But the times were special. The militancy of the antiwar movement had not abated in the slightest with the election, and for good reason: the war itself had not abated. Rather, during the first two years of the Nixon Administration, it broadened. For those within the Administration, from the President on down, outside agitation—whether it came from antiwar activists, environmentalists, or civil rights advocates—mirrored the hostility within and contributed to both a sense of isolation and a feeling of “us” against “them.” Several years later, in a rambling conversation with his aide John Ehrlichman, the President bitterly assaulted environmentalists. He thought them “overrated,” and that they served only the “privileged.” Their issue, he said, was just “crap,” and for “clowns,” and “the rich and [Supreme Court Justice William O.] Douglas.” The tensions, from both sides, only further poisoned the political air.
Nixon and his associates personalized the opposition, and again not without cause. The resistance and civil disobedience of the 1960s confronted a system which some considered evil and intolerable. Much of that activism was condoned by politicians, intimidated intellectuals, and the media. Nixon’s election, for them, constituted a self-fulfilling prophecy, justifying more opposition, more disobedience. The whole business was circular, as Alexander Bickel observed: “Men who are loudly charged with repression before they have done anything to substantiate the charge are apt to proceed to substantiate it.”1
Various Administration officials reflected on the times and their feelings. Ehrlichman flatly denied any notion of White House paranoia toward antiwar demonstrations. Others have testified to the contrary. Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deeply resented the demonstrations. He remembered the “tension” because of the war, the opposition, and the media. The President himself acknowledged that “I was a paranoiac, or almost a basket case with regard to secrecy,” fearing that leaks would jeopardize diplomatic negotiations or even reveal the precariousness of the military situation in Vietnam.
William Ruckelshaus was in the Department of Justice in October 1969 when tens of thousands of demonstrators converged on the capital. Ruckelshaus had a well-earned reputation as a moderate man and was hardly a presidential sycophant. But he recalled the tear gas that drifted from the streets into the Attorney General’s office (“so much you could hardly speak”) and the buses surrounding the White House for security purposes: “My Lord,” he said, “you don’t have to be paranoid to say everything ain’t working just swimmingly here.” The net result of the demonstrations, according to Ruckelshaus, was that they provoked extreme reactions on the other side as well. However justified the civil disobedience, the counter-reaction, he thought, “inevitably” would go beyond what good judgment considered appropriate. White House aide Jeb Stuart Magruder later testified to the alternate feelings of frustration and anger among the President’s men. The President’s opponents, Magruder contended, failed to appreciate his efforts to end the war on his often-articulated basis of “peace with honor.” Their resistance created “frustration and a feeling of impotence”; consequently, Magruder admitted, the President’s men grew more callous toward their enemies, whom they saw committing illegal acts with the approval of a large portion of the American public.2
Wars historically impose enormous strains on the Constitution, and the Vietnam war proved no exception. The Administration’s responses to antiwar activists (wiretapping), demonstrators (mass arrests), and leaks from Administration operations (more wiretapping and illegal break-ins of private offices to obtain ostensible evidence) reflected a government threatened from without and besieged from within. Nixon’s oft-declared insistence that he would not be the first American President to lose a war to a large degree inspired his Administration’s behavior and justified it to him and his loyal supporters.
Nixon’s first term often is viewed as a successful one—after all, the American voters enthusiastically endorsed it in 1972. A decade after the President’s resignation, some historians and journalists, following Nixon’s lead, sparked a burst of revisionism that ranged from a view of Watergate as but a blip on the continuum of both American and Nixonian history, to a full-blown public declaration of rehabilitation by some members of the media the ex-President had once fought so bitterly. Nixon’s historical reputation, it was argued, would stand or fall on his policy achievements, and some commentators argued that his domestic triumphs far outstripped those in foreign policy.3
Nixon himself claimed little in the way of legislative achievement. To be sure, he lacked LBJ’s congressional majorities, not to mention his standing and skill with Congress. Nixon’s own party, moreover, was badly divided on legislative goals. When the President pushed an affirmative-action program, Senate Republican leader Dirksen warned that Nixon would split the party if he insisted on the law. “[I]t is my bounden duty to tell you,” Nixon remembered Dirksen as saying, “that this thing is about as popular as a crab in a whorehouse.” The most famous Nixon proposal was the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), a promising welfare-reform proposal pushed by Daniel P. Moynihan and other academic experts. But this project floundered amid Left-Right legislative and White House pressures. In the end, Nixon himself abandoned the idea, and FAP died aborning.
