The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  The accusations were over the top, but they reached their mark.11 A man with an Ivy League background who had married into money, indulged in far-out sex, and took drugs was a ready-made Nixon target. In the days that followed, the president would remind his staff frequently of his glory days pursuing another Harvard man, Alger Hiss. Kissinger also touched another nerve certain to prompt a reaction from Nixon. If the president failed to respond, the adviser dared suggest, it would show he was “a weakling.”

  That meeting with Kissinger, with Haldeman and Ehrlichman sitting in, raised more than the spector of Ellsberg. Nixon had long since ordered aides to bring him the file on the 1968 “bombing halt episode,” President Johnson’s election eve effort to get peace talks started by calling off bomb strikes against North Vietnam. If the files revealed that the cessation of bombing had been merely a vote-getting ploy at election time, as the Nixon side had always maintained, they might be used against the Democrats.

  “You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff,” Haldeman suggested, “and it might be worth doing.” Nixon of course had another reason for wanting to obtain the file. As reported earlier, he had actively worked to sabotage the 1968 peace talks, and the records in question might actually prove more damaging to him than to President Johnson.

  When Haldeman explained that the material had likely been lodged at the Brookings Institution, Nixon seized on the possibility of getting hold of it. “I wanted it . . . right now,” he would recall in the memoirs, “even if it meant having to get it back surreptitiously.”

  A tape released in 1996 reveals that Nixon ordered a break-in of Brookings. He reminded Haldeman of the 1970 domestic intelligence plan that had featured burglary as a component—a plan he had approved and later aborted—and then said: “Implement it. . . . I want it implemented. . . . Goddammit it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get them.”

  The notion that this was merely an impetuous command, one he did not expect to be carried out, is belied by the evidence.12 Less than two weeks later, on June 30, the tapes show, Nixon again insisted on action at Brookings.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: The way I want that handled, Bob is . . . I want Brookings . . . just break in, break in and take it out. Do you understand? . . . You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in.

  HALDEMAN: I don’t have any problem with breaking in . . .

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Just go in and take it! Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.

  HALDEMAN: . . . Make an inspection of the safe.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: That’s right. You go in and do an inspection. I mean clean it out.

  The next morning, meeting with Haldeman and Kissinger, the president again raised the subject of Brookings.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Now you do it and wake them up, get them off their goddamn dead asses. . . . We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy, they’re using any means. [Then, with separate emphasis on every word] We—are—going—to—use—any—means. Is that clear? Did they get the Brookings Institute raided last night? . . . No? Get it done. I want it done. I want the Brookings Institute safe cleaned out. And have it cleaned out in a way that it makes somebody else look . . . [next word unintelligible, perhaps “guilty”].

  And two hours later:

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Who’s going to break into the Brookings Institute? . . . Henry . . . He’s a little afraid. He’s got some friends over at Brookings . . . he told me he was for it. . . . You’ve got to get this stuff from Rand and Brookings.

  Then, to Ehrlichman:

  PRESIDENT NIXON: John, you mop up. You’re in charge of that. And I want it done today. . . .

  The following day, more:

  PRESIDENT NIXON: I really meant it when I, I want somebody to go in and crack that safe. Walk in and get it. . . . They’ve got to do it. . . .

  They did try to do it, more than once, and over a period of months. One of the detectives used for earlier undercover jobs, including the pursuit of Edward Kennedy, recalled being assigned by Charles Colson to raid the Brookings Institute. Colson, he testified, suggested a way to go about it: Nixon operatives would set fire to the Brookings building, and the file would be grabbed during the ensuing commotion.

  This witness, former policeman John Caulfield, thought the scheme “asinine” and asked White House counsel John Dean to intervene. Dean did so, he would testify, by flying to San Clemente to see Ehrlichman. The president’s aide, apparently unsurprised by the report of the fire-bombing plan, merely looked over his half-glasses and said, “Well, maybe we should call it off.” Then he called Colson to say, “Chuck, that Brookings thing. We don’t want it anymore. . . .”

