The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  The President had hoped to stave off public and congressional critics as the nation realized the wisdom of his plan. But six months later, his action ordering American forces into Cambodia to attack North Vietnamese and Viet Cong sanctuaries rekindled the opposition. Public protests cascaded throughout campuses and cities. Nixon responded on May 1, 1970, with a Pentagon speech attacking campus demonstrators as “bums” living a protected, sheltered life while “the kids” in Vietnam “stand tall.” The remarks prefaced more violence, including the fatal shooting of students at Kent State University in Ohio. A week later, the President visited protesters at the Lincoln Memorial in the middle of the night, hoping to explain his policies in a direct, unprovocative manner. Public protests thereafter subsided somewhat, but more in fear of further violence than because of agreement with the President.53

  The real change in attitude toward Vietnam was in Congress. On June 24, 1970, the Senate repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 81–10. Nixon had not relied on that measure as overtly as Johnson; nevertheless, the vote was powerfully symbolic and a portent of congressional resistance. Nixon understood this. He wanted “our friends” to “fight [the repeal] vigorously,” although he thought it “completely irrelevant as far as this Administration is concerned.” Still, he was concerned that repeal of the historic resolution “might be detrimental to American foreign policy abroad since it could well be misunderstood.” Republican Senator Jacob Javits of New York said that Congress must find the means to establish its authority at the outset of military hostilities—a cue for what was to become the War Powers Act of 1973. Representative John B. Anderson (R-IL), one of the Republican leaders, complained that the President had too much “initiative and responsibility” for deployment of American troops abroad; this was not, he said, the intent of the Constitution.54

  The President counterattacked, instructing Cabinet members to defend the Cambodian action with direct attacks on Congress. Presidential surrogates emphasized the President’s need to protect American troops and called upon Congress not to “stab our men in the back.” Congressional resistance, it was suggested, gave the enemy “aid and comfort,” encouraging them “to kill more Americans.” If Congress voted against the war, the directive continued, then it “must assume responsibility” for the lives of American troops, “rather than leaving such responsibility, and the decisions connected with it,” to the President. Finally, Congress must be held accountable “for an ignominious American defeat if it succeeds in tying the President’s hands through a Congressional appropriation route.”55

  By June 1971, with the war and diplomatic negotiations both dragging on wearily, congressional restlessness gave rise to a gesture of rebellion. As part of a defense-authorization bill, Congress called on the President to terminate military operations in Indochina and provide for withdrawal within nine months, subject to the release of prisoners of war. In a bold fashion of his own, Nixon said he would ignore the proviso, since it did “not reflect my judgment about the way in which the war should be brought to a conclusion,” adding that he considered the statement “without binding force or effect.” The next year a federal court repudiated the President: “No executive statement denying efficacy to the legislation could have either validity or effect,” the court’s decision said, and the court characterized Nixon’s statement as “very unfortunate.”56

  But the war continued, and the President planned to end American participation on his own terms. He also turned his attention to the war critics. Noting the correlation of their criticism and North Vietnamese resistance to his peace proposals, the President proposed an all-out attack on the critics, reminiscent in style and tone of his earlier political campaigns. He wanted his opponents accused of “playing politics with peace.” He claimed that he had “done everything but offer surrender to the enemy.” The critics, he charged, “want the United States to surrender to the Communists. They want to turn South Vietnam over to the Communists.… They want the enemy to win and the United States to lose.” In a more positive vein, Nixon emphasized the necessity for negotiation and, correspondingly, the need for closing ranks. But he preferred “the attack line” to the positive one. Attack, he said, was more effective because it tended “to keep the critics from getting out too far and also because it simply makes more news. We have often failed in the past in these PR efforts because we simply have not had colorful enough attack lines and have not followed up on them. I do not want us to make that mistake this time,” Nixon said. He told his aides to press leading Republicans to use these themes, and to find “a good, hardhitting newspaper editorial” for broad circulation to friendly editors. Finally, he directed the staff to emphasize that Senators Muskie, Humphrey, and Kennedy “got us into the war [and] are now trying to sabotage Nixon’s efforts to get us out.” The President also had difficulties on the Right and in his own house. Vice President Agnew urged that there be no deal with North Vietnam unless it cleared all of its troops out of the South. “Unreasonable,” the President told Ehrlichman.57

  Nixon realized that Congress was the domestic battlefront, not the universities or the streets. But his assault was ineffective, and Congress responded in its own fashion. At the opening of the new Congress in 1973, Senate Majority Leader Mansfield told the Democratic caucus that the war must end. He did not know if it could be done through the legislative route, but he did “know that the time is long since past when we can take shelter in a claim of legislative impotence. We cannot dismiss our responsibility by deference to the President’s.” Apparently Mansfield’s remarks anticipated Nixon’s growing vulnerability and offered an opportunity for Congress to take the initiative. Soon, characterizations of congressional “impotence,” “acquiescence,” and “passivity” lost their earlier applicability. As the Senate Select Committee opened its hearings on the conduct of the President’s 1972 re-election campaign, a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee began its own inquiry into the Constitution and war powers. Representative Spark M. Matsunaga (D–HI) offered a keynote: Vietnam’s great lesson, he said, pointed out the need for “definite, unmistakable procedures to prevent future undeclared wars.”58 Months later, the War Powers Act of 1973 was law. Whatever its ambiguity, it offered a coda to the long struggle between the branches of government over Vietnam policy, and it signalled a new era in executive-legislative relations.

