The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Within three hours, before any details about the assassin were clear, a White House aide announced to the press that papers found in Bremer’s Milwaukee apartment linked him to “leftist” causes, perhaps to the campaign of Senator McGovern. “What matters for the next 24–48 hours is the story,” Nixon would tell colleagues the next morning, according to Haldeman’s diary. “Don’t worry about doing it all by the book. The problem is who wins the public opinion on it. It’s all P.R. at this point.”

  His real view was in fact even blunter. The president recalled that day that he had recently told the new attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, that there were “times when it’s best that the Justice Department not know . . . we’ll tell you what we think you need to know.” Now was one of those times, and the president urged aides to use the acting FBI director, Pat Gray, as “an accomplice.” Meanwhile he exhorted them: “Use Colson’s outfit, you know, to sneak out things. I mean, he’ll do anything. I mean, anything!”

  Nixon spent the hours after the Wallace shooting drinking and dining with Colson, pestering the FBI for half-hourly updates, and plotting ways to bend the truth. “We sat there for a couple of hours,” Colson recalled, “Nixon having a cocktail, he’s sitting there with his feet back, we’re waiting for the FBI to call . . . he would say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if they had left-wing propaganda in [the assassin’s] apartment? . . . Too bad we couldn’t get somebody in there to plant it. . . .’ ”

  Attributing the idea for this mischief to the president may have been buck-passing on Colson’s part, but it is clear that the pair colluded in the matter. A snatch of the evening’s exchanges between Nixon and Colson, taped off Nixon’s telephone, recorded this dialogue between the president and his trusted aide:

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Is he a left-winger, right-winger?

  COLSON: Well, he’s going to be a left-winger by the time we get through, I think.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: (chuckling) Good. Keep at that. Keep at that.

  COLSON: Yeah. I just wish that, God, that I’d thought sooner about planting a little literature out there.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Hah! Ha, ha, ha!

  COLSON: It may be a little late, although I’ve got one source that maybe . . .

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Good.

  COLSON: You could think about that. I mean, if they found it near his apartment that would be helpful.

  That evening, Colson later told the FBI, he placed a call to the man he had in mind for the task, Howard Hunt. Hunt was to fly to Milwaukee, where the would-be assassin had lived, and penetrate Bremer’s apartment. To obtain entry, Colson suggested, Hunt could “bribe the janitor or pick the lock.” According to Hunt, he pointed out that it was too late, that the apartment would now be sealed and virtually impenetrable. Colson called off the mission the following day.16

  The president’s entire election strategy, a senior colleague recalled, had been based on whether Wallace ran or not. That spring, Theodore White observed, “With the needle sticking at 43% of the vote for Nixon, the President was still vulnerable—until, of course, May 15 and the shooting. Then it was all over.”

  Wallace’s effective removal from the race was so decisive, in Nixon’s favor, that some serious commentators later considered the possibility that the attempt to kill him was—as Washington Post managing editor Howard Simons put it—“the ultimate dirty trick,” that the assassin might have been put up to the deed by Nixon’s men. There were indeed troubling aspects to the case, and Wallace himself harbored suspicions until his death in 1998.17

  The notion that the White House sanctioned murder cannot be dismissed out of hand as a melodramatic conspiracy theory. A man since convicted of the murder of a Massachusetts policeman, William Gilday, has claimed since 1974—in communications with the New York Times and others, including this author—that Nixon aides had asked him and a crony as early as 1970, in Boston, to take part in schemes ranging from dirty tricks to murder.

  Those he was incited to kill, Gilday has said, included Senator Edward Kennedy and George Wallace. The aides in question are unnamed here for legal reasons, but Gilday has appeared to have knowledge of corroborating details—their nicknames, for example—and has provided reconnaissance photographs he said were taken with Kennedy’s murder in view.

  In one of Nixon’s most conspiratorial taped conversations, recorded after Watergate, he discussed with Colson the mistakes that had been made in mounting operations that were “very close to me.”