  By that time, Dean was to tell investigators, Colson’s men had already “cased the joint.” A veteran guard at Brookings, interviewed years later, did recall an evening visit by two suspicious strangers. When he blocked their way, they made their excuses and left.

  According to another of the detectives on contract to the White House, a second reconnaissance was carried out later. Other operatives were at work by that time, devising a variant on the original scheme. Brookings was still to be set on fire, but the first fire engine to arrive would be a phony, an old, used model purchased expressly for the operation. Its “crew” would “hit the vault, and then get themselves out in the confusion of other fire apparatus arriving.”

  The dangerous caper was scrapped, said the former operative who described it, only because the fire engine was “excessively expensive.”13 While Colson later tried to deny his alleged role, Ehrlichman acknowledged having called it off. He said too that Nixon knew about the fire-bombing plan in advance. If true, that is surely the most astonishing feature of the whole mad episode.

  That Nixon was in earnest about the Brookings plot is evident, and not only because the tapes reveal his insisting it be carried out. They have also preserved the conspiratorial moment when—just for a moment—he evidently remembered the hidden microphones. On June 30, as he urged Haldeman to see the plan through, Nixon paused to warn: “Don’t discuss it here. . . .”

  To break into Brookings, Haldeman had pointed out, they would need “somebody to do it.” The president had someone in mind. “You talk to Hunt,” he said. Hunt. E. Howard Hunt, the man who exactly a year later would lead the Watergate break-in.

  As reported earlier, Hunt had first met Nixon some twenty years earlier as a young CIA officer.14 It was then that, already an admirer, he had gone up to Nixon’s table in a Washington restaurant to congratulate him on his pursuit of Alger Hiss. Out to dinner with Pat, the young politician had asked Hunt and his wife to join them at their table.

  Six years on, when Hunt was serving in Uruguay and Nixon stopped there en route to Caracas, they talked again. Later still, when both men were embroiled in early efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro, Nixon’s military aide Robert Cushman told Hunt to call on the vice president for help if necessary.

  That was the extent of the relationship prior to the Nixon presidency, Hunt said in a 1997 interview. Nixon mentioned nothing of the earlier meetings in his memoirs—and one passage could be taken to mean that he had not heard Hunt’s name until as late as 1972.15 “You know,” he was to tell Ehrlichman on the White House tapes, as his presidency began to implode, “Colson never told me about Hunt, that he knew Hunt, until after the Watergate thing.”

  It was not true. If the earlier meetings were insignificant and understandably forgotten, Hunt’s name had at least been floated past the president by June 30, 1971. On that day, the tapes show, he had mentioned Hunt’s name as a candidate for the Brookings break-in. The following morning Colson briefed the president in detail, praising Hunt as “a very close friend of [Senator] Jim Buckley’s . . . hard as nails . . . a brilliant writer . . . just got out of the CIA, fifty, kind of a tiger.” Colson knew Hunt because they had socialized before the presidency as members of the Brown University alumni club.

  Haldeman also discussed Hunt with the president as a potential recruit, on two occasions. Colson
praised him again a month later, recommending Hunt as “a first-rate analyst who spent his whole life in subversive warfare . . . an admirer of yours since the Alger Hiss case.” Hunt’s name, he later recalled, was at the bottom of a list of six men he put forward for the job of countering leaks like the Pentagon Papers. It was, however, Hunt whom Nixon picked.

  Haldeman had noted in his diary that week that the president wanted a “dirty guy” to go after the “conspiracy” against him. Now he had one. “I want to alert you,” Ehrlichman said in a call to Cushman, by now a senior CIA official, “that an old acquaintance, Howard Hunt, has been asked by the President to do some special consultant work on security problems. He may be contacting you sometime in the future for some assistance. . . . You should consider he has pretty much carte blanche.”

