by Nancy Gibbs
“This is an opportunity to associate with some of the things E was known for,” one speechwriter advised. “The search for peace . . . the calming of the nation; good heart, good nature, good sense . . . the rock-ribbed integrity, the moral authority.”
Those were all qualities essential to Eisenhower. They would prove, like so much else about him, nontransferable. Nixon did, however, find uses for memory. After Eisenhower left office, his successors found that the cork floor of the Oval Office was scarred from Eisenhower’s golf cleats; Kennedy decided not to replace the floor; Johnson didn’t either. Nixon had the pocked boards pulled up and replaced, then cut up the pieces into two-inch squares, mounted them on plaques, and sent them to an appreciative coterie.
NIXON AND JOHNSON:
Brotherhood and Blackmail
Richard Nixon treated the presidency as sacred, even as he set about defiling it. He decorated the Oval Office in imperial style, instructed the White House staff not to address him directly, referred to himself in the third person; he was no longer “I,” no longer an individual; he was Richard Nixon, President of the United States. He was not above the law—he was the law, as he famously explained: if a president does something, “that means it’s not illegal.” Especially in time of war, the president’s powers, in his view, were virtually unlimited.
So Nixon would pose a particular challenge to the club, which basically meant to Lyndon Johnson. You must help me protect the presidency, he told Johnson, from all those who are trying to break it, who think they know better, the liberals, the elites, the antiwar zealots who would burn buildings, leak secrets, aid and comfort the enemy on the grounds that any act was justified if it helped end an immoral war. When the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, Nixon pressed Johnson to join him in bipartisan denunciation. When his covert war against leakers led to Watergate, he wanted Johnson to help shut the Senate inquiry down. You know how this goes, Nixon reminded Johnson; a president does what is necessary.
But Johnson refused to be bullied or blackmailed; over the years he had done a great deal to help Richard Nixon, but would do no more. There were limits to how far the club would go to protect either the office or its members. But in the end that didn’t matter. Harry Truman died at Christmastime 1972, just after Nixon won his landslide reelection. Johnson died a month later. And with that, for the moment, Nixon was all alone.
13
“I Want the Break-In”
—RICHARD NIXON
Richard Nixon was forever starting new clubs, not least because he was often rejected by old ones. In college he founded the Orthogonians, a mock-Latin term he invented to mean the upstanding straight shooters, the scholarship kids, who would band together against the entitled Franklins, Whittier College’s elite fraternity, which had turned him down. When he got to Congress he formed the Chowder and Marching Society, fifteen junior lawmakers who united as a bloc in hopes of having some clout in a chamber controlled by the Old Bulls. It included, among others, Gerald Ford and, later, George H. W. Bush. “Chowder and Marching welded exuberant friendships,” wrote Time’s Hugh Sidey decades later, “and accidentally founded a power matrix that helped produce three Presidents and shape an American half-century.”
As for the Presidents Club, even before joining Nixon had obsessively studied it for decades—not just the institution but the members themselves. He reread every inaugural address before sitting down with his legal pads to write his own (he especially liked the baroque oratory of James K. Polk). He knew everyone’s secrets; he knew that Eisenhower did not like to be touched. “He would shake hands and all the rest,” Nixon later told journalist Bob Greene. “But he didn’t want people to come up and throw their arms around him and say ‘Hi, Ike.’ Kennedy was the same way. Despite the fact that he had the reputation of being, you know, very glamorous and the rest, he had a certain privacy about him, a certain sense of dignity.”
His heroes were the ones who went for the gutsy move. Nixon hung a portrait of Eisenhower in the Cabinet Room because it was expected, and maybe some of the magic would rub off. But Ike wasn’t really his model. Ike had firmness; Woodrow Wilson, whose portrait he also hung, had idealism. Nixon was determined to have both.
