The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  “I hope it was because he was tired,” said Joan Pelletier, a twenty-year-old sophomore from Syracuse University, “but most of what he was saying was absurd. Here we had come from a university that’s completely uptight, on strike, and when we told him where we were from he talked about the football team. When someone said he was from California, he talked about surfing.”

  Some were alarmed as much by Nixon’s manner as by what he had to say. “He didn’t look anyone in the eyes,” said Lynn Schatzkin, also from Syracuse. “He was mumbling. When people asked him to speak up he would boom one word and no more. As far as sentence structure, there was none.”

  “He looked like he had a mask on,” Pelletier remarked. “He was wearing pancake makeup. He looked scared and nervous like he was in a fog. His eyes were glassy.”3 “The vibrations in the air were scary,” thought her companion, Ronnie Kemper.

  Nancy Dickerson, remembering Nixon’s call that night, understood what the students meant. “If he talked to the students the way he talked to me,” she said, “they had reason to be taken aback and even a little scared.” She thought Nixon was suffering a “dislocation of personality.”

  The president made one further stop during that strange outing. A lone White House aide, thirty-year-old Egil Krogh, had joined the president’s group at the memorial, keeping his distance because Nixon had specifically asked that no one but the valet and the Secret Service accompany him. He had followed in another car when Nixon ordered his limousine to head for the Capitol.

  It was a Saturday, still not yet six o’clock in the morning. “We went to the House of Representatives,” Krogh recalled in 1997. “There was a charwoman there, an older black woman, mopping up the floor. They got talking about the Bible. She had hers with her, and I think he signed it, and he talked about his mother to the charwoman, saying: ‘My mother was a saint.’ ”

  Then, after getting a janitor to unlock the House chamber, Nixon headed for the seat that he had occupied as a young representative in the forties. As Krogh, White House doctor Walter Tkach, and the Secret Service agents stood by, he told his valet to step up to the Speaker’s chair and make a speech.

  “I watched this extraordinary tableau unfold before me,” said Krogh. “Richard Nixon, exhausted, his face drawn, like a man running on adrenaline . . . sitting there by himself telling the valet, ‘Manolo, say something!’ Manolo was embarrassed—he was a dear, sweet man—but he did try to talk a little. And Nixon started to clap. Clap, clap, clap, echoing in the chamber. I tell you, at that moment I wasn’t quite sure what was going on . . . what really was the matter here. This was very bizarre to me. . . . I did question his mental stability.”

  The House visit over, Nixon was “upset” to discover he could not gain entrance to the Senate chamber. Then Haldeman appeared and the party headed off again in the limousine. Nixon insisted on stopping for breakfast, hash with an egg on it at the Mayflower Hotel. “Very weird,” Haldeman noted in his diary. “P completely beat and just rambling on.”

  Next, with demonstrators starting to throng the streets, the president insisted on trying to walk back to the White House. “The president kept walking,” Krogh remembered, “and the car was sort of moving along trying to keep close to him. Haldeman hissed, ‘Stop him!’ and I kind of grabbed Nixon by the arm. He pulled his arm away and glowered, and then he got in the back of the car. We drove back to the White House. . . .”

  “The weirdest so far,” Haldeman noted that day. “I am concerned about his condition . . . there’s a long way to go and he’s in no condition to weather it.”

  It was decided to clear Nixon’s schedule and get him away to Florida as soon as possible. “This whole period of two weeks of tension and crisis,” Haldeman wrote, “has taken its toll . . . is not getting enough sleep, is uptight etc. . . . Could be rough if a new crisis arises, because he’s not ready to handle it.” Kissinger thought the Lincoln Memorial episode “only the tip of the psychological iceberg.”

