The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Those still unpersuaded that Nixon was privy to the murder plots may reconsider in light of a new piece of information. If what the author was told in 1997 by President Kennedy’s former press secretary Pierre Salinger has validity, Nixon not only was aware of the CIA-Mafia plots but authorized them.

  In 1968, said Salinger, he had lengthy conversations with Maheu while soliciting his boss, Howard Hughes, for a contribution to Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. “I knew Maheu well,” Salinger said. “He told me then about his meetings with the Mafia. He said he had been in contact with the CIA, that the CIA had been in touch with Nixon, who had asked them to go forward with this project. . . . It was Nixon who had him [Maheu] do a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro.”

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  Nixon’s frantic insistence, as president, on obtaining the CIA’s Bay of Pigs material, now begins to make sense—especially in light of events never before laid out in sequence for the public. It includes discoveries originally made by Terry Lenzner and Mark Lackritz, senior counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee, but not further pursued.

  On January 18, 1971, halfway through Nixon’s first term, papers across the country carried a sensational story. The columnist Jack Anderson, Drew Pearson’s successor, offered remarkably accurate revelations about the Castro plots. He named Maheu directly and reported that the murder plans had begun under Eisenhower and Nixon and continued until shortly before the assassination of President Kennedy. Then Anderson raised a chilling possibility: Some of those privy to the plotting, he wrote, suspected that the plans to murder Castro had provoked the Cuban leader into retaliating in kind, by having Kennedy killed.20

  On the same day, at the White House, Bob Haldeman wrote an internal memo requesting information on Howard Hughes, Maheu, and Maheu’s contact with Democratic National Committee Chairman Lawrence O’Brien, who had been working as a Hughes consultant.21 The following afternoon, after publication of a second Anderson article on the plots, the attorney general, John Mitchell, placed a call to Maheu.

  At the time Maheu was under pressure to appear before a grand jury in connection with a Las Vegas gambling prosecution. He had so far denied knowledge of the Castro plot story but, as he has put it, thought things might “very easily get out of hand” with the grand jury and the press. Maheu came to Washington and, in private, told Mitchell “the entire Castro story.”22 Mitchell, he remembered, was “shaking” by the time he finished. The attorney general forthwith offered him a deal: Instead of going before a grand jury on the Vegas matter, Maheu would merely be interviewed by senior Justice Department officials. In this formal session he did not expound on his work for the CIA. “I assured them,” Maheu recalled, “I intended to keep my word and maintain the secrecy of the mission.”

  Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General Will Wilson was quickly assigned to review whatever the Justice Department might hold on the CIA-Mafia contacts. The Nixon White House, he would later tell Watergate investigators, was hoping to turn up proof that it was the Kennedy brothers who had tried to kill Castro, news that could damage the surviving Kennedy brother, Edward, should he run for the presidency in 1972. Maheu’s information, though—along with anything that might be found in the files—posed a threat as much to the sitting president, Nixon, as to the Kennedys.23

  Within three days of Maheu’s initial phone conversation with Mitchell, White House investigator John Caulfield filed the first in a series of cautionary memos. Caulfield, a former policeman who had first met Nixon while working security during election campaigns, had been charged with responding to Haldeman’s demand for information on Hughes, Maheu, and the Democrats’ O’Brien.

  In his first memo Caulfield pointed out that Maheu and O’Brien had been close since “pre-Kennedy” days. In the second he warned that Maheu’s “tentacles touch many extremely sensitive areas of government, each one of which is fraught with potential Jack Anderson type exposure. . . . Before any action is taken . . . we should authorize an in-depth analysis of all (CIA, FBI, IRS) information available. . . . There is a serious risk here of counter scandal.”

  A further Caulfield memo, sent within days of Maheu’s meeting with Mitchell, raised the issue of “Maheu’s covert activities . . . with CIA in the early Sixties.” There were “significant hazards in raking over the matter,” Caulfield emphasized, and the risk that pursuit of O’Brien “might well shake loose Republican skeletons from the closet.” Three years later, questioned about this by Senate Watergate Committee counsel Lenzner and Lackritz, Caulfield first asked to go off the record. After discussion in private, he conceded that his reference to “covert activities” related to the Castro plot revelations.

