The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  —Nixon’s friend and colleague Robert Finch, addressing the California Republican League, 1973

  At noon on Friday, June 16, 1972, Nixon sat in the Oval Office waiting to take part in a commemorative ceremony. Though rarely noted in accounts of the day that would lead to his downfall, the occasion evoked all the tensions that had riven the presidency: the Vietnam War, its heroes, its opponents, and those Nixon saw as traitors.

  At Arlington Cemetery that morning politicians, generals, and former colleagues had gathered to bury John Paul Vann, the nearest the United States had to a great charismatic leader in Vietnam. A symbol of the struggle for America to prevail in Southeast Asia and the inspiration for Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, that brilliant study of the conflict, Vann had died in a fiery helicopter crash the previous week. Now, the burial over, his widow and four sons had arrived at the White House. Nixon was about to present them with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the posthumous honor he was awarding Vann.

  The atmosphere was shadowed by ambiguity and bitterness. One of the mourners at the funeral had been Vann’s friend and Nixon’s foe Daniel Ellsberg. Vann had been torn over his friend’s exposure of the Pentagon Papers. On one hand, he had given advice to Nixon aides on the best way to prosecute Ellsberg. On the other, he had promised to testify on his behalf at his trial.

  Jesse, Vann’s twenty-two-year-old son, was a draft resister. At the grave-side in Arlington he had resolved to make a gesture he believed his father would have understood, “the gift of his own honesty.” He had torn his draft card in two and laid one half of it among the flowers on the coffin. The other piece he planned to give to Nixon instead of shaking hands.

  Word of Jesse’s intention spread from his family to the White House staff, and an aide scurried to warn Nixon. When the aide reemerged, he told the young man to abandon his plan or see the ceremony canceled. The young man relented, out of deference to his mother, and the family filed into the Oval Office.

  Nixon did not impress the Vanns. He irritated them when he announced he could not award the dead man the nation’s highest award, the Congressional Medal of Honor, because Vann had no longer been in the army at the time of his death. The excuse was legitimate, but the family thought Nixon’s explanation overly complicated and disingenuous. He smiled too much and failed to look them in the eye.

  This awkward scene ended Nixon’s official schedule for the day. He flew alone to the Bahamas that afternoon, for a weekend in the sun with Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp. There was time to swim and inspect the island turtles before dinner.

  As the president headed south, Howard Hunt’s Cubans had been on their way north. Once in Washington, they checked into the Watergate Hotel and dined sumptuously on lobster. Then, after a briefing session with Hunt and Liddy, they waited for the all-clear to start their second break-in of the Democratic headquarters. It wasn’t until after midnight that the last lone campaign worker was seen to put down the phone, relieve himself in a planter on the terrace, switch out the lights, and leave. Sometime after that the burglars moved in.

  Hunt and Liddy remained in the hotel, watching an ancient film on television. Baldwin, in his room with a view from across the street at the Howard Johnson’s, had instructions to keep an eye on the Watergate. (The other eye apparently was trained on a movie called Attack of the Puppet People.)

  The burglars, along with CREEP security director McCord, went about their felonious tasks inside the DNC for about an hour. They searched through files and broke into Lawrence O’Brien’s office. “I personally checked O’Brien’s desk,” one recalled. “All I could find were bottles of liquor. . . .”

  At 2:10 A.M. plainclothes police officers in cruiser 727 received a radio call from their dispatcher. A guard at the Watergate