The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

“We were attacked,” he said, “by about half a dozen guys. At least two were dressed as policemen. Some were in plainclothes. They picked me out and they chased me through a parking lot into an alley. One held my arms and I was beaten, and at the culmination of this beating I was hit about the face with a billyclub. . . .” “He was jumped by two plainclothesmen.” Hoffman’s widow said in 1998, “At first it looked like they were right-wing demonstrators. . . . That’s when his nose was broken.”

  The injury was genuine, as news photographs of the bandaged nose show. It was initially treated by pediatrician Benjamin Spock, who had also been arrested that day. Hoffman said he later had to undergo surgery as a result of the attack.13

  Haldeman declined to comment on the “thugs” tape. The CD-ROM of his diary, transcribed from tapes he made each evening, reflects a gap ascribed to garbled recording. The former chief of staff noted merely that he and the president had spoken about “demonstrations—danger of caution.”

  The May 5 tape meanwhile suggested that recruiting thugs was a strategy that had been used before. “Do it with Teamsters,” Haldeman had said casually. “Just ask them to dig up their eight thugs.” The president just replied with a “Yeah.” The exchange prompts a reexamination of another violent episode, one that had taken place a year earlier.

  On May 8, 1970, in New York City, young people protesting the Kent State shootings had been set upon by construction workers brandishing American flags and chanting, “All the way, U.S.A! Love it or leave it!” They beat the young people with their fists and their hard hats, and some of the victims ended up in the hospital.

  The counterprotest had been well organized. Workers had been briefed by their shop stewards the previous day “to go and knock the heads of the kids who were protesting the Nixon-Kent thing.” One worker, who did not join the group, said employees were offered a bonus as an incentive.

  During the assault, another worker said, he saw “men in business suits with color patches in their lapels . . . shouting orders.” A businessman, watching from his office window through binoculars, saw “two men in gray suits and hard hats . . . directing the construction workers with hand motions.”

  Two weeks later, after demonstrations in support of the war by tens of thousands of construction workers and longshoremen, Nixon received their leaders at the White House. The union bosses presented him with a hard hat of his own inscribed “Commander in Chief,” as a symbol of “freedom and patriotism.” One member of the deputation, Biagio Lanza of the Plasterers Union, was a known mafioso, and another, a Glaziers Union official, had recently been convicted of extortion.14

  Peter Brennan, the union leaders’ spokesman and organizer of the march, was president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York. The council was mob-linked, and Brennan routinely carried a loaded gun and traveled with bodyguards. Nixon later appointed him secretary of labor. “Pete Brennan’s people,” Nixon said, “were with us when some of the elitist crowd were running away from us. Thank God for the hard hats!”

  Was the New York violence triggered by orders from the Nixon high command? “There aren’t many spontaneous acts in politics,” former White House aide Richard Howard chuckled when asked that question in 1997. “It’s all for the media.” Ehrlichman said he always assumed the White House had “laid on” the hard hat demonstrations.

  Nixon’s response on the “thugs” tape, when Haldeman told him trouble was expected, had been a mere “Good!” Today it is clear that he and his people actually welcomed violence, in hopes of making opponents look bad. Consider the rally at San Jose, California, five months after the New York unrest, when the president’s motorcade was pelted with rocks and eggs.

  It was said to have been the first ever such attack on a president in his own country, a scene from which neither side emerged with credit. Nixon climbed onto the hood of his limousine to give the V sign, and was heard to comment, “That’s what they hate to see.” Rose Woods was quoted as saying it was “just like Caracas.” The slightly damaged limousine was displayed to reporters, and Nixon followed up with a speech. “No band of violent thugs,” he said, “is going to keep me from going out and speaking with the American people. . . .”

  The San Jose protesters’ abuse, and their missiles, had been real enough, yet some journalists suspected a setup. The “so-called riot has been exaggerated,” asserted the city’s police chief.