  Lenzner and Lackritz were pioneers at the time of the Watergate investigations. After stumbling onto the Castro plots, known publicly at the time only through the allegations in the Jack Anderson articles, they quickly found themselves stalled. When they asked the CIA for information they were given none. When they asked Senate Watergate Committee chairman, Sam Ervin, to let them subpoena key witnesses, he turned them down. The attorneys were left frustrated, able only to guess at the implications of what they had found.

  Nixon had good reason to fear exposure of his part in the Cuban intrigues. The information marshaled here shows starkly why it was that in 1971, in the wake of the Anderson articles and the Maheu scare, he renewed his demands for the CIA’s files on the Bay of Pigs. He hoped, to be sure, that they contained embarrassments for the Kennedys. At the same time, he knew the agency’s records probably contained material compromising to himself. Nixon needed to see them, as he explained to Ehrlichman, in order to know what to “duck,” to “protect” himself.

  Four years after the collapse of the presidency Haldeman would add a dramatic new dimension to the puzzle of Nixon’s worry about “the Bay of Pigs.” “It seems,” Haldeman wrote in his memoirs, “that in all those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.”

  Researchers have pored over this passage in the Haldeman memoirs as though it were a newfound parchment in the Dead Sea Scrolls.24 It was probably no more than its author’s speculation—but provocative nonetheless. In subsequent paragraphs Haldeman suggested that, in his exchanges with the CIA about the Bay of Pigs, Nixon may have been goading the agency over the fact that after Kennedy was killed, it failed to inform the Warren Commission about the Castro plots.

  If the Cuban leader decided to retaliate, Haldeman surmised, then the U.S. plots to kill him “may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy.” The CIA, he suggested, “desperately wanted to hide that dark possibility.” What Haldeman did not say, but what is likely, is that Nixon was equally desperate to keep the Castro plots secret.

  Nixon’s right-hand man made one further observation, which appeared in his book immediately after his supposition about the meaning of Nixon’s Bay of Pigs references. Haldeman recalled how Nixon reacted, on their arrival in the White House, when he suggested using the power of the presidency to reopen the investigation into Kennedy’s death. “I felt we would be in a position to get all the facts,” Haldeman wrote. “But Nixon turned me down.”

  Was Nixon weighed down by “survivor’s guilt”? Very possibly, even if he had merely been privy to the early Castro plots, let alone instrumental in them. Ehrlichman once spoke of Nixon’s “Kennedy fixation.” “There was something about Nixon and the Kennedys,” Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times thought “not rational.” Not rational, perhaps, but understandable in a man so haunted.

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  I felt crushed by the sense of the really awful burden he was inviting in the office he wants. . . . If he were a great, vital man, I think I should have felt: “Yes, he must have it. . . .” I did not have this feeling. . . . I felt dismay and growing pity.

  —Whittaker Chambers, after lunching with Nixon before the 1960 presidential campaign

  It had been thirteen years since they had met, Nixon and Kennedy,
at a cocktail party for the freshmen congressmen of 1947. Kennedy, tanned and tousle-haired, had breezed over to greet the dapper newcomer from California. Nixon was “the star of the show” then, thanks to his upset victory over Jerry Voorhis. Kennedy, his road to the House of Representatives smoothed by his father’s millions, was a star act born and bred.

  They were “like a pair of unmatched bookends,” in Nixon’s description, separated by background but at that point not by politics. They agreed on the imperative of crushing domestic communism. Appointed to the Labor Committee together, they soon found themselves on the same podium, addressing fractious steelworkers in Pennsylvania. Afterward they talked baseball over a meal at a local diner, then reminisced about their navy days in a shared sleeping compartment on the train back to Washington.

  The moderator of that evening’s debate had been struck by what appeared to be their “genuine friendliness.” The pair began meeting to compare notes, once talking far into the night at the home of one of Kennedy’s sisters. Nixon kept two books his colleague gave him at that time, inscribed “To Dick from his friend John F. Kennedy.”