  “Let’s face it, most Americans today are simply fed up with government at all levels,” Nixon said in his 1971 State of the Union message. The remark reflected frustration at his inability to gain congressional support for his program; it was an extension of the “deadlock” theme he had propounded in the 1970 midterm elections. The election results had changed nothing to alter the President’s view of congressional relations. The attack on “government” was an oblique attack on Congress, and hence an attack on the Democratic Party as the party and paladin of government. Nixon’s war on Congress would continue.

  Modern presidential-congressional relations have a checkered history. Some observers have been critical of an altogether too compliant Congress. Carl Vinson, who first arrived as a Georgia Congressman in 1914, sadly lamented in 1973 that Congress was a “somewhat querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while furiously puffing on his pipe but who, finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance, grants the permission, or raises his hand in blessing, and then returns to his rocking chair for another year of somnolence broken only by an occasional glance down the avenue and a muttered doubt as to whether he had done the right thing.” Indeed, even Richard Nixon could be a beneficiary of that kindly old uncle. Congress passed the Economic Stabilization Act in 1970, which gave the President sweeping authority to regulate wages and prices—a domestic equivalent to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as one writer remarked.59

  Still, the pattern of deadlock was real. More important, Congress had begun to resist and question executive authority, an authority that some believed relied too much on deceit and bullying. In facing tho
se resentments, Nixon again had to grapple with a dubious legacy from LBJ, but his own actions contributed to an ever-widening gulf filled with mistrust, suspicion, and ill will between the White House and Congress. Nixon believed that government could work better, but only with changes in structure and direction. His rejection of traditional political accommodation in the legislative process, as well as his notions of change and effectiveness, clashed with those who believed in the status quo—or who distrusted Richard Nixon. They perceived his design as one that deliberately sought to devalue or weaken other institutions in order to strengthen his own influence and power. Perhaps the President believed that the 1972 campaign could change all that. For his second term, perhaps he could win a smashing victory, capture that ever-elusive mandate, and exercise power with an ideological majority in Congress that would enable him to imprint his stamp on other institutions.

  The American people voted in 1972 to retain Richard Nixon for the usual mixture of positive and negative reasons. They also voted to retain a Congress dominated by Democrats. Nixon knew that this meant more confrontation and acrimony. The conflict went on and even escalated to include the President’s urging his staff to order the IRS to audit every member of Congress. For Nixon, Congress was a hopelessly archaic institution that mindlessly resisted innovation both in other branches of government and in itself. He promised that by the end of his second term, he would “blast” Congress for having prolonged the Vietnam war by encouraging the enemy in hard bargaining. Nixon had no fear of challenging Congress. The nation, he believed, was indifferent to the question of which branch was supreme, although he warned his aides to be aware of seeming arrogance. Still, in an interview published after the election, he promised that he would move decisively in his second term. To his White House staff the President said: “There are no sacred cows. We will tear up the pea patch.”60 Even as he spoke, however, it was too late.

  Richard Nixon admired Woodrow Wilson perhaps more than any other of his twentieth-century predecessors. As a professor, Wilson had studied and analyzed congressional power, drawing lessons that he usually applied with great skill as President. But tragically—some might say willfully—President Wilson failed to make the necessary bargains and accommodations to secure acceptance of his cherished League of Nations in 1919. On the League, he would have his way absolutely, or not at all. Strange, given Wilson’s own axiom that the American system rejected absolute power anywhere: the tact and mutually beneficial bargaining that had characterized Wilson’s earlier dealings with Congress gave way to direct confrontation in the vain hope that the American people would deliver a referendum vindicating him. It never came. Strange, too, that the same lesson seemed lost on Wilson’s admiring pupil, Richard Nixon.

  VII

  MEDIA WARS

  In December 1968, on the eve of his presidency, Richard Nixon solicited his speechwriters for a research paper recapitulating “the typical opposition smears of Richard Nixon back through the years, including the more vicious press comments.” The staff ignored this particular request and according to William Safire, one of the writers, denied Nixon and his men the opportunity to “rub each other’s sores”—a favorite Nixon phrase. There were plenty of sores to rub. Five years later, as his Administration began to unravel, Nixon described some reporters as snobs and offered a familiar refrain to one visitor: “I’ve earned their hatred.” The hostile press was, he said, “all wrong on Hiss.” Alger Hiss had provided Nixon with national attention, but Nixon knew the price. “[The Hiss-Chambers case] left a residue of hatred and hostility toward me—not only among Communists but also among substantial segments of the press and the intellectual community,” he wrote in 1962. Anticommunism eventually lost some of its political appeal, but intellectuals and the press remained formidable adversaries, another vital link in Nixon’s chain of enemies.1

  Nixon had both an instinctive, visceral hatred of the news media and a compulsive desire to manipulate and tame them. At times, they were an enemy; at other moments, useful instruments to be played for political and public-relations gain. Richard Nixon and his aides spent much time attempting to master both drives. The Nixon Administration mounted an unprecedented, transparent assault on the media and individual reporters; yet that Administration, like others, went to extraordinary lengths to cultivate the press. And for good reason: the media had become an essential component in the task of governance in late-twentieth-century America. Mastery of it, or at least maintaining its goodwill, became a recognized, desirable prize as presidents sought to reach and shape public opinion and to build constituencies for their programs and future campaigns.