  Twenty-four years later, with publication of Haldeman’s diary, came confirmation that Nixon had actually sought out trouble. “We wanted some confrontation,” Nixon’s chief of staff said into his tape recorder that evening, “and there were no hecklers in the hall, so stalled departure a little so they could zero in outside. . . . Made a huge incident, and we worked hard to crank it up. . . .”

  Not long before the “thugs” conversation on the White House tapes, the Quaker president apparently even lost patience with a Quaker protester. Monroe Cornish, a Maryland schoolteacher and maverick political candidate, was maintaining a prolonged peace vigil in Lafayette Park within sight of the White House windows. He had a ten-foot banner, and Nixon sent word that it had to come down. Dwight Chapin, the appointments secretary, told a colleague he was “going to get some ‘thugs’ to remove that man. . . . it would take a few hours to get them, but they could do the job.”

  In the event, the thugs were not needed: The offending man moved away a short distance, out of the president’s line of sight, after a police warning. Later the Quakers’ Washington headquarters would be ransacked, one of numerous break-ins that went unnoticed during the Watergate furor. The intruders left valuables untouched but rummaged through the files.

  Also in 1971, when Nixon was to appear at a Billy Graham Day in Charlotte, North Carolina, an advance man sent Haldeman a briefing memo. There would be demonstrators, the aide reported. “. . . They will be violent; they will have extremely obscene signs. . . . It will not only be directed towards the President, but also toward Billy Graham . . . the Charlotte police department is extremely tough and will probably use force to prevent any possible disruption of the motorcade or the President’s movements.”

  Haldeman wrote, “Good,” beside the line in the memo warning the protest would be violent. He scrawled, “Great!” beside the forecast that the abuse would also be aimed at Graham. “Good” appeared again beside the prediction that the local police would use force.

  As it turned out, the meeting took place without significant violence. The discovery of the memo, however, shocked the Senate Watergate Committee. “What mentality,” asked Senator Lowell Weicker, “is in the White House that goes ahead and indicates ‘good’ when the word ‘violence’ is mentioned, when ‘obscene’ is mentioned, which violence and obscenity is [sic] to be directed against the President of the United States?”

  When the first sketchy outline of these abuses emerged, the columnist Mary McGrory offered her personal impression of them. Nixon, she thought, “sounded rather like a demented monarch, totally removed from reality, calling down vengeance on his enemies . . . a man as incapable of the presidency as he was unworthy of it.”

  A hard look at the record raises serious questions as to whether Nixon was sufficiently balanced, or emotionally stable, to be president.

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  Was Nixon “sick of mind”? . . . I agree with the senior Nixon assistant who concluded that the President must have been suffering from some mental defect that long preceded Watergate.

  —John Osborne, in the New Republic, 1975

  “What do we do with him?” H. R. Haldeman had asked rhetorically even before Nixon took office. “He knows he needs to relax, so he comes down to Florida. He likes to swim, so he swims for ten minutes. Then that’s over . . . he doesn’t have a hobby. His best relaxation is talking shop, but he knows he should not be doing that, because that doesn’t seem to be relaxing. So what do we do with him? It’s a problem.”

  Senior aides noticed the tension in Nixon early on. Even a p
ress conference, Kissinger observed, left him “so drained that he sought to avoid stress for days afterward . . . sustained efforts, especially on routine matters, exhausted him physically and made him extremely irritable.” Just months into the presidency, Arthur Burns worried privately about how the president was withstanding the pressure of office in what was perhaps the most pressured job in the world.

  By the late spring of 1969, Burns said, Nixon was already in “a mood of frustration . . . angry.” He talked for a while as though the problems he faced as President were too big to be solved, then seemed to recover. “We were quite concerned abut him,” Burns recalled.

  In the fall, ushered in to meet Nixon on joining the staff, new aide Jeb Magruder was startled by the way his new boss’ hands shook. “When he drank coffee,” Magruder remembered, “there was an embarrassing rattle of cup against saucer.”