  A day into the four-day break Nixon’s aide was still worrying. “The unwinding process is not succeeding . . .” he recorded in his diary. The next day: “More of the same.” According to one of Dr. Hutschnecker’s associates, the psychotherapist was summoned to Key Biscayne that weekend in “an emergency housecall,” intended “to piece together Nixon’s shattered ego.”4

  The president seemed removed from reality. While in Florida he asked Bebe Rebozo’s woman friend and future wife, Jane Lucke, to do some sewing for him. Then he held an odd little ceremony. “In plane on way back,” Haldeman recorded in his diary, “P had me up . . . then Ehrlichman . . . and Kissinger and said the three of us had borne the brunt these past few weeks and we deserved an award like the Purple Heart, so he had devised a new award, the Blue Heart, for those who were true blue. Then gave us each a blue cloth heart made by Jane Lucke, and said the honor was to be kept very confidential.”

  The president did relate the Blue Heart episode in his memoirs. In the contemporary memo to Haldeman, he even mentioned the visit with his valet to the House of Representatives. He omitted that incident from the autobiography, however, presumably realizing his readers would find it bizarre.

  Less than two weeks after the rest period in Florida, Nixon flew to San Clemente. He was still “recovering from the ordeal” of defending the Cambodia decision, Kissinger recalled, and having trouble sleeping. After another phone conversation with Billy Graham, the president asked Kissinger to join him on a remarkable trip. The former adviser remembered:

  He had his heart set on showing Rebozo and me his birthplace in Yorba Linda. So we set off in a brownish unmarked Lincoln . . . we could not possibly share the emotion that obviously gripped him . . . suddenly Nixon noticed that two cars had followed us; one was filled with Secret Service agents, the other contained the obligatory press pool . . . standard procedure. . . . But Nixon lost his composure as I had never seen him do before or after.

  He did not want company. He was President and he was ordering privacy for himself. The orders were delivered at the top of his voice—itself an event so unprecedented that the Secret Service car broke every regulation in the book and departed, followed by the press pool.

  Nixon seemed to relax for a while as he showed Rebozo and Kissinger the gas station his father had run—he told them the false story about how the family had missed out on a later oil find on the property5—and his alma mater, Whittier College. When he could not find the way to the Los Angeles house he had lived in just a decade earlier, however, he again became “agitated, nervous.”

  It was more than a week before Haldeman could record that his boss was “back to a fairly full schedule . . . generally simmering down. Will coast along for a bit, then we’ll be ready for the next crisis. . . .” But the fact that all was not well and that there was no physical reason to explain Nixon’s behavior had not gone unnoticed. The veneer of the supposedly self-possessed Nixon, carefully nurtured by his public relations men, had cracked.

  While he was in San Clemente, the Associated Press had run a story on the remarkable amount of time he was spending away from Washington. UPI’s Helen Thomas noticed during the Cambodia crisis that he “looked like a man in a daze.” Nancy Dickerson thought he had become “mentally erratic” and told her bureau chief as much. Like most other journalists, though, the bureau head did not pursue the matter, for it was inconceivable to run a story suggesting the president of the United States was unstable.

  The White House correspondent of the New Republic, John Osborne, was an exception. One of Washington’s most respected journalists, he came closer than anyone, and as early as 1970, to writing what he actually believed.

  “Things that have never happened before at the Nixon White House kept happening in early May,” he wrote, “and the President’s people kept saying that it didn’t mean anything.” He described Nixon’s “alternating moods of anger and euphoria,” his increasingly frequent slips of the tongue. “The staff habit of denying Mr. Nixon ever loses his
cool, tires himself beyond the limits of prudence,” he noted, “suddenly went out of fashion.”

  Interviewed by Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times, the president at first “created the impression of feeling that he was on top of the world, in control of the situation.” Yet something about Nixon bothered Brandon. “However reassuring his words,” he remembered, “his refusal to look one straight in the eye was disturbing to me. He either looked straight ahead of himself or at my lapel. . . . His eyes looked as cold as ever, often shooting cruel flashes. He had virtually no eyelashes, and under his eyelids was a redness that betrayed fatigue. I also had the feeling, throughout the interview, that here was a man who constantly tried to observe himself, how he was doing and how he sounded.”

