentators. The same simplistic, one-sided approach is precisely what the Silent Majority also questioned, as they saw cities in flames, order and authority flouted, and the cherished realities and symbols of flag and institutions treated with contempt. Enough. Poverty and unemployment could be deplored, yet the prevailing liberal sympathy for the aggrieved seemed somehow disproportionate to other realities. Wasn’t there a place for condemning anarchy and lawlessness as well? Richard Nixon thought so.

  As the 1968 primary season wound down, and as he had imposed his own moratorium on discussions of the war, Nixon turned to the “law-and-order” theme. He scoffed at Johnson’s Great Society programs. Money, he insisted, had not solved the problem of crime. We needed more police and more money for them, less “soft” Supreme Court decisions, an Attorney General who would enforce the law, more wiretapping—in short, more support for the “peace forces” and less sympathy for the “criminal forces.” Nixon never strayed far from that theme.7 Meanwhile, black militant H. Rap Brown called violence “as American as cherry pie,” only compounding the liberal dilemma and further legitimating Nixon’s law-and-order demands.

  Alabama Governor George Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1968 was a twofold blessing for Nixon. First, during the primaries, Wallace divided the Democrats. His third-party candidacy guaranteed some erosion of Democratic strength. Better yet, Wallace’s stridency on the war (particularly after he selected as his running mate Air Force General Curtis LeMay) and on domestic issues gave Nixon a golden opportunity to preempt the middle. But one had to divine the calculus of the middle. After King’s assassination, Nixon advisers hotly debated whether he should attend the funeral services. His law partner Leonard Garment reportedly remarked: “Things have come to some pass when a Republican candidate for President has to take counsel with his advisers about whether he should attend the funeral of a Nobel Prize winner.” Nixon eventually went, but he did not march behind the mule-drawn wagon bearing King’s body—that presumably was no place for a centrist candidate. Still, Nixon would periodically thereafter rebuke those who had suggested he attend the funeral, complaining that it had been “a serious mistake” and almost cost him the South.8

  The political earthquakes that divided the Democrats left the Republican Party mostly untouched. The party’s internal fratricide of four years earlier now seemed to be history, largely because the conservative faction dominated. But the conservatives lacked a candidate of their own, and Nixon soon had the field to himself. It seemed so easy, perhaps even boringly so.

  George Romney served as Nelson Rockefeller’s surrogate in 1968. Rockefeller himself no longer seemed viable as a candidate, since the entrenched Goldwaterites remained implacable toward him. As president of American Motors, Romney had made a name for himself as a gadfly to the Detroit automobile establishment, successfully challenging their pet marketing and design notions. He parlayed his entrepreneurial success into a political one, twice winning election as governor in the Democrats’ Michigan stronghold. He was “Mr. Clean,” a man whose integrity and moral rectitude went unchallenged. Romney seemed a perfect alternative to the tarnished images of “old pols” such as Johnson and Nixon. But any candidate of t
he time had to come to terms with the Vietnam war, and that proved Romney’s undoing.

  In a casual interview with a local Detroit radio station, Romney remarked that he had been “brainwashed” by his military hosts when he had visited South Vietnam. No doubt, Romney had been misled, perhaps even deliberately deceived, as others had been before and would be after him. The remark seemed true to the man: candid and blunt, yet betraying a long-suspected naïveté. If Romney could be brainwashed by our own military, how could he withstand other, more pernicious, attempts to influence him? “Brainwashing” was a poor choice of words, conjuring up images of Korean prisoners of war who had displayed a fatal weakness when confronted with a trying situation. Somehow, the media managed to convey the image of Romney as an inept, incompetent, perhaps even clownish figure. He was through. His explanations fell flat, and he announced his withdrawal even before the New Hampshire primary balloting. Richard Nixon had a clear field.

  Party leaders steadily gravitated toward Nixon. Republican Senate leader Dirksen regarded Nixon as a party loyalist—“kosher” was his improbable description. Even Eisenhower proved malleable to Nixon’s will after all the years. The former President had offered to endorse Nixon but proposed waiting for the opening day of the Republican Convention. Nixon pressed Ike for an earlier statement and got it on July 17. Eisenhower praised Nixon in the predictable fashion, but he added a personal note on a copy of his prepared text that he sent his Vice President: “Dear Dick—This was something I truly enjoyed doing—DE.”9