  “In those early years,” Nixon recalled, “we saw ourselves as political opponents but not political rivals. We shared one quality. . . . He was shy, and that sometimes made him appear aloof. But it was shyness born of an instinct that guarded privacy and concealed emotions. I understood those qualities because I shared them.”

  Not enough, however, to deal easily with one Kennedy gesture that was not at all shy. Before Nixon left on his first trip to Europe, the congressman from Massachusetts dropped by with the phone numbers of three young women in Paris. Nixon, his secretary remembered, was “too embarrassed” to take the numbers with him.1

  When a contribution came in the other currency the Kennedys had in plenty, hard cash, Nixon accepted. At the bidding of his conservative father, Kennedy walked into Nixon’s office in 1950 with a donation to the campaign to unseat Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon later denied having received the money but admitted in his memoirs that Kennedy gave him an envelope containing $1,000. To have helped Nixon’s political advance, John F. would one day admit, had been “the biggest damnfool mistake.”

  Meanwhile, the chumminess seemed genuine. To Nixon’s aide William Arnold they appeared to be “fast friends.” Kennedy sent a handwritten note to wish Nixon “all kinds of good luck” when he was picked as Eisenhower’s running mate. Nixon wrote sponsoring his “personal friend” Kennedy for membership in the Burning Tree Club. Kennedy invited Nixon to his wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier. By the late fifties they occupied offices 361 and 362 in the Senate Office Building, facing each other across a corridor.

  For Kennedy, however, the relationship had little meaning beyond cordiality. In 1958, at a background-only dinner for selected journalists, he assessed Nixon carefully as “a man of really enormous ability . . . at heart more conservative than the pose he adopted . . . for reasons of expediency.” An oral history interview with former Senator George Smathers, who was close to both men, offers a clue to what he really thought of his colleague.

  “Nixon,” Smathers began by saying, “had a greater admiration for Kennedy than Kennedy had for Nixon. . . .” The lines that follow were once blanked out in the transcript available to researchers, but have been reinstated after application to the Kennedy Library by the author. The uncensored passage reads: “Nixon told me several times he admired Jack, and I happen to know the feeling was not particularly mutual. I don’t think Jack ever thought too highly of Nixon, either of his ability or of him as a man of great strength of character. . . . He felt that Nixon was a total opportunist.”

  In a 1959 conversation with a journalist, speaking for background only, Kennedy added another observation about Nixon. “It seems,” he said, “he has a split personality, and he is very bad in public, and nobody likes him.”

  Nixon by contrast set aside his antipathy toward Ivy League elitists when it came to the Harvard-educated Kennedy. He seemed almost transfixed by the representative from Massachusetts. “When Jack started to talk” at a congressional hearing, Kennedy aide Ted Reardon remembered thinking, “Dicky-boy sort of looked at him . . . with a look between awe and respect and fear.” Theodore White, chronicler of four presidential campaigns, considered that Kennedy exerted over Nixon “the same charm that a snake charmer exerts over a snake.”

  Raised to avoid displays of emotion, Nixon was visibly moved when Kennedy became seriously ill. Chronic back trouble, combined with an adrenal deficiency not yet alleviated by medication, made him a semi-invalid in the early congressional days.2 In 1954, after an operation on his spine, the doctors feared for his life. Nixon, unaware of the gravity of the situation, arrived at the hospital to learn that Kennedy had been given the last rites. He hurried back to the vice presidential limousine and slumped in his seat in tears. “That poor young man is going to die,” Nixon sobbed to a Secret Service agent. “Poor brave Jack is going to die. Oh God, don’t let him die!”

  When Kennedy recovered, Nixon made certain a basket of fruit with a “Welcome home!” message was on Kennedy’s desk when he returned to work. Nixon’s official suite, slightly closer to the Senate floor than Kennedy’s office, was placed at his disposal. “He really admired Jack,” Reardon thought. Jack Drown, Nixon’s longtime friend, said he “really liked Kennedy.” “He loved him,” Nixon’s brother Edward observed in an interview with the author.

