The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  At home that afternoon, as the women packed for a break in Florida, Nixon retreated to his study. Soon, through the double doors, came the blare and brass of one of his favorite records, the Richard Rodgers theme for Victory at Sea. Later, as he and Pat boarded the plane, he swung her around in a pirouette. His staff noticed that the aircraft, provided by President Johnson as a courtesy, was Air Force One, the same jet that five years earlier had carried John F. Kennedy home from Dallas in a coffin.

  The trappings of office were already in evidence. People accustomed to addressing him as Mr. Nixon or Dick started trying out Mr. President. To the Secret Service detail guarding him, its number now doubled, Nixon was now known by the code name Searchlight. Pat was Starlight.

  This was what Nixon had yearned for so long. Yet, Haldeman thought, watching and listening to his boss, that “he felt it was very strange that he could get elected.”

  _____

  The days and weeks that followed were not exactly as the public was led to believe, and they were full of portents.

  “Baloney!” exclaimed Ehrlichman, recalling press reports that the president-elect was ensconced with his staff and “with bulging briefcases, doing a lot of work. We did have a couple of meetings, but basically we were left on our own to compose the government. . . . How did Nixon pick the White House and other personnel? The answer to that question is: ‘Not very well.’ The personnel process during our transition from Johnson was a shambles.”

  Scorning the free offices that had been made available to them in Washington, the Nixon people installed themselves in Manhattan’s Pierre Hotel. Campaign treasurer Maurice Stans, soon to be secretary of commerce, was shocked by “the lavish facilities and the extravagant costs,” a million dollars more than the federal allowance.

  When a prepared file on possible appointees proved useless, Nixon approved a farcical scheme. Letters went out to every single person listed in Who’s Who, some sixty thousand individuals, soliciting recommendations on how to fill two thousand government jobs.

  The selection process began oddly. Less than twenty-four hours after the election, Nixon casually offered John Ehrlichman the post of attorney general. Ehrlichman, who had had limited experience as an attorney, thought the notion “ridiculous.” He became instead White House counsel, in which job, he later recalled, “I didn’t do one single legal chore.” He advised, rather, on domestic policy.

  The attorney general job went to campaign manager John Mitchell. Nixon’s patron Thomas Dewey had sniffed that Mitchell “may be the best bond lawyer in New York, but he’s no politician.” He served however—as one reference book has it—as Nixon’s “political right arm—arm-twister and lightning rod, counselor and confidant. . . .”

  Mitchell had not immediately joined Nixon and other staff in Florida after the election, explaining tearfully that he had to go “take care of some things with Martha.” His mercurial wife, whom Nixon could not stand and whose indiscretions were to help blacken his name, was already having problems with alcohol.

  In picking Bob Haldeman as White House chief of staff, Nixon had in mind advice Eisenhower had once given him: that every president needs “his S.O.B.” At forty-two, having earned his stripes as a superefficient campaign organizer, Haldeman became by his own account his boss’s “pluperfect S.O.B.”

  Beguiled at first by the chief of staff’s quiet manner, Theodore White thought him an “absolutely outgoing, fine guy.” Before leaving J. Walter Thompson to follow Nixon, Haldeman had supervised the accounts of 7-Up, Sani-Flush, Blue Chip Stamps, and Walt Disney Productions. His “great dream,” even after 1968, was that he would one day become head of the Disney empire. By staying with Nixon, White later concluded, he became a man who “swam too far out, beyond his natural depth.”

  The cliché would later be that with Ehrlichman, Haldeman was one of Nixon’s “Nazis.”2 While he was the aide closest to the throne, Haldeman had an odd nonrelationship with Nixon in human terms. In the thirteen years of their association, the two men dined informally together, with their wives, only once. “He didn’t see me as a person, or even, I believe, as a human being,” Haldeman said years later. “To this day he doesn’t know how many children I have or anything else about my personal life. He never asked. . . .