  “I did things out of Boston,” Colson replied. “We did some blackmail and . . . my God, uh, uh, uh, I’ll go to my grave before I ever disclose it. But, uh, we did a hell of a lot of things and never got caught . . . you had one of the men who was in line at your Christmas tree lighting reception who ran 15 or 20 black projects in Boston, and that’ll never be traced. No way. And I could under oath say I didn’t know how it happened . . . that’s the way to do it.” Nixon listened without demur.

  Only years later did it become known that Hunt and Liddy had had detailed discussions on how to get rid of the columnist Jack Anderson. Anderson, successor to Nixon’s perennial critic Drew Pearson, had repeatedly enraged the president with his revelations: of secret payments to Nixon from Howard Hughes; of settlement of an antitrust suit against International Telephone and Telegraph, apparently in return for a huge cash contribution to fund the Republican convention; of Nixon’s support of Pakistan in its recent conflict with India over Bangladesh—a war in which the United States was supposedly neutral—in which an estimated million Bengalis died and many times that number became refugees.

  Anderson and Pearson, Ehrlichman observed, were Nixon’s “deadliest foes” in the media. Only in 1975, when official inquiries were winding down, would information reach Watergate investigators that the president’s fury had led to talk of murder.

  “They charged us with the task: ‘Come up with ways of stopping Anderson . . .’ ” Liddy has said. “We examined all of the alternatives and very quickly came to the conclusion the only way you’re going to be able to stop him is to kill him. . . . And that was the recommendation.”

  According to Liddy, he and Hunt debated ways of killing Anderson at a meeting with a CIA physician in early 1972. The options included a covertly administered dose of LSD that would cause Anderson to crash his car, a deliberate collision designed to be fatal, and “aspirin roulette,” the placing of a poisoned tablet in the appropriate bottle in the journalist’s medicine cabinet. It was agreed after some debate to recommend that Anderson “should just become a fatal victim of the notorious Washington street-crime rate.” Eventually, however, word came down that murder was “too severe a sanction.”

  Hunt has never publicly acknowledged the murder planning but said in an affidavit that Colson settled “on a concept that would have Anderson appear to be drunk or incoherent during one of his TV or radio appearances.” “It would be great,” Colson had exclaimed, “to make it look as though he’s blown his mind.” The discussion with the CIA doctor about covert drug doses, Hunt maintained, had been pursued not with murder in mind but with the idea of discrediting Anderson by making him appear insane. Hunt said in passing that he had proposed the same treatment for Daniel Ellsberg.

  Both Ellsberg and Anderson escaped unscathed, but some CIA staffers reportedly believed that Edmund Muskie had not. The public breakdown that wrecked the senator’s campaign, some officials suspected, had been caused by “Howard Hunt or his henchmen spiking his drink with a sophisticated form of LSD.”

  The truth of that rumor may never be known. A disquieting possibility, though, emerges from Hunt’s affidavit on the meeting that set him off on a search for ways to silence Jack Anderson. “Colson seemed more than usually agitated,” Hunt recalled, “and I formed the impression that he had just come from a meeting with President Nixon.”

  _____

  By May 1972 Nixon had cause to be more confident than ever about winning the election. The polls showed him pulling strongly ahead of McGovern, the su
rviving Democratic front-runner. With Wallace crippled and soon to be out of the race, there was little real competition.

  Behind the scenes, though, the “political intelligence” operation trundled on, some of its schemes relatively harmless. In line with other CREEP propaganda, phony polls, and trumped-up letters and telegrams, Liddy had Miami Cubans stage a demonstration backing Nixon’s latest bombing in Vietnam.

  After the abortive attempt to beat up Daniel Ellsberg, Hunt and Liddy had driven around Washington one night on a reconnaissance mission with three of their men. The bright lights around Senator McGovern’s headquarters, Liddy had remarked, would have to be dealt with before any break-in was attempted. (He was to shoot them out later with a pistol.) Then the group had headed down Virginia Avenue, past the Democratic National Committee offices in the great curved complex called Watergate. “That’s our next job,” Liddy said, pointing.