  Years earlier, in Six Crises, Nixon had written of the need to exercise self-mastery, to keep impulses firmly under control. Those who observed him closely early in the presidency, though, saw public and private flashes of untoward fury. Kissinger remembered Nixon’s reaction on learning that diplomats and CIA operatives in Southeast Asia were not obeying instructions promptly: “He flew into a monumental rage. On the night of April 23, 1970, he must have called me at least ten times. . . . As was his habit when extremely agitated he would bark an order and immediately hang up the phone. . . . In these circumstances it was usually prudent not to argue and to wait twenty-four hours to see on which of these orders Nixon would insist after he calmed down.”

  What Kissinger was seeing in Nixon, as a mass of evidence indicates, was a president of the United States losing his sense of proportion and his emotional balance, while directing events of great military and political significance.

  Early that same month Nixon had a private viewing of the film Patton, George C. Scott’s portrayal of the World War II general who played a key—and famously aggressive—role in the Allied conquest of Germany. He would watch the movie again within weeks and cajoled Kissinger to see it twice also. Secretary of State William Rogers thought Nixon was behaving like “a walking ad for that movie” at a time Nixon was set on a strike of his own: an attack by U.S. troops inside Cambodia.

  The actual decision to invade took place in late April in an atmosphere within the White House of confusion, scorn, and truculence. After a meeting with the president, Kissinger told one of his staffers, William Watts: “Our peerless leader has flipped out.”

  The same day, asked by Kissinger to listen in on a conversation with Nixon, Watts found himself witness to a shameful exchange. “They were on the helicopter to Camp David, and Nixon was talking to Henry. His voice was slurred, like a person who’d had too much to drink, and he said, ‘Hold on, Bebe has something to say to you.’ Rebozo came on and said, ‘Henry, the president wants you to know that if this doesn’t work, it’s your ass.’ ”1

  An Ehrlichman minute written the following day suggests that to some degree an ignoble imperative lay behind the Cambodia initiative. Kissinger phoned, Ehrlichman noted, to say that Nixon’s “leadership quotient [is] very low and he’s not gaining on domestic side—needs a bold stroke. . . .” The midterm elections were a few months away, and a military success would help the Republicans.

  Nixon had been rebuffed that month by the Senate, which for the second time rejected his choice for a new Supreme Court justice. William Watts, again instructed to listen in on an extension, was startled to hear the president speak of the Cambodia plan as a way to spite the Senate. “We’re going into Cambodia,” he told Kissinger, “and I’ll show those fucking senators who’s tough.”

  Nixon told Kissinger of his decision to go into Cambodia while swimming in the pool at Camp David. They then flew back to Washington for a cruise on the presidential yacht, the Sequoia. “The tensions of the grim military planning,” Kissinger recalled, “were transformed into exaltation by the liquid refreshments, to the point of some patriotic awkwardness when it was decided that everyone should stand to attention while the Sequoia passed Mount Vernon—a feat not managed by everybody with equal success.” Nixon viewed Patton again that evening and is said to have seen it as many as five times in all.

  The directive for the attack into Cambodia was issued the next day, and the president signed the order twice—once, with an imperial flourish, with just “RN,” and then with his full name. Three days later he stayed up all night crafting a TV address to announce the invasion. During the broadcast he slurred his words and sweated as he spoke of America’s bold stand against “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy.” Nixon made much of his role as “commander in chief.”

  The public response to the speech, said to have been overwhelmingly favorable when measured in terms of calls to the White House, turned out to have been largely manufactured by presidential PR men. As for the military action on the ground, which this author covered as a journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation, its results were at least questionable.

  “The president’s unbridled ebullience and his obvious expectation of spectacular results,” Army Chief of Staff General Westmoreland recalled of a Pentagon meeting on the first day of action, “required some adjustment to reality.”

  Protest over the invasion was almost instantaneous. “Everyone misunderstands me,” Nixon said tearfully as he downed scotches with an aide. He seemed to know he was in fragile shape, for that week he summoned Dr. Hutschnecker, the psychotherapist he had consulted in the years before the presidency.