  Sitting in the sun on the terrace at San Clemente, a week after Hunt had joined up, Nixon proceeded from the hiring of one individual to the establishment of a secret investigative unit that would respond directly to the Oval Office.

  The new group, composed of five men, would soon be working out of a room in the half basement of the Executive Office Building, with a sign on the door reading MR. YOUNG, PLUMBER. Young was David Young, the unit’s joint leader. “Plumber” described their mission: to plug the leaks that infuriated the president.

  Nixon had personally briefed the other man assigned to run the outfit, Egil (“Bud”) Krogh, the young aide who had witnessed his bizarre dawn visit to the House of Representatives the previous year. Krogh was, and is—as the author learned in extensive interviews—one of the most decent of those who served on the White House staff. He was at that time also somewhat inexperienced or, by one friend’s account, “the kind of guy who, if you put him in charge of a big wedding . . . wouldn’t have known how to get a couple of cops to help with the traffic.” As such, he was not, perhaps, an ideal choice to head the president’s crack undercover unit.

  Also drafted were Howard Hunt and the strange character with whom his name would be forever linked, Gordon Liddy. A former FBI agent, then aged forty, Liddy had a particular interest in Nazi Germany. The music of the Third Reich stirred him, made him feel “strength inside.” He was also, by his own account, preoccupied with guns, violence, and the elemental power of the human will.

  Liddy liked to discuss methods of killing—such as how to dispatch a victim with one thrust of a sharp pencil just above the Adam’s apple—and acquired a CIA 9 mm parabellum pistol “for use in the event Bud Krogh or other of my White House superiors tasked me with an assassination.” It was perhaps not an irrelevant potential asset, as these pages will show.

  “Gordon’s a cowboy,” said one who knew him then, and the description would remain apt far into the future. In the year 2000, at seventy, he was a hectoring talk-show host with a “LIDDYPage” Web site featuring himself with his “formidable Lingenfelter modified ’94 Corvette ZR–1,” his “Boss-Hoss” motorcycle, and his role in the TV series 18 Wheels of Justice. The site also included an ad for the “G. Gordon Liddy Stacked and Packed Calendar Featuring America’s Most Beautiful Women Heavily Armed.” This was the man who, in 1971, became field operations coordinator for the president’s special unit.

  Soon after becoming a Plumber, Liddy would brag later, he would earn Nixon’s praise for writing “the best memo he’s seen in years. . . .” The reference was to a report he had submitted summarizing why it was time for FBI Director Hoover to retire, an argument of which Nixon was already persuaded. Hoover had long been an ally, but now he wanted him gone.

  The president had been having trouble with the director, most recently over the pursuit of Daniel Ellsberg. “Notwithstanding the president’s agitation,” Ehrlichman recalled, “Hoover assigned a very low priority to the project.” Nixon was frustrated by the apparent indifference, so much so that he phoned Hoover to say he was “having to resort to sending two people out there.”

  The “two people” were Hunt and Liddy, and “out there” was California. Disappointed by an initial psychiatric profile of Ellsberg provided by the CIA, the Plumbers had proposed, in writing, a “covert operation” to “examine all the medical files” in the office of Ellsberg’s Los Angeles psychiatrist. Ehrlichman approved the idea, again in writing, on condition the mission could be carried out in a way that was “not traceable.”

  As the world would learn during Watergate, Hunt and Liddy duly flew to the West Coast. Equipped with silly disguises provided by the CIA and assisted by Cuban exile accomplices, they broke into the doctor’s office, found nothing, and left the place a mess to give the impression that their motive had been to steal drugs. The crime achieved absolutely nothing except—one day in the future—to imperil further Nixon’s presidency.