  Reflecting on the Nixon presidency years later, Osborne would state openly what he had long been hinting. “Even in the first years of his presidency,” he wrote, “reporters who followed and observed Nixon as closely as I tried to did so in part because, way down and in some instances not so far down in their consciousness, there was a feeling that he might go bats in front of them at any time.”

  _____

  The president was “letting himself slip back to the old ways,” Haldeman confided to his diary. The “old ways” were the symptoms that had bothered him and Ehrlichman after the 1962 campaign: exhaustion combined with chronic insomnia and the problem with alcohol.

  Nixon increasingly had trouble sleeping. Tormented by the barking of his own dogs, he sometimes abandoned his grand bedroom at the White House to seek slumber in the room assigned to his daughter Julie, now married and often out of town.

  There had been a scare when Nixon visited Romania early in the presidency. After a marathon journey around the world, Air Force One had brought him into Bucharest to a rapturous welcome. His first visit to a Communist country as president, at a time of tension with Moscow and the first tentative feelers toward Beijing, was going brilliantly well. He had met with the Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceaucescu, who impressed him very favorably, smoked a cigar, and had gone to bed feeling ebullient.

  Around 1:00 A.M. Nixon phoned speech writer Raymond Price from his room. He sounded ebullient, “savoring the triumph, basking in it,” Price thought. “Then, as I finished my answer to one of his questions, there was no response. The phone line was still open. But where a moment earlier I had been talking with the president of the United States . . . now suddenly there was no president on the other end.”

  Before the sudden silence Nixon had sounded slurry and repetitive. It was a scenario Price remembered from the campaign trail, when sudden fade-outs had been triggered by the combination of beer and a sleeping pill. Worried, he alerted the Signal Corps switchboard operator, and a Secret Service agent was soon rushing to the president’s suite. He found him propped on a pillow, out to the world, the phone still resting on his shoulder.

  The standard line from the White House was that Nixon drank “little more than an occasional sip of light wine.” This was not true, and alcohol had alarming effects even when he drank little. Researchers at the National Archives, listening to the White House tapes in years to come, heard time and again the clink of glass on glass, followed by slurred, rambling speech.

  The truth was known to some even during the presidency. “I got a call one afternoon after I had written a piece about Vietnam that he liked,” Life’s Hugh Sidey recalled. “Nixon called me about three o’clock in the afternoon. He said, ‘I just want to tell you that’s a great piece. Come on down for the weekend . . . we’re going out to the Virgin Islands’ . . . obviously he had been drinking, since he couldn’t talk very well.”

  Some officials who served Nixon were also aware of the problem. “He was given to exploding,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William Sullivan, “particularly in the course of the evening if he had had a few drinks. He would call up [Secretary of State] Bill Rogers or somebody else and say, ‘Fire this man’ . . . Bill said Nixon would forget this the next morning. . . .”

  “Two glasses of wine,” Kissinger recalled in 1999, “were quite enough to make him boisterous, just one more to grow bellicose or sentimental with slurred speech. Alcohol had a way of destroying the defenses he had so carefully constructed to enable him to succeed. . . .”

  Determining what Kissinger really thought, on this, as on other subjects, is difficult. Nixon’s drunken episodes, Kissinger has written, “occurred rarely, always at night and almost never in the context of major decisions. The few of us who actually witnessed such conduct never acted on what he might have said; we felt we owed the President another chance to consider whatever the issue was.”

  Kissinger has also said that others’ descriptions of Nixon’s drinking himself into incoherence are absurd. Former members of Kissinger’s staff, however, throw doubt on this assertion.

  Roger Morris, a senior National Security Council aide early in the presidency, said Kissinger referred to Nixon as “our drunken friend.” Morris was one of a handful of staffers entrusted with collating Kissinger’s daily diary notes. “We caught glimpses of Nixon, Laird, Rogers, and Kissinger in action,” he said. “Nixon drank exceptionally at night, and there were many nights when you couldn’t reach him at Camp David. . . . There were many times when a cable would come in late and Henry would say, ‘There’s no sense waking him up; he’d be incoherent.’ ”

  The Washington Post’s Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote of learning about a call in which the president “drunkenly related to Dr. Kissinger the Vietnam military policy of his friend Bebe Rebozo. . . . During another call, Kissinger mentioned the number of American casualties in a major battle in Vietnam. ‘Oh, screw ’em,’ said Nixon.”