Similarly, he vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill in late 1971, with a strident ideological message that was designed to appease conservatives embittered by the President’s decision to visit China. Perhaps Nixon’s most prominent domestic move was the imposition of wage and price controls in 1971, although years later he devoted several pages of his memoirs to repudiating that same policy.4
Foreign policy, of course, offers a weightier argument for Nixon’s leadership qualities. Here the President was in his favored milieu. In the years following World War II, Congress had tended to accord presidents preeminence in foreign-policy matters. Thus Nixon had greater opportunities to act in this area than he did in domestic policy. Certainly, his move toward rapprochement with China was a major historical achievement—whatever his mixed motives and his own past efforts and commitments toward isolating the Chinese. Visiting China in 1972, he toasted the event as “the week that changed the world.” Perhaps he exaggerated, but his trip did in fact change the relationship between two great nations, and, as Nixon noted fifteen years later, the move showed that through cooperation between the two nations, “the world can be changed—and changed for the better.”
His moves toward détente with the Soviet Union are especially intriguing; ironically, their long-range success and wisdom have earned Nixon extraordinary enmity from many of those who otherwise loyally supported him. Finally in the survey of his foreign policy, the Vietnam war proved to be no less a burden for Nixon than it had been for Johnson. Nixon promised to withdraw American troops, gain the release of prisoners of war, and secure “peace with honor” while preserving the integrity of South Vietnam. American soldiers came home, along with the POWs, but only after losses in men and matériel that almost matched those suffered under Johnson. The resulting North Vietnamese takeover of all of Indochina confirmed much of the contemporary skepticism and contempt for Nixon’s vaunted “peace with honor.”5
The public achievements of Nixon’s first term are scattered. They merit historical recognition, but have little to do with what always will make Nixon unique: his resignation in disgrace, amid ever-mounting scandals. The revelations that followed the break-in at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972 pierced the curtain that had masked the seamy side of the Administration for almost four years.6 Therein lay the origins of the tragedy that engulfed Richard Nixon and the nation.
* * *
John Mitchell, Nixon’s 1968 campaign manager and the first of his five Attorneys General, testified in 1973 about the “White House horrors,” a term he applied generically to a range of political “dirty tricks” he considered far more disturbing than the Watergate break-in. Mitchell’s comment was pointed at roguish p
residential aides who he believed had misled and badly advised the President. Other contemporaries referred to the staff more charitably, characterizing them as the “Beaver Patrol,” dutifully parceling out “Mickey Mouse” missions. The sarcastic veneer of that judgment barely concealed the reality that Richard Nixon commanded the patrol and dictated its missions.