  In a 1973 broadcast to the nation, after the break-in had been exposed, Nixon would explain that his brief to the Plumbers had been that the Ellsberg matter was “of vital importance to the national security.” He was more forthright in the memoirs, insisting that Ellsberg’s “views had to be discredited.” In other words, the sort of charges Kissinger had alleged against Ellsberg were to be corroborated and made public. “He can be painted evil,” as Colson told Nixon; or “neutralized,” Hunt put it in a memo.

  Whether Nixon ordered the break-in or knew of it in advance is a question that has long been debated. Krogh, who sent Hunt and Liddy on their mission, told the author Nixon had given him general “authority” for the assignment but no specific break-in order. Ehrlichman quoted Nixon as having given the go-ahead for “direct action” by Hunt and Liddy.16

  Recently released White House tapes fail to clarify the matter. “I briefed Ehrlichman on it today on the investigative side,” Nixon told Colson during a discussion of the Pentagon Papers. This conversation took place at the very time, and probably on the very day, that Ehrlichman signed the memo approving the mission.

  Days after the break-in, however, Ehrlichman withheld specific details about it from the president, telling him only that there had recently been “one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles, which, I think, it’s better you don’t know about.” Ehrlichman later testified that he opted not to communicate to his boss what had happened, after the fact—because “there wasn’t anything the President could do about it.”17

  Likewise Nixon’s later conversations with aides reveal no certainties as to the level of his involvement. “Goddamn to hell,” he would complain to his press spokesman, Ron Zeigler, in the midst of Watergate. “I didn’t tell them to go fuck up the goddamn Ellsberg place.” Two days later: “I am stuck with, and have to be stuck with . . . approving this plan, which I did. I didn’t check whether there were burglaries and all that. God to hell, we didn’t even think of such things!”

  As the tapes clearly demonstrate, Nixon certainly had considered similar actions. He had repeatedly ordered a break-in of the Brookings Institution only two months before the burglary of the psychiatrist’s office. Another exchange makes it clear what his primary motive was as scandal engulfed him. “I believe somehow,” he told colleagues, “I have to avoid having the President approve the break-in of a psychiatrist.”

  In the 1973 broadcast Nixon did categorically deny involvement, insisting he “did not authorize and had no knowledge of any illegal means.” In private, days after his resignation, he was less assured. “Did I know about it?” he asked former Plumber Egil Krogh, one of the first visitors to San Clemente after Nixon had left Washington.18

  Two years later, Nixon expressed the same uncertainty to Bob Haldeman. “I was so damn mad at Ellsberg in those days,” he said. “I’ve been thinking—and maybe I did order that break-in.”

  According to Ehrlichman, two aides who worked with Nixon in exile told him Nixon eventually did take responsibility. “Nixon now admits what he formerly denied,” Ehrlichman claimed. “He knew of the [Ellsberg psychiatrist] break-in before it occurred, and he encouraged it.”19

  In the memoirs Nixon resorted to vagueness. “I do not believe I w
as told about the break-in at the time,” he wrote, “. . . but I cannot rule it out.” The equivocation enraged Ehrlichman, for while Nixon was never held to account, he and Krogh had served time in jail in large part because of their role in the break-in of the psychiatrist’s office.

  Ehrlichman went to his grave believing that Nixon did authorize the crime, through Charles Colson. Colson has denied involvement, yet the paper record proves he was privy to the idea from the moment it was proposed.20 He features too in another, more pathetic possible explanation for Nixon’s apparent amnesia on the matter.

  “It would be hard to know what [Nixon] did—or didn’t—know,” said Haldeman’s eventual replacement, Alexander Haig. Colson “would get President Nixon in the bag—when I say ‘in the bag,’ all Nixon needed was one scotch. His toleration of alcohol is zero—and he could get pretty high. . . . The real éminence grise of all this was Colson.”

  _____

  It was unbelievable, Nixon was to grumble as Congress’s investigation began, that he had to put up with “this horse’s-ass crap” about his operatives’ covert activity. A skein of information, however, suggests that more such activity had been undertaken, even by late 1971, than Watergate probers ever were able to investigate.