  “Shortly after it came out,” Haldeman said, “I saw the movie Star Wars: there is a robot, a metal machine clanking along doing what it’s told by a computer-like mind. From Nixon’s viewpoint, that’s what I was. And I was a good machine.” Nixon would eventually designate Haldeman his “Lord High Executioner.” The “good machine” inspired terror in White House colleagues.

  Having won the presidency, Nixon rid himself of many old friends and retainers. Herb Klein, remembered as one of the most decent figures in the entourage, was passed over as press secretary in favor of Ron Ziegler, a much younger man from Haldeman’s old ad agency. Ziegler—“Zigzag” to reporters because of his talent for obscuring the facts—would remain loyal to the end and beyond.

  On Haldeman’s orders, but with Nixon’s acquiescence, even the faithful Rose Woods was relegated to a basement room far from the Oval Office. At one stage after hearing this news, she refused to speak to Nixon, even allowing herself an outraged “Go fuck yourself!” She made her point and, while Haldeman got the office adjacent to the president, she wound up with one close by.

  One after another, White House posts were filled with clean-cut, upright-seeming young men approved by Haldeman. A cosmetics businessman, Jeb Magruder, was brought in as a special assistant. Another J. Walter Thompson product, Dwight Chapin, would work the Oval Office phones and tend to Nixon’s personal needs. He believed his boss would become “the greatest president in history.” A lawyer completing a hitch in army intelligence, Tom Huston, was recruited to the domestic security committee. A young attorney with the Nixon law firm, Gordon Strachan, became Haldeman’s personal assistant.

  Later arrivals would include attorney Charles Colson, an ex-marine who became a Nixon intimate and, in his own words, a “flag-waving, kick-’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic”; and John Dean, the counsel Nixon was to describe as “a Judas and a turncoat . . .” when he spilled the Watergate beans to a Senate committee.

  Colson’s father considered his son “viciously loyal,” and colleagues recall Dean’s initial eagerness to “please the boss.” Huston would later speak—one assumes with hyperbole—of the unquestioning readiness of Nixon’s young men to follow orders. “If Nixon told them to nationalize the railroads,” he said, “they’d have nationalized the railroads. If he’d told them to exterminate the Jews, they’d have exterminated the Jews.”

  Haldeman and Ehrlichman would later come to view such unconditional obedience as the key to the scandals that would one day destroy them all. Nixon, Ehrlichman said, was given to issuing “rhetorical instructions . . . excesses . . . you just simply had to know the difference. . . . There were people around who didn’t know the difference, such as the Marine Corps types. They saluted and went out and did whatever they were told.” The implication was that unlike some of their colleagues, he and Haldeman knew when to ignore Nixon’s more foolhardy orders.

  Nixon’s announcement of his cabinet was promoted as a major public relations event, but in the event it excited no one. His priority was to transform foreign policy, and the cabinet appointments, even that of secretary of state, had little relevance to that. Nixon thought domestic policy “a bore.” “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a president,” he had said the previous year. “All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a president for foreign policy. . . .”

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan, appointed assistant for urban affairs, came away from a first meeting with Nixon amazed at his ready admission of the huge gaps in his knowledge. As even his strongest critics must agree, however, the opposite was true of Nixon’s knowledge of geopolitics. He intended to make foreign policy himself, and that m
eant giving priority to the appointment of assistant for national security affairs, to which he named forty-six-year-old Henry Kissinger.

  The collaboration of the politician and the professor was a historic one, but had improbable beginnings. As a lecturer heading Harvard’s Defense Studies Program, Kissinger had declared a special abhorrence of Nixon. While he dismissed Humphrey during the campaign as a “clown,” he deemed the Republican party “hopeless” and Nixon “the most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as President.” He was “not fit to be President,” a “disaster,” who if elected would bring national catastrophe. Kissinger expressed such views despite a first meeting with Nixon the previous year at which he had found Nixon “gentler . . . more thoughtful” than he had expected.