So it was the Roosevelts—Teddy and Franklin—who were Nixon’s models, combining vision and strength, ideals and the toughness to realize them. He went so far as to change the name of the conference room across from the Oval Office from the Fish Room (FDR used to keep an aquarium in it) to the Roosevelt Room; there was a bust of Teddy over the mantel. And like Franklin, Safire observed, “he took pleasure in using devious methods to reach worthy goals.”
Secrets and Lies
Three conversations—two just after the 1968 election, another just after the inauguration two months later—reveal how of all those who came before, it was Lyndon Johnson whose ghost haunted Nixon’s presidency and whose motives and movements, real or imagined, helped doom it.
The first encounter, right after the election on November 11, 1968, came when Nixon visited Johnson at the White House. “One of the first things [Johnson] did was to take me upstairs to show me the bedroom safe, where he kept God knows what, and the recording contraptions that Kennedy had installed under the beds,” Nixon told his young aide Monica Crowley years later. “Johnson got down on the floor, lifted the bedspread and waved his hand under the bed.” He was giving Nixon his first tour of the White House taping system.
The second meeting, also that November, took place on the thirty-ninth floor of the elegant Pierre Hotel in New York City, where Nixon set up his transition headquarters. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover came to call on the president-elect. Johnson had praised Hoover as a vital presidential asset: “If it hadn’t been for Edgar Hoover, I couldn’t have carried out my responsibilities as Commander in Chief. Period,” Johnson told Nixon. “He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men.”
And that day, Hoover was a man on a mission.
“Hoover, florid, rumpled, came into the suite and got quickly down to business,” recalled H. R. Haldeman. The business, Haldeman figured, was “covering his ass. And no one was more adept at sheltering that broad expanse than he.”
Hoover told Nixon that Johnson had ordered the FBI to wiretap Nixon—bug his plane, for national security reasons—as well as spy on Mme. Chennault. He was embellishing; the FBI had never actually gone ahead and bugged the plane, but Nixon didn’t know that, which means he had reason to fear that Johnson—and Hoover—might have hard evidence linking him with the sabotage of the Paris peace talks. Nixon’s obsession with any files related to the bombing halt and peace talks in the fall of 1968 stemmed from that natural fear.
“When you get to the White House,” Hoover warned, “don’t make any calls through the switchboard. Johnson has it rigged, and little men you don’t know will be listening.” Plus a president could tape Oval Office conversations at the touch of a button.
After Hoover left, Haldeman recalled, Nixon poured himself another cup of coffee. He wasn’t angry; he didn’t blame Johnson for spying on him. “He’s been under such pressure because of the damn war, he’d do anything,” Nixon said. And he paused. “I’m not going to end up like LBJ, Bob, holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face on the street. I’m going to stop that war. Fast.”
He also made one of his first presidential decisions: “We’ll get that goddamn bugging crap out of the White House in a hurry.”
The third conversation came about two months later, just days after Nixon took office. Haldeman found him relaxing in the Oval Office, his feet up on the desk, gesturing broadly as he explained Haldeman’s first assignment. You could say that he was already acting on another piece of Eisenhower advice, that every president needs “an S.O.B.”
I want you to investigate the final weeks of the campaign, and Johnson’s bombing halt decision, Nixon told Haldeman, which had almost sunk Nixon’s campaign. “There was plenty of phony stuff going on by LBJ, Bob,” Nixon said. “I want
you to make up a full report with all the documents showing just what he did. He let politics enter into a war decision, and I want the whole story on it.”
“But that’s all behind us,” Haldeman protested. What Haldeman didn’t fully realize—but what Nixon did know—was that the file also potentially contained the evidence that Nixon had played dirty during the campaign.
Nixon fiddled with his desktop pen holder. He knew what he needed. Start with the Pentagon, he ordered, they’ll have all the military moves Johnson made.
Haldeman launched his investigation, “and soon felt the first shiver of a future governmental war,” he wrote in his memoirs. He learned that Leslie Gelb, a former Pentagon official, had moved over to the Brookings Institution, taking key files with him including one allegedly on the bombing halt. When Haldeman asked the Pentagon for a copy, he was told the only copy was at Brookings—which functioned as a kind of Democratic government in exile.