  Preparations for two bugging operations were already well in hand. The electronics man, McCord, had reconnoitered the McGovern building on the evening of the day Wallace was shot. There were problems there, so the team concentrated first on the Watergate. His masters, Liddy confided, were especially eager to target the office and nearby apartment of Nixon’s old foe, DNC Chairman Lawrence O’Brien.

  Early in May there was an unexplained break-in of offices in the Watergate two floors above the Democratic headquarters. Another occurred, within the complex but in another building, at law offices used by four leading Democrats, two of them on Nixon’s Enemies list.18

  McCord meanwhile brought on board two new men. Former FBI agent Alfred Baldwin was used first as a security guard for John Mitchell’s wife and then for a little spying on Capitol Hill offices, pending bigger assignments. The second recruit, whose name to this day remains virtually unknown to the general public, had a link to the president himself.

  Louis Russell was yet another former FBI man. Two decades earlier, as a congressional investigator, he had worked closely with Nixon on the Hiss case. In the fifties he was recruited for the operation Nixon sanctioned while vice president against shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. In the late sixties he had been hired by another member of the coterie of Washington investigators, one with links to key Nixon associates, Caulfield, Chotiner, Colson, and Mitchell.

  A year into the presidency, having requested an appointment with Nixon himself, Russell had visited with Rose Woods at the White House. He wanted a job, and Woods wrote to the White House personnel department on his behalf. A report on Russell was later sent to Attorney General Mitchell, and the former agent lunched with William Birely, a Washington stockbroker who had long been friendly with Nixon and his secretary.

  Russell worked on the continuing White House probe of Chappaquiddick and, according to his daughter, was used as a courier to carry large sums of cash. Then, in 1972, he began working for CREEP. His known responsibilities included running staff security checks, researching leftist newspapers, and—the latest stage of what had now become a White House preoccupation—investigating the columnist Jack Anderson.

  This operative with a personal connection to the president, however, had a special qualification. It can hardly be a coincidence that before joining CREEP, Russell had worked for the security service that protected the Watergate.19

  _____

  On the night of May 22 Richard Nixon was in Moscow, keyed up in anticipation of tough negotiations with the Soviets. Sleep eluded him, and the hours before dawn found him wandering the enclosed courtyards of the Kremlin. During the ten-day trip abroad, and in spite of the momentous foreign policy issues he had to wrestle with, the president was to hold regular meetings on the situation at home. “He never loosened his grip on White House operations,” a senior correspondent reported.

  In Washington that same night six of Howard Hunt’s Cubans were settling into the Manger Hamilton Hotel, a dozen blocks from the Watergate. Four days later, as Nixon and Kissinger struggled through the last phase of a complex arms negotiation, the Cubans moved to rooms at the Watergate Hotel—directly behind the Democratic National Committee’s offices.

  Hunt’s men were now posing as businessmen and using aliases. Across Virginia Avenue, at a Howard Johnson’s, McCord’s man Alfred Baldwin waited with equipment that picked up radio transmissions from bugs. “We’re going to put some units across the street,” McCord had told him, “and you are going to be monitoring.”

  No bugs were planted in the Democrats’ phones that night or the next, for Hunt and his burglars twice failed to get in. On May 28 they finally made a successful entry. Hunt’s Cubans photographed papers on O’Brien’s desk, and McCord, according to his later testimony, placed bugging devices, miniature transmitters, on two telephones, one in the office of Spencer Oliver, head of the association of Democratic state chairmen, the other on the phone of O’Brien’s secretary, on a line she shared with her boss.20

  Five thousand miles away in Moscow, Nixon would later note without a hint of irony, he refrained from his usual daily dictation of his diary “because of the pervasive bugging.” “The Soviets were curiously unsubtle in this regard,” he wrote in his memoirs. “A member of my staff reported having casually told his secretary that he would like an apple, and ten minutes later a maid came in and put a bowl of apples on the table. . . .”