  The news media have fostered and promoted a cult of presidential personality. Presidents make easier copy than such less sharply defined, more impersonal institutions as Congress, the courts, or the regulatory agencies. The President makes news; he is news. For many Americans, the President is the government of the United States. The problem for a president, therefore, is not visibility—that he has in abundance—but controlling that visibility to show himself in the best possible light.

  Usually, the relationship between press and President has been relatively easy and friendly, and the media have normally been deferential. But because Richard Nixon believed the relationship to be adversarial and hostile, both by the nature of American government and because of his personal views, the problem became a fixation for him. His longtime friend and media adviser, Herbert Klein, acknowledged that “there was no organized conspiracy in the White House, but mistrust of the press was strong and ever present.”

  Klein had worked for Nixon since the 1950s as a press-relations specialist. After the 1962 gubernatorial defeat in California, Klein returned to San Diego, where he became the editor of the Union, the Copley chain’s flagship newspaper. Klein rejoined Nixon for the 1968 presidential campaign. He soon recognized the ominous signs that the “New Nixon” had new extensions—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Mitchell—to reflect and carry out some of his darker designs. It was a side of Nixon that Klein remembered and disliked. While Nixon shifted power to a new set of aides who would be close to him, however, he also found places for such older retainers as Klein.

  Nixon and Haldeman installed Ronald Ziegler as Press Secretary. This was apparently a conscious move to diminish, certainly to subordinate, the position. Ziegler had been a Disneyland guide and a Haldeman aide in an advertising agency. Not to name a working reporter for the post marked a dramatic departure for a new Administration, although LBJ had done the same late in his presidency.

  Herb Klein may have realized that Nixon intended to bypass him for his obvious role as Press Secretary, or he may have hoped the President had some more important job in mind for him. In any case, Klein proposed the creation of a wholly new White House post: Director of Communications, with himself as the obvious candidate. Klein’s scheme provided that the Director of Communications would report directly to the President, attend Cabinet meetings and other White House staff gatherings, and serve as the President’s liaison to the newspapers and television networks. Klein envisioned an official in touch with network executives, anchormen, publishers, and leading columnists. Day-to-day news and briefings would be left to Ziegler. Significantly, Klein did not provide that the Director of Communications would direct Ziegler’s office; he wisely sensed that would be the domain of the President and Haldeman. For Klein, however, it was a fatal omission in terms of his authority and effectiveness.2

  The choice of Press Secretary, even the creation of a Communications Director, were somewhat immaterial. Nixon, determined as always to be the “man in charge,” often demonstrated that he would decide what information the White House dispensed. For example, in November 1970, he prepared an elaborate ten-page memorandum for Haldeman, dictating answers to questions submitted for a later, “intimate, spontaneous” interview.3

  In anticipation of the 1960 campaign, Nixon had told his staff that the only way to change the media was “not to cooperate with them.�
�� Ten years later his aides prepared memoranda listing various reporters “who should receive special treatment.” On March 2, 1970, Nixon dispatched to Haldeman a flurry of directives relating to the press. In one, he called for “an all-out, slam-bang attack on the fact that the news people are overwhelmingly for Muskie, Kennedy, any liberal position.… I want a game plan on my desk.” The same day he told Haldeman to arrange a private session with Time magazine correspondent Hugh Sidey. “Leave the time open so that I can talk to him as long as I feel it is worthwhile.” Two years later, however, Nixon wanted Sidey “cut off in as effective a way as possible.” The President directed his staff to treat the media with “the courteous, cool contempt which has been my policy over the last few years.” Yet he took the trouble to write to another reporter, “I always will appreciate your objective coverage of my activities over the years,” and at Nixon’s direction, Haldeman privately pressed Time-Life executives to restrain their writers from going “beyond … normal objective criticism.”4

  Thus the President’s mood toward the news media vacillated, usually in response to momentary externals. He perceived the media as a mixed bag of friendlies and unfriendlies. They were like any other interest group—to be courted and wooed as occasion dictated and to be fought when necessary.

  The problem of Nixon’s relations with the media, as the President often saw it, was not his, but theirs. He was delighted when Henry Kissinger turned the tables on James Reston’s question as to why Nixon did not get along better with the press. Kissinger suggested to Reston that maybe the fault lay with the press. Nixon directed Haldeman to get a friendly columnist to explore the theme. Shortly afterward, however, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, and Nixon was in a frenzy. He told Haldeman that “under absolutely no circumstances” was anyone in the White House to give an interview or respond to any queries from the Times—“unless I give express permission (and I do not expect to give such permission in the foreseeable future).”