The Nixon presidency marked a further evolution in the style and life of the White House. Since the Eisenhower years, it had come increasingly to resemble a monarchical court. Former Johnson aide George Reedy accurately portrayed that development and uncannily anticipated its continuance. White House life, Reedy wrote, basically served the material needs of the President, from providing the most luxurious means of travel to having a masseur constantly present. But, more important, he was treated with kingly reverence. “No one speaks to him unless spoken to first. No one ever invites him to ‘go soak your head’ when his demands become petulant and unreasonable.” Reedy’s master was well known for his almost compulsive drive for micro-managerial control which paralyzed initiatives and innovations from others. In Johnson’s White House, presidential aides seemingly existed to carry out the leader’s whims and decrees and, in time-honored fashion, they were to have a “passion for anonymity.”7
Nixon’s conception of his role varied only slightly from Johnson’s. That same drive for control, that same intensity of involvement across a wide spectrum of activities, from the most global and profound to the most localized and petty, characterized Richard Nixon’s behavior. For many, Nixon’s staff, especially Haldeman, his main “gatekeeper” (as the President characterized him), and Ehrlichman, served as scapegoats, as the “bad Germans,” to explain the darker side of the Nixon Administration. Senator Dirksen had complained of having to work through the White House’s “Berlin Wall”—meaning Haldeman and Ehrlichman. House Republican leader Gerald Ford likewise excoriated these aides for their apparent view that Congress existed “only to follow their instructions, and we had no right to behave as a co-equal branch of government.” But Ford later conveniently discovered that such attitudes were not exclusively held by presidential aides. As President himself, Ford savored his prerogatives; Congress, he complained, had disintegrated as an organized legislative body.8
The idea that his sinister aides transformed the newly minted Nixon of 1968 back into the old, familiar Nixon apparently has its source in accounts of the campaign. Nixon’s media advisers claimed that he lost his large lead over Humphrey when Haldeman came more directly into the fray. Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary since 1951, and long regarded as the “fifth Nixon,” later—after the Watergate revelations—complained: “It was all warm and friendly until … Bob Haldeman arrived.”9
Harry Robbins Haldeman had stood outside the Los Angeles television studio where Nixon made his “Checkers” speech in 1952. The twenty-six-year-old advertising account executive sent a note into the studio, offering to help in the campaign, but he was refused. The rebuff showed that Senator Nixon had something to learn about gratitude, for Haldeman’s father had contributed to Nixon’s $18,000 “slush fund.” Haldeman’s grandfather, who had made a fortune in the plumbing-supply business, had co-founded the Better American Federation of California, an early anticommunist organization. Following the 1952 election, Haldeman continued his career in advertising, handling accounts as diverse as Disneyland and Black Flag insecticide. He finally gained a place in the Nixon camp when he signed on to work in the 1956 re-election effort. Robert Finch, then Nixon’s Chief of Staff in all but name, was impressed, and made Haldeman the chief advance man in the 1960 campaign. Haldeman opposed Nixon’s pursuit of the California governorship but loyally coordinated the effort when it was decided upon. While John Mitchell managed Nixon’s presidential bid in 1968, Haldeman maintained proximity to the candidate and quietly assumed the lion’s share of power. After the election, he commanded the transition arrangements and eased into the role he occupied until the end of April 1973.
For several of the Nixon campaigns, Haldeman had enlisted the services of his college friend John D. Ehrlichman, who had been practicing real-estate law in Seattle. Ehrlichman, too, served an apprenticeship as a Nixon advance man, but in 1968 he worked closely with Haldeman. Quite naturally, he followed his friend into the White House, where he first served as Counsel to the President, and later as head of the Domestic Council. Ehrlichman, far more than Haldeman, worked with the President on substantive policy matters.10
Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s detailed notes of their constant meetings with the President faithfully recorded Nixon’s wishes and complaints—not, however, without occasional sarcasm or astonishment at his behavior. At one point during their repeated visits to the Oval Office in the 1972 campaign, Haldeman scratched a note to Ehrlichman: “Why did he buzz me?” Like a schoolchild answering a passed message, Ehrlichman sketched several sarcastic answers in his inimitable style: “He had an itchy finger.” “Also there was a chair unoccupied.” “Also he has been talking about not just reordering the chaos, and he would like you to understand that point.”