  As Nixon began his homeward journey, via Iran and Poland, Baldwin sat in the Howard Johnson’s listening to the first bugged conversations transmitted from the DNC. The logs of these conversations, which were passed on to Liddy, were deeply disappointing. No transmissions had been picked up from the device McCord said he had placed on O’Brien’s office phone. The conversations intercepted on Oliver’s phone, meanwhile, apparently contained little or nothing of political value.

  The high-risk, expensive venture was so far a virtual failure, a result that was met with irritation. Although smartly typed up on GEMSTONE stationery and presented in envelopes marked “SENSITIVE” and “EX DIS”—for executive distribution only—the executive recipients greeted the edited logs with derision.

  Magruder, backed up by testimony from his assistant, later said he showed the material to John Mitchell. “This stuff,” Mitchell reportedly grunted, “isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”21

  Magruder also asserted that, deeming the logs “too sensitive” for the internal mail, he had Haldeman’s aide Gordon Strachan come over to CREEP’s office to peruse them. Later Liddy faced criticism over their contents. “Strachan called me to the White House,” he recalled, “and told me that the original submissions from the electronic surveillance were unsatisfactory. I assumed he was speaking for Haldeman.”

  For Haldeman to have admitted any knowledge of the bugging would have brought the responsibility for Watergate too close to himself and by implication to the president. “To the best of my knowledge,” Nixon’s chief of staff said on oath before the Senate Watergate Committee, “I did not see any material produced by the bugging. . . .” It was a carefully qualified denial and, when asked in court if he had known of espionage against the Democrats before June 1972, he refused to reply “on advice of counsel.”

  Under cross-examination, though, Haldeman slipped up. Immediately after the Watergate arrests, he testified, he told Strachan to check the file to see “whether any result of bugging the Democratic National Committee had been provided to us.” Unfortunately for Haldeman’s credibility, at that time only the burglars themselves and their controllers had any idea there had been a break-in, or any bugging, that could have produced a “result.”

  Haldeman had lied under oath for Nixon before, during the lawsuit over operations against the Democrats in 1962. He had all the more reason to lie over prior Oval Office knowledge of the Watergate bugging.22

  _____

  The president had returned from his foreign trip four days after the planting of the bugs. He was still fretting about the election, even though new polls showed him now way ahead of McGovern, by 54 percent to 38 percent. At a meeting at Camp
David Haldeman received fresh campaign orders from his boss: “We need savage attack lines. . . . Get McGovern tied as an extremist.” The Nixon tapes show that the president urged Colson at this time to get the Secret Service to spy on McGovern. Confidential information was subsequently picked up by an agent on the senator’s detail and passed to the White House.

  Another idea, Nixon suggested, was to hire a tame reporter that “just covers the son of a bitch like a blanket.” “That business of the McGovern watch,” he insisted, “it just has to be—it has to be, now, around the clock.”

  That conversation took place on June 13. The previous day Liddy had promised CREEP’s Magruder that he was planning to “hit McGovern headquarters” within days. Magruder, for his part, wanted another entry to Watergate, to rifle the files and to get the defective bug fixed or replaced.

  John Mitchell would later deny having known anything about bugging by the organization he headed. Colson’s testimony, however, suggests otherwise. That same week, Colson said, he and Mitchell sat speculating about what strategy would emerge from a meeting of top Democrats at a New York hotel. “Tell me what room they are in,” Mitchell said with a half-smile, “and I will tell you everything that is said in that room.”

  On June 15, at a meeting with Mitchell, Liddy handed over the accumulated logs; some two hundred calls had by then been monitored by the bug that was functioning. He promised new action to deal with the faulty device said to have been planted in O’Brien’s office. “The problem we have,” he told the man running Nixon’s election campaign, “will be corrected this weekend, sir.” Mitchell just nodded.

  But the question remains: Why? Why, especially, was Lawrence O’Brien being targeted?