  Kissinger had cannily played both sides against the middle in the months before the election. He contacted Humphrey’s foreign policy adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, saying he “hated” Nixon and offering to make “shit files” on him available to the Democrats—a proposal on which he never delivered. Soon afterward, according to Nixon and his campaign foreign policy adviser, he leaked what he knew of the Vietnam peace talks to the Republicans.

  Shortly after the election Kissinger called the journalist Gloria Steinem to ask whether he should work for Nixon if invited. Was it better he wondered, to “try to make things less bad by working from the inside?” Steinem got Kissinger to agree to write a piece for New York magazine entitled “The Collaboration Problem.” He never followed up on the assignment because Nixon did offer him a position, which he accepted.

  Soon Kissinger would be on his way to morning meetings at the White House, growling, “Guten Morgen, Herr Haldeman!” Haldeman would respond with “And a guten Morgen to you, Heinz!” Ahead lay the drawn-out entanglement of the Vietnam negotiations, the breakthrough to China, a complex relationship with Nixon—and lasting fame.

  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover also trekked to the Pierre Hotel to be confirmed in the job he had held for forty-four years and to play on Nixon’s fears. During the probe of Republican interference in the Vietnam peace initiative, Hoover claimed to Nixon, President Johnson had ordered the FBI to bug Nixon’s campaign plane. There is no evidence that the instruction was carried out, and former Hoover aide Cartha DeLoach has said his boss deliberately embellished the facts. Nixon, however, believed what he was told. He would raise the matter time and again during Watergate, in the hope of demonstrating that the Democrats were as guilty of electronic abuses as his own people.

  In similar vein, Hoover admonished Nixon not to make calls through the White House switchboard. “Little men you don’t know,” the FBI director warned, “will be listening.” He claimed that presidential communications, which were overseen by the Army Signal Corps, were insecure and said “the President should know that if he talked on those lines he would probably be monitored.”

  Since the discovery of a bug in his 1962 campaign headquarters,* Nixon had been perennially anxious about electronic surveillance. A veteran wireman had been on duty throughout the campaign, checking for bugs in Nixon’s law office in New York, at aides’ offices, at the Republican convention, and at every hotel the candidate used around the country.3

  Concern about bugs preoccupied Nixon even when on nonpolitical business—if one can say he was ever so detached. “Let’s get off in a corner someplace and make sure we’re not bugged,” he had told a Pepsi vice-president on a trip to Cairo a year or so earlier. His friend Pat Hillings recalled Nixon’s anxiety after visiting the Johnson White House in 1966. “We got into the White House limo to travel to the airport, and I asked Nixon what had happened upstairs. He said, ‘Shh! Shh!’ and pointed to the car roof, indicating it was bugged, so we said nothing until we got into the airport.”

  A meeting with Johnson after the election confirmed all such fears. “Johnson was so obsessed with all the recording crap,” Nixon said in 1991. “I will never forget the day he had me to the White House after I won. . . . One of the first things he did was to show me the recording contraptions that Kennedy had installed under the beds. Johnson got down on the floor, lifted the bedspread, and waved his hand under the bed. ‘Dick,’ he said, ‘they are voice activated.’ Johnson was obsessed with recording everything. He had every room taped.”

  The wiring of the White House was not new. It had begun as early as 1940, when Roosevelt had his office space and phone rigged with primitive recording devices. Truman did not use the equipment, but it stayed in place. Eisenhower, indulging a penchant for covert recording that dated to his army days, used a concealed Dictaphone machine to record some meetings.

  John F. Kennedy had the Secret Service install multiple microphones in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and elsewhere, feeding back to recorders in a locked storage room. The phone in the president’s bedroom was wired, but the most recent study of the subject makes no reference to the voice-activated mikes “under the beds” that Nixon described.

  Kennedy’s recording apparatus was dismantled hours after his assassination, but Lyndon Johnson moved in a formidable new system of his own. According to a former director of the White House Military Office, Bill Gulley, Hoover’s warning to Nixon about its potential was fundamentally accurate.

  “Johnson had an extensive, really extensive taping system,” Gulley said. “He had it installed by the White House Communications Agency, which is under the Military Office. . . . It was a very professional job. . . . The Military Office handled the secret bugging of the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, and installed taps on his telephone and those of his staff members.”