In general, however, the two aides dutifully gave their President the loyalty that they demanded of others in his name. “There shouldn’t be a lot of leeway in following the President’s policies,” Ehrlichman said in 1972. “It should be like a corporation, where the executive vice presidents (the cabinet officers) are tied closely to the chief executive,… [and] when he says jump they only ask how high.” Critics of Haldeman and Ehrlichman regularly complained that they were not men of ideas, that they pursued power as an end in itself. Richard Whalen, who had written speeches for Nixon in 1968, was a conservative with firm ideological and policy convictions. Whalen was appalled at the lack of values and philosophy in the President’s key aides, and he winced when Ehrlichman announced that the President was only interested in what was “feasible and tactically shrewd.” Whalen eventually realized that Ehrlichman was no different from the others; he served as a functionary, carrying out the role and duties designed by Richard Nixon. CIA Director Richard Helms, too, understood the role of the President’s aides; as for Nixon himself, Helms considered him “the original loner.”11
“We had a strong, tight-knit team with a passion for anonymity,” Haldeman said rather disingenuously, nearly fifteen years after he left the White House. But unlike Johnson, Nixon did not demand anonymity from his aides; their visibility served him conveniently and well, especially in diverting heat and attention from himself. Visibility and independent power are quite different things, however. Both primary aides have offered ample testimony that they had executed the President’s wishes, not invented them. Their self-effacement was self-serving, to be sure. But Robert Finch came to the same conclusion. He insisted that the Richard Nixon of 1960 obviously was not the Richard Nixon of 1968 through 1972. Finch, who saw Haldeman in a role he once had, at first thought that “they”—Haldeman and other White House aides—“were constantly changing Nixon.” But Finch reluctantly concluded that “they” were but an extension of Nixon’s own personality. And Harry Dent, another White House aide, who ranked just below Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and who disliked Haldeman intensely, scoffed at the notion that Nixon could not control his subordinates. “I know from whence every order came.… You couldn’t be around without knowing that everything came from one well, one spring.” Egil Krogh, a particular Nixon favorite, concurred.
Nixon had the message, and in Haldeman he had his medium. William Safire, who savaged Haldeman in his account of his White House years, well understood Haldeman’s role: “Haldeman organized the dissemination of the President’s thinking;…. Haldeman organized the execution of the President’s orders,” Safire wrote. Haldeman even had a verb for his function—“game planning.” His memos came in a cascade, “game planning” Vietnam, prisoners of war, and Clement Haynsworth’s Supreme Court nomination. By “Game Planning we will attempt to co-ordinate total Administration activities toward producing the maximum possible results fro
m any of the key objectives that the President feels requires special attention and an all-out effort,” the Chief of Staff told his subordinates.
The President’s daughter admitted that “my father wanted Bob Haldeman to be the sole conduit to him.” Hardly an admirer of Haldeman’s, however, she added that he “seemed to want that even more.” Nixon depended “mightily” on his Chief of Staff, and he did not want to hear criticism of Haldeman. According to Julie Nixon Eisenhower, her father “closed his eyes to Haldeman’s occasional overstepping” of his bounds and allowed his aide to isolate him. Her account reads like a historical novel depicting a powerless medieval king manipulated by supposedly inferior feudal barons. Ultimately, however, the President’s daughter conceded that Haldeman’s “occasional overstepping” reflected “what the President wanted.”
A decade earlier, Nixon had acknowledged the difficulty, even the impossibility, of certain administrative functions. For those, he said, “you need a son-of-a-bitch in it.” Such was Haldeman’s position, and both men realized what was required. Haldeman readily acknowledged his role: “I’m his [Nixon’s] buffer and I’m his bastard. I get done what he wants done and I take the heat instead of him.” Haldeman later recalled that early in the Administration, he lost his “passion for anonymity” when he appeared on television to denounce congressmen who had criticized the President’s Vietnam policy, accusing them of “consciously aiding and abetting the enemy.” But he made that statement, he revealed, “at the president’s orders.”12
Haldeman displaced Rose Mary Woods as the President’s most important assistant, an act that Haldeman’s detractors often cited to illustrate his grasping for power. But the directive that elevated Haldeman came from Nixon. Haldeman’s notes for his September 19, 1971 meeting with the President record Nixon as saying: “When Rose gets back—reevaluate her job. 80% of her time making calls.” The next day, Haldeman dictated an action paper as follows: “When Rose Woods gets back we should reevaluate her job. She should shift to a use of her time that is more externally productive. Approximately 80% should be spent making phone calls. She should be checking things like congratulations to the staff people and outside people.…” Given her experience with the President, Woods must have recognized who had demoted her.13
The Wars of Watergate Page 12