Nixon was not pleased at this news. “I want that Goddamn Gelb material and I don’t care how you get it.”
That was the kind of nutty assignment Haldeman would let slide. But not Charles Colson, Nixon’s “personal hit man,” as Haldeman would call him, or in Colson’s own words, “a flag-waving, kick-’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic.” Soon he and other men around Nixon would follow his orders and protect his interests, at immeasurable cost.
Thus was laid the foundation for so much of what followed: Nixon covering his tracks, while trying to get hard evidence that Johnson had done what presidents before him had done: cut corners, bent laws, helped friends, lashed enemies.
Minding Lyndon
From the moment he took office, biographer Richard Reeves observes, Nixon made resolutions: be “compassionate, bold, new, courageous,” he wrote to himself less than three weeks into the job. “Most powerful office. Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone. Need to be good to do good.”
It was important, he reminded himself, that he demonstrate his “zest for the job (not lonely but awesome).” But the presidency is a lonely job, especially when you put a lonely man in it. “I believe you should keep your troubles to yourself,” Nixon would say. He could not have been more different in this way than Johnson, the man who could not stand to be alone, or Kennedy with his large family and adoring disciples, or Ike with his many comrades. His aide John Ehrlichman referred to Nixon as the Mad Monk. He’d slip away to his private office in the Old Executive Office Building to brood for hours. “No one,” Republican chairman Len Hall once remarked, “would look forward to spending a week with Nixon fishing.”
So Nixon was not wired to seek out club members for companionship, as Johnson had; and in any event Eisenhower had died within a few months of Nixon’s taking office, and Truman was safely retired in Missouri. Nixon did travel to Independence to present for his presidential library a piano that had been in the White House when he was there. The encounter was warm, clubby; you would not have known they had hurled insults at each other for decades, as they shook hands and smiled. Nixon sat at the piano and pounded out “The Missouri Waltz.” Truman actually hated the tune, but by then he was too deaf to mind.
But it was Johnson that Nixon cared about, Johnson whom he courted and flattered and watched like a hawk to make sure he did not cause trouble. It was not that Johnson retained a drop of political clout in his Texas exile. It’s just that he knew too much about Nixon’s past.
Handled correctly, Nixon believed, LBJ could be a valuable ally and asset in the future. Mishandled—well, anything could happen.
Nixon worried about Johnson so much he created an office inside the White House dedicated to his care and feeding. He issued Executive Order 11456, which established the new post of special assistant to the president for liaison with former presidents. It would be his job to keep the club informed on “the major aspects of such principal international and domestic problems as the President directs” and convey their views back to the president. Truman heard from his old buddy Harry Vaughan that Eisenhower’s former military aide Robert Schultz earned $25,000 for that “boondoggle.”
“If [Schultz] does not check with you weekly,” Vaughan joked, “he must bother LBJ a lot to earn his pay.”
It was actually the other way around. Johnson called the White House frequently, looking for information and favors, pestering a young military aide named Brent Scowcroft for military transport at all hours. Scowcroft at first found Johnson impossible, needy, demanding, but then grew over time to look forward to his calls. Johnson called so often looking for a place to bunk down in Washington that Nixon directed Scowcroft and other aides to liberate some money from the General Services Administration to purchase a clubhouse; they found and refurbished a run-down Lafayette townhouse to be used by the former presidents.
As it turned out, Gerald Ford would be the first to actually stay there, in 1977; it was eventually run by the same staff as the adjacent Blair House, its walls lined with pictures of the former presidents. George Herbert Walker Bush would stay there when his son was in residence across the street; his wife, Barbara, was known to call the place “a dump.”