  “As any new tenant, I inspected the fittings,” Haldeman would recall of his arrival in his quarters adjoining the Oval Office. “I opened the door of a closet in the wall connecting my office to the President’s suite, and found myself staring at a mountain of gleaming electronic components jammed in that closet, obviously for the use of the previous tenant to tape or monitor LBJ’s conversations.”

  According to Haldeman, Nixon made a snap decision after his meeting with Hoover in November, 1968. “We’ll get that goddamn bugging crap out of the White House in a hurry,” he said. So they would. But toward the end of Nixon’s first term, as all the world now knows, microphones would again be sown around the presidential quarters—this time with devastating results.

  _____

  “As 1968 came to a close, I was a happy man,” Nixon was to write in his memoirs. “In Key Biscayne a wreath hung on the front door and a beautifully trimmed Christmas tree stood in the living room. . . . Those were days rich with happiness and full of anticipation and hope.”

  Nixon had achieved his goal, was about to take possession of the prize that only thirty-six men had won before. Yet he did not seem to be a man at ease with his destiny. At the Hotel Pierre, Kissinger had thought Nixon’s greeting “a show of jauntiness that failed to hide an extraordinary nervousness. . . . His manner was almost diffident; his movements were slightly vague, and unrelated to what he was saying, as if two different impulses were behind speech and gesture. . . . While he talked, he sipped, one after another, cups of coffee that were brought in without his asking for them.”

  The previous months had been hellishly tough, as is any campaign for an American presidential candidate, but Nixon’s condition worried close aides. “I would call for him at his hotel in a small Midwestern city in the morning,” Haldeman remembered, “and find he was missing. Some time in the early dawn he had gotten out of bed and slipped away, with a nervous Secret Service man tailing him. We’d search all over town until we found the candidate looking haggard and wan in a flea-bitten coffeeshop.”

  Nixon suffered from chronic insomnia. “A month before the election,” Len Garment recalled, “I would get a call, three or four times a week, somewhere between midnight and three A.M. I was at home, in New York. The phone would ring, and my wife and I would look at that phone. Usually it would be John Ehrlichman, and he’d say: ‘The Old Man wants to talk to you.’ It was always the same th
ing. He would start off with ‘How are things back there? How’s it going with John Mitchell?’ But manic, manic, and depressive. . . . He’d go from all the assertive, confident things to ‘Are we gonna be all right?’ ”

  Once reassured, Nixon would seem to drift off, murmuring memories of the forties and fifties. “He would become blurred and slightly incoherent, then more so, like talking to somebody who was very drunk. I’d be getting worried about what was happening, and then it would just end, click.”

  Years later Ehrlichman told Garment how it had been at his end of the line. “He would talk to political people,” Ehrlichman remembered. “Then, for the last call, he would say, ‘Get me Len.’ By that time we would have given him his Seconal and a good stiff single-malt scotch. And he’d get on the phone with you until the phone dropped from his fingers and he fell asleep. Then I’d pick the phone up very quietly, and hang up.”

  “I was the disembodied presence,” Garment recalled, “to whom Nixon could unload his daily deposit of anxieties until he was finally carried away by alcohol, sedation, and exhaustion into the Land of Nod . . . cries and whispers . . . I worried over these calls.”

  Nixon’s public stance at the start of the race was that he seldom drank anything. “When I’m campaigning, I live like a Spartan,” he declared even as he was nursing a whiskey. Once again where the subject of Nixon and drink was concerned, the issue was one of propaganda versus reality.

  Nixon told Theodore White that he realized that once in office he “couldn’t take a drink again, couldn’t party it up. You can’t drink and think clearly . . . two drinks and your mind isn’t quite sharp, and you may not be able to think clearly when that phone rings at night . . . you’ve got to be ready. . . . No more drinking, no more late hours. . . . I felt I knew what Jefferson meant when he said the presidency was a ‘splendid misery.’ ”