  Hutschnecker, who had once reportedly worried that his patient might not be the right man to have his finger on the nuclear trigger and might not hold up well under pressure, had seen little of Nixon since he became president. Haldeman and Ehrlichman are said to have blocked his visits, and the doctor had gained an audience only once, to discuss the causes of violent crime and his utopian notions of how the United States could achieve world peace.

  Now, furtively and without having had to sign the White House gate log, Hutschnecker was ushered in for a meeting with the president. The doctor, who had not realized that this time Nixon wanted him for a consultation, instead launched into another pitch for his world peace plans.

  His “old intimacy” with Nixon, the doctor felt, seemed absent that day. The president listened for a while, then abruptly ended the meeting. Two days later, with a wave of protest engulfing the nation and the White House under virtual siege—aides were overheard discussing having machine guns set up on the lawn—Nixon called a press conference. He seemed composed enough as he defended his Vietnam policy, though Kissinger thought he was in fact “on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”

  NBC’s Nancy Dickerson had cause to remember that night. “I had the strange feeling that he would have liked to slap me,” she recalled of the way Nixon glared when she asked a pointed question. Then his mood and facial expression abruptly changed, and ludicrous though it seemed, he now appeared to be flirting with her.

  A little after one in the morning, when Dickerson and her husband were in bed asleep, the phone rang. It was Nixon, opening the conversation with “This is Dick.” He complained about the way the conference had gone, saying he wondered what the media’s problem was. Then, plaintively, he said, “I’m the best thing they’ve got—I’m the only president they have.” He talked about the student protesters, then asked Dickerson if she would be attending the White House church service that weekend. When she said she had not been invited, the tone of Nixon’s reply left her disconcerted.

  “Oh! I can take care of that,” Nixon said with a bravado, Dickerson thought, that “would have been more fitting if he were announcing his ability to bomb Hanoi . . . it was almost like a small boy bragging about his physical prowess.” “That man has not been drinking,” she observed to her husband when the call ended, “but I would feel better if he had been.”

  The call to Dickerson was one of no less than forty-six made by Nixon between 9:30 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. that night. Ther
e were seven to Henry Kissinger, the White House log shows, seven to Haldeman, one to Ehrlichman, two to Rebozo, one each to Pat and Tricia, and four to Rose Woods. Two preachers, Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, received one each.

  After this flurry of telephoning, Nixon slept for an hour and a quarter—soundly, he said in a memo to Haldeman a few days later. Then he went to the Lincoln Sitting Room, adjacent to his bedroom, to listen to classical music. He took care to specify in the memo that his selection included “an Ormandy recording with Entremont at the piano playing a Rachmaninoff album for piano and orchestra.” Next, having woken a few more people with phone calls, he summoned his valet, Manolo Sanchez. Minutes later astounded Secret Service agents were rousted out to escort Nixon on an excursion that has become legendary, the dawn visit to talk with protesters at the Lincoln Memorial.

  Nixon had long since told Haldeman he wanted nothing to do with “the hippie college-types.”2 That night, however, in the bizarre phone call to Nancy Dickerson, he had mentioned going out to see the student demonstrators. “I really love those kids, I really do,” he insisted. Now, as the pink light of dawn crept into the sky, the president of the United States and Sanchez, his valet, stepped out of a limousine and climbed the steps to the great brooding statue of Abraham Lincoln.

  They were just yards away from the site where the ebony marble Vietnam Wall stands today, a memorial that Nixon would in old age dismiss as too “mournful” and decline to visit. After giving Sanchez a brief guided tour, the president walked over to a group of people gathering for the day’s protest against the war.

  Later, in his memo to Haldeman—and with an eye to a possible press story—Nixon would offer his version of what “actually took place” at the Lincoln Memorial. He described a wide-ranging and serious talk, but young people quoted in the next day’s newspapers were not favorably impressed.