But its creation was all about the managing of Johnson. Every Friday Nixon dispatched a jet carrying classified national security briefing papers to Johnson down on his ranch. Cabinet members called him regularly with updates, and Henry Kissinger came in person to discuss the progress of the peace talks. Once Lady Bird drove Kissinger back to the airstrip and asked how he thought Johnson seemed. “I mumbled something about ‘serenity in retirement,’” Kissinger told Safire, “and she almost drove off the road. I supposed flattery has to be related to reality, however vaguely.”
“It feels good,” said Johnson, “not to have that sergeant with the little black bag a few feet behind me.” But rest and relaxation did not come naturally to a man so obsessed with how he would be remembered. He was still young, just sixty years old—two years younger than Ike when he first took office. So Johnson poured his energy into building his library, a temple for study and celebration of his epic political life. He’d go over to the house where he was born, which had been turned into something of a shrine, and check the license plates in the parking lot to see how many different states were represented. He kept track of the number of postcards sold; he wanted his home to host more visitors than any other birthplace. The library staff learned to inflate the visitor count. Later, after the library was built a stone’s throw from the massive University of Texas stadium in Austin, he arranged for the announcer of the Longhorn football games to remind the tens of thousands of fans as they filed out at halftime that there were plenty of bathrooms just around the corner at the LBJ library.
Nixon looked for ways to woo Johnson, bring him into the tent. In August 1969, to mark Johnson’s sixty-first birthday, he flew the Johnson family to his Western White House at San Clemente for a party. It was start to finish a Nixon production, “from the original idea down to the details of a mariachi band at the helipad,” Haldeman wrote in his diary.
Nixon led the group as the guests sang to him; Johnson stood smiling, holding his felt hat and looking a little dazed in the brilliant California sun. The photographers snapped pictures: Nixon turned to one and remarked, “he doesn’t look that old, does he?”
Then the two presidents climbed into golf carts and rode off to Nixon’s office to talk privately. Johnson complained about everything from finding the right staff to managing reporters. “He’s really psychopathic,” Haldeman recorded. “Raved on and on about how humiliating it all was.” Johnson went back over the campaign, his decision not to run, when he had actually made it (long before McCarthy humiliated him in New Hampshire or Bobby Kennedy jumped in): “Is obviously completely absorbed in writing history the way he wants it to be,” Haldeman concluded.
Then the group reassembled for lunch and a three-tiered lemon-filled birthday cake decorated with yellow roses and Texas bluebonnets. The Nixons gave Johnson a nineteen-inch-hi
gh Japanese bonsai tree, and thoughtfully included a book, Practical Bonsai for Beginners.
Soon California governor Ronald Reagan joined in, and Billy Graham, as Nixon and the Johnsons flew north to Redwood National Park together. On the way, Johnson urged Nixon not to listen to his critics, and found a way to remind Nixon of the reasons to keep him happy. Johnson was in the process of assembling his presidential library, and needed help getting his papers processed for the archives. “LBJ makes valid point that our interests are very much involved,” Haldeman wrote, “in that there will be many of his papers we will not want made public.”
The remarks at the dedication of “Lady Bird Grove” in Redwood were warm as could be. Nixon remarked on Johnson’s birthday, and wished that “he may live as long as the trees,” of which the average was five hundred years old.
In return, Johnson offered Nixon his first formal, public welcome into the fraternity. “One never knows what it is to be a President until you are a President,” he said as he thanked the Nixons for taking the time to pay them this honor. “Presidents are lonely people, and the only ones they are really sure of all the time are their womenfolk. President Nixon and I have something else in common. We can always depend on our womenfolk. Just as Mrs. Johnson has been by my side every step of the way, so has Mrs. Nixon.
“Of one thing I am absolutely sure,” he went on. “Of the 37 Presidents that have come, and 36 have gone on, I feel sure from what I have read and studied about their lives that their greatest problem was never doing what was right; their greatest problem was knowing what was right.
“No man occupied the place that you occupy who didn’t want to do the best he could, and some have succeeded and some have had less success. But of this you can be sure: If all of your days are as successful as today in bringing happiness to your predecessor, you will have a most successful Presidency.