  At Key Biscayne, according to a Secret Service source, Nixon once lost his temper during a conversation about Cambodia. “He just got pissed,” the agent quoted eyewitnesses as saying. “They were half in the tank, sitting around the pool drinking. And Nixon got on the phone and said: ‘Bomb the shit out of them!’ ”

  “People who knew about the slurred voice and the nights beyond reach,” Roger Morris said, “seem to have a range of contrasting motives for silence. It was, after all, they told themselves, only an occasional problem. Its revelation might invite Soviet recklessness or some other action that would not have happened otherwise. Patriotism, fear, admiration for Nixon’s potential greatness, shame, personal fear, or desire for power—all had a part in a covenant of silence about the other side of Richard Nixon.”

  For many years Kissinger spoke only to colleagues in private about one particularly outrageous episode that occurred in the first year of the presidency. The last weekend of August 1969, Haldeman’s diary shows, started early for Nixon. He had been at San Clemente for much of the month, a good deal of that time taken up with relaxing and entertaining. On the Friday afternoon, he had spent two hours on the beach with Rebozo before hosting a party for “old friends.” The next day was scheduled to be a day off, with another visit to the beach and a trip to a football game.

  Meanwhile, more than seven thousand miles away in the Middle East, Palestinian terrorists had hijacked a TWA airliner with more than a hundred passengers on board and forced the pilot to fly to Damascus. The hijackers were demanding the release of comrades held in Israeli prisons.6

  Kissinger, also in California that week, swiftly briefed the president on the situation. His response, described by Kissinger publicly for the first time in 1999, was startling. “I reported to Nixon,” Kissinger recalled, “who was in San Clemente with his two friends Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp. Obviously trying to impress his pals, Nixon issued a curt-sounding order. ‘Bomb the airport of Damascus.’ ”

  Even had that order not been rash and ill considered, a bombing operation is not simply a matter of carrying out a sudden command. Targets have to be plotted, diplomatic measures prepared, and many other steps taken. Mercifully, no U.S. aircraft carrier was then within range of the Syrian capital, a factor tha
t proved helpful to Kissinger as he decided how to respond.

  Certain the order “would not survive the night,” Kissinger worked out with Defense Secretary Laird a way to avoid outright disobedience while blocking the president’s order at the same time. “Laird and I decided to carry out the letter of the order by implementing the first steps and leaving the other measures for the morning.”

  The two U.S. aircraft carriers on station in the Mediterranean, the Saratoga and John F. Kennedy, were instructed to sail toward a potential launch position, but no further orders were given. When Nixon came on the line with badgering phone calls—he did so “hourly” that night—Kissinger mollified him with reports of the naval movement. Laird, for his part, stalled the president with the excuse that bad weather was hampering operations.

  The following morning, when Kissinger informed him of the carriers’ progress, Nixon asked innocently, “Did anything else happen?” “When I replied in the negative,” Kissinger recalled, “the President without moving a facial muscle said, ‘Good.’ I never heard another word about the bombing of Damascus.”

  The weather pretext was needed again a year later, when Palestinian terrorists hijacked several airplanes to the Jordanian desert. “The president wanted to hit an airfield in Jordan,” Laird recalled, “and I said: ‘Just tell ’em [the White House] we had bad weather.’ Because we’re not going to hit that airfield.”

  Ten days later fighting broke out in Jordan between Palestinian forces and King Hussein’s army. It was a conflict that threatened to spread, with the possibility of a U.S.-Soviet confrontation. Perhaps with some exaggeration, Nixon was to remember the period as being “like a ghastly game of dominoes, with a nuclear war waiting at the end.”7 In the context of previous episodes, Haldeman’s diary entry for the day the war began, September 17, is interesting: