The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  At the outset Nixon recognized that he had to adopt “complex political strategies” to secure his program. He was determined to be an “activist President in domestic affairs.… I was prepared to use the first year of my presidency to knock heads together in order to get things done.” The “complex political strategies” included public-relations operations and a preoccupation with “the opposition.” Safire complained about the obsession with “PR,” apparently directing his pique toward Haldeman and his advertising-agency minions who filled the West Wing of the White House. But the obsession was Nixon’s; as always, Haldeman was merely the instrument. In an earlier memo to his aide, the President emphasized “PR” activities. Henceforth, every Monday, he wanted a week’s projection of major opposition attacks, “so we can plan our own statements with those in mind.” Nixon demanded to “be informed as to what action has been taken and, if action is not taken, why the decision has been made not to take it.” Earlier, it was the President—not Haldeman—who ordered that all editorials and “column plays” be sent daily to the appropriate White House staff members.27

  Nixon was unhappy with the public response to his June 1969 meeting with South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and his announcement that he would withdraw 25,000 troops from South Vietnam. Admittedly, the media found the news “most welcome,” but Nixon categorized the reaction as “what else is new?” He blamed his staff for a failure to follow through on his efforts. Alexander Butterfield, who spent most of the day at the President’s side, conveyed Nixon’s dissatisfaction to White House aides, including Herbert Klein, who was supposedly in charge of dealing with the media.

  “All of us,” Butterfield told them in a memo, “failed to provide that massive exploitation action which is so vital (essential) to the achievement of our political and other goals.” He asked Klein and another aide for written responses. The matter was most urgent.28

  The White House had a special staff to deal with the public-relations aspects of policy problems—the “ten o’clock” and “five o’clock” groups—whose sole function was to create a favorable flow of news for the President, timed to fit noon and evening news deadlines. By mid-1971, with little more than a year remaining before the next presidential election, the public-relations groups seemed concerned that the nation did not view the President as “being personally involved in domestic issues.” One staffer thought it important that the President, not Attorney General Mitchell, speak out on drugs; that President Nixon, not the Environmental Protection Agency’s William Ruckelshaus, talk about pollution; and again, that President Nixon, not Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz, discuss the economy. Ehrlichman and Haldeman agreed that the President must be more involved—or, at least, more visible—in domestic matters. Haldeman stressed “the real issues like economy & drugs,” not “the phonies like health & environment.” Ehrlichman thought that the President had overlooked the need for “credibility, compassion and humanity.” Not so, Haldeman retorted: “We may be failing to get them across; we are sure as hell not overlooking them.”29

  In October 1969, Nixon instructed Haldeman to have his speechwriters work out a statement of his philosophy. It “would be worth some work and effort by our PR group,” the President thought. Haldeman directed Safire to deal with the details. Safire had been frustrated since the campaign by his inability to establish a coherent overview of Nixon’s political philosophy. At the moment, he was trying to write a rationale for the President’s “New Federalism” program, a term Nixon had casually dropped at the National Governors’ Conference in September. Now, ten months into his presidency, Nixon wanted someone to develop his philosophy. Safire’s observation was revealing, however inadvertent: “Strange, fitting a philosophy to the set of deeds, but sometimes that is what has to be done.”30

  The President periodically pressed his aides for a “manifesto of the Nixon programs for progress.” But his need for a coherent philosophy paled in comparison to his constant concern for his image. Haldeman’s notes typically recorded presidential self-advertisements: “Nixon superbly qualified for summitry experiences, does home work, tough, strong,… met more [heads] of govt—conciliatory, subtle, knows the subject.” In a March 1970 memo, Nixon told Haldeman: “On another subject, RN’s effectiveness with small groups, on toasts, etc., might be a theme to have Klein, Ziegler, et al get out as they talk to people for background purposes.” The same day, Nixon asked his aide to have the “PR group” consider whether “New Majority,” rather than “Silent Majority,” should become the Administration’s slogan. En route from California to Washington one day, the President dictated more than a dozen memos to Haldeman and Ehrlichman regarding things for them to do in the public-relations sphere. He consistently laid out “themes” for his aides and surrogates to pursue, such as his own “come-back,” his effectiveness in using television, and his being the only twentieth-century president (excepting Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Hoover) who “completely writes a major speech.”

  The President was determined to project himself as the man in charge. At the outset of his Administration, he admonished Ehrlichman to refute media commentators who described the Nixon regime as “government by committee.” “Of course, as you know,” Nixon told Ehrlichman, “nothing could be further from the truth.” He urged him to “get across the point that RN provides very positive direct leadership to the Cabinet committees.” Later, he pressed Ehrlichman to mount “a more effective public relations campaign” that would demonstrate the President’s leadership in combatting crime. Nixon thought John Dean would be the ideal man to carry out the task.31

  After two years in office, the President remained dissatisfied with the White House’s public-relations efforts. In March 1971, he thought that he needed a “full-time PR man to really convey the true image.” This most serious of men worried about a need for humor and color in his talks. Above all, he wanted to be portrayed as having warmth and passion; what he wanted, of course, was love and affection from the nation.

  Nixon prodded Haldeman to arrange a “private” gathering of his men at Blair House in March 1971 at which they would discuss what Haldeman described as the Administration’s “principal flaw”: its failure to secure proper credit for the President’s achievements. The gathering was not so private, in fact, for Haldeman arranged to have it taped. The Chief of Staff presided, speaking from notes prepared by Charles Colson. But the undoubted star of the evening was Treasury Secretary John Connally, then at the height of his standing with the President. Connally exhorted the others to do more for the President. Nixon himself might as well have been speaking when Connally said: “[Y]ou have a President who is a hell of a lot better President than he’s getting credit for being. Secondly, he’s doing things for which he receives not only no credit, but no attention.” Connally stirred his audience most when he urged that someone do something about the President’s awkward thrusting up of his arms and giving the V-for-Victory signal with his fingers. The other presidential aides thought Connally was the only one who could tell Nixon to stop the gesture.32

  The quest to shape the President’s image as he wanted it continued throughout the Nixon presidency, amid success and amid disaster. In the days of the “global village,” of course, public relations are an inevitable aspect of politics. But in this case it may have come too late. The nation knew Richard Nixon after his more than two decades in public life; its perception of him had long since crystallized. Shortly after he attended the Blair House gathering, Leonard Garment told Ehrlichman he thought it futile to project the President as anything other than what he was. Instead he suggested that the President simply continue to act responsibly, and with a little luck, he would persuade voters in 1972 on the critical issue: “Has the President managed the corpus of Presidential trust through four incredibly difficult years so that it is not impaired?”33 Unfortunately, the President and his campaign advisers had far more complicated and grandiose plans for persuading the electorate.

  Th
e perception which Nixon and his staff had of the Cabinet involved a conviction that its officers were captives of their own bureaucracies. “We don’t need an army of bureaucrats,” the President told Haldeman in 1971. Nixon’s tones were more bellicose in a complaint to Ehrlichman in April 1973: “We have no discipline in this bureaucracy. We never fire anybody. We never reprimand anybody. We never demote anybody. We always promote the sons-of-bitches that kick us in the ass.” A few weeks earlier, Ehrlichman recorded a typical Nixon expression: “Burocracy [sic] fighting us.” The President and his aides were by then under increasing fire as a result of Watergate revelations; indeed, Ehrlichman would resign in less than two weeks. But the sentiments were familiar ones for Nixon in other contexts. From the earliest biography to his own memoirs, Nixon repeated a set refrain about his own experience as a bureaucrat in the Office of Price Administration in 1942. That service “disillusioned” him about the bureaucracy, revealed the “mediocrity” of civil servants, and taught him about the “old, violent New Deal crowd” that was out “to GET business” and used government for that purpose. He deplored bureaucratic waste and “empire-building.” The refrain became an article of faith. As Vice President, he often talked about removing entrenched New Dealers and Democrats who threatened Republican goals.34

  Venting hostility toward the bureaucracy has, of course, always been a convenient safety valve for political frustration. “What is a bureaucrat?” Senator Alben Barkley mockingly asked in 1948. “It is a Democrat who has some job a Republican wants.” At a meeting in August 1970, Senator Barry Goldwater berated the President for not having control of the government. Goldwater insisted that Nixon had not changed governmental policies in accordance with his 1968 mandate, and urged prompt firings and transfers. Two years later, a young White House aide bitterly complained that the President did not run the bureaucracy: “the civil service and the unions do. It took him three years to find out what was going on in the bureaucracy.”

  John F. Kennedy’s aide and biographer, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., recalled many instances of his and Kennedy’s frustration in getting the bureaucracy to respond to policy directives. Schlesinger claimed that he spent three years unsuccessfully trying to persuade the State Department to stop using outmoded references to the “Sino-Soviet Bloc.” More generally, he observed that “the President used to divert himself with the dream of establishing a secret office of thirty people or so to run foreign policy while maintaining the State Department as a facade in which people might contentedly carry papers from bureau to bureau.” (Ironically, that was precisely the system that Nixon and Kissinger installed.) Schlesinger saw the problem in broad institutional terms: “Kennedy, who had been critical of the Eisenhower effort to institutionalize the Presidency,” Schlesinger wrote, “was determined to restore the personal character of the office and recover presidential control over the sprawling feudalism of government.”

  Finally, Schlesinger almost despaired “of making the permanent government responsive to the policies of the presidential government.” In fairness, he admitted that the problem cut two ways: “The aggressiveness of the White House staff no doubt compounded the trouble”; furthermore, “White House meddling struck some of the pros as careless intrusion by impulsive and ignorant amateurs.”35

  Bureaucracy had thrived amid the putatively hostile, antibureaucratic Republican atmosphere of the 1950s. In fact, the relaxed laissez faire managerial style that characterized much of the Eisenhower Administration heightened the power, even autonomy, of the government’s components. The Kennedy and Johnson presidential assistants changed that, as Schlesinger observed, haranguing bureau chiefs, demanding action and movement in the President’s name.

  Nixon and his entourage placed a premium on loyalty from below. In this, their expectation was no different from that of other administrations—and it probably was similarly fruitless. Various instances that involved the Nixon Administration’s insistence on bureaucratic loyalty only further exposed a general pattern of behavior. When the Pentagon eliminated the position of a prominent “whistle blower” as an “economy measure,” Butterfield was elated. He told Haldeman that while the man was “no doubt a top-notch cost expert,… he must be given very low marks in loyalty; and after all, loyalty is the name of the game.” When several lower-level State Department officers quietly circulated an internal memorandum protesting the Cambodian invasion in 1970, Alexander Haig, then Kissinger’s deputy, demanded that the men “be separated” or be reassigned “to field duties where they may be subjected to the kind of discipline that seems to be missing from their Washington assignments.” The President himself complained that “lower echelons” of the State and Defense Department bureaucracies had “deliberately” attempted to sabotage his policies. He asked his closest advisers “to give consideration as to how we can get better discipline with the bureaucracy.” Through it all, of course, Nixon disclaimed any desire to “censor” the views of others.36

  The White House staff moved beyond occasional intrusions and oversight procedures directed toward the bureaucracy by seeking direct and operational control of policy-making, often at the price of creating a parallel system of personnel and activity. Kissinger’s expansion of his role as National Security Adviser is the most obvious case, although by 1973 John Ehrlichman’s Domestic Council had developed the same tendency. When Nixon spoke to Richard Kleindienst after Kleindienst became Attorney General, the President’s “talking points” paper noted: “From time to time I’ll give you policy guidance through the Domestic council staff. I expect it to be complied with; if you object to it I expect to hear back from you at once via the same channel. I won’t have subtle diversion of my instruction by a dissenting bureaucracy.” The President also emphasized that he would insist on having “reliable men,” cleared by the White House, in subordinate positions. The “administrative presidency,” born and nurtured in previous administrations, matured significantly in the Nixon years.37

  Richard Nixon and his advisers were convinced that the bureaucracy was another form of the enemy within. The opposition controlled Congress, the bureaucracy’s natural ally. The two quite naturally resisted Nixon policies, which threatened the programs of one and the existence of the other. Contemporary studies did show a high degree of ideological hostility to the Nixon Administration in the upper strata of the civil service. As a practical matter, however, bureaucrats under Nixon did what they always did, even when not ideologically hostile to the Chief Executive: they fought for position and a share of power and often settled on the basis of mutually satisfactory group bargains.38 That was not the game favored by the President and his men. And as the White House staff grew, that bureaucratic structure, with its own subunits, confronted the myriad of established bureaucracies scattered throughout the government, giving a new dimension to jurisdictional warfare.

  The tale of the Huston Plan offers a variety of insights into Nixon’s desire for personal control of matters he considered sensitive, the Administration’s plans for the bureaucracy, and the latter’s counterattacks. Perhaps most important of all, the story offers a revealing indication of the Administration’s contempt for constitutional limitations.

  The Huston Plan bore the name of Tom Charles Huston, a second-echelon White House aide. Huston, a former national leader in Young Americans for Freedom, was a deeply committed right-wing ideologue who sometimes signed his memos “Cato the Younger.” He proposed to gather all domestic intelligence activities under his direction in the White House. According to fellow aide John Dean, Huston believed the government would surely fall if it did not deal harshly with the revolutionaries who were determined to destroy it.39 Reflected in the plan was a combination of White House frustration at the alleged inefficiency of the intelligence community with a desire to have that community focus on activities that affected the Administration’s political concerns.

  Tom Huston wrote the details, but the CIA Director had no illusions about their ultimate source: the plan, Rich
ard Helms said, was “basically Richard Nixon’s doing, and he called it the Huston Plan.” The idea logically followed from Nixon’s law-and-order campaign theme in 1968. For some, providing order meant putting an end to protest, demonstrations, and dissent—whatever the constitutional legitimacy of those political activities. That conviction was rooted in a longstanding American belief, first heard in response to political protests in the late 1790s and continuing through the Cold War, that dissent was necessarily something nourished abroad to foment subversion and hence destruction at home. James Madison once lamented that “the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against dangers, real or pretended, from abroad.”

  Nixon himself, of course, was not unfamiliar with such notions. Throughout the years of antiwar activism, a theme of the response from the Right was that the protests were inspired and fueled in Moscow, Hanoi, or Peking. J. Edgar Hoover, in his forty-fifth year as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when Nixon assumed office, already had in place COINTELPRO, an elaborate program of infiltration and disinformation against the so-called New Left. Still the protests mounted, eventually provoking the President to demand greater efforts to discredit the dissidents.