  In 1960 the man who loved Kennedy was to confront him on the battlefield of politics, playing for the highest stakes of all. After the struggle that was to follow, love would be replaced by disillusion and resentment—and something as close to hatred as is possible in one who has once loved.

  _____

  “The powers that be in California—and they are really powerful, especially the publishers—have determined that nothing shall stand in the way of putting Tricky Dick Nixon in the White House.” Thus read a Drew Pearson diary note, written three years before Nixon ran for the presidency, after a chat with Jim Bassett, a Los Angeles newspaper editor when not on loan to Nixon for campaigns. The “powers” to which Pearson referred included Norman and Dorothy (“Buff”) Chandler, publishers of the Los Angeles Times. It was to the Chandlers, who had always backed him, that Nixon turned for advice in 1959. Should he do as everyone expected and make his run for the White House?

  “I’ve got to decide,” Nixon told the Chandlers over drinks, and they discussed the issue for hours. The alternative, Nixon said, was to get out of politics and make some real money. By 3:00 A.M. politics had won. “I’ve got to do it,” Nixon declared. “The time is right.” Pat was at his side as they talked, Pat who had remained supportive, who had traveled three hundred thousand miles at his side during the vice presidency, who yearned for more quality family time. “I wish you wouldn’t run,” she said now. According to Buff Chandler, Nixon “paid no attention to her at all.”

  Nixon had decided to run, but his mood was strange for a man about to launch on a great endeavor. “He went into a slump,” recalled Father Cronin, a confidant and speechwriter since the Hiss days. “He was practically unavailable to anybody, including myself, for over six months. There was something wrong there, and you could say he was afraid of winning. I suspect probably the answer is going to be that there’s a schizophrenic personality there, maybe not in the technical sense, but in the loose sense.”

  In July 1960, fifteen years after having been chosen to run for Congress as a young navy veteran, Nixon arrived in Chicago to hear his party select him as its candidate for the White House. Pat was there, her doubts long since dutifully suppressed. Nixon’s mother, now seventy-five, looked proudly on. She had for weeks been giving interviews extolling her son’s virtues—to interviewers approved by Nixon. Now Hannah perched like a tiny bird on her chair in the old Stockyards Convention Hall, waiting for Nixon’s big moment.

  In the three days of policy wrangling that preceded the nomination, Nixon had had virtually no sleep. Hearing
loud music late one night, former Republican Committee Chairman Len Hall had entered Nixon’s room to find him in a trance, conducting to the trumpets and thundering drums of the 1812 Overture. Soon afterward, nominated by an overwhelming majority, he made the speech he came to consider the most effective of his career. Apart from the rhetoric about “building a better America,” Nixon accurately prophesied the collapse of the Soviet Union. “When Mr. Khrushchev says our grandchildren will live under Communism, let us say his grandchildren will live in freedom.” In a time of heightened world tension, the globe-trotting vice president presented himself as the man of experience on whom Americans could rely.

  Eleven days earlier, facing west into the sunset at the Los Angeles Coliseum, John Kennedy had made his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, his call to the New Frontier of the sixties. Across the continent in Washington, watching on television, Nixon realized he had underestimated his opponent. “Kennedy’s got no chance,” he had forecast months earlier, before a poker session with former Speaker Tip O’Neill. “I’m running against [Lyndon] Johnson. You’re not going to be able to stop him.” Kennedy had stopped Johnson, who was now—controversially—his running mate. “We just didn’t think Kennedy was a heavyweight,” Nixon adviser Pat Hillings would recall ruefully. “We didn’t think he would work that hard. . . .”

  Nixon was seriously shaken when Kennedy tore ahead in the primaries, thanks to his charisma and the ruthless disbursement of his father’s money. “Dick is really worried about K winning the Democratic nomination,” Ruth Buchanan, wife of the White House chief of protocol, wrote in her diary. “He’s sure that’s who he’ll have to beat, and he doesn’t feel too easy about it.” “Anyone who does not recognize that we are in for the fight of our lives,” Nixon soon admitted, “must be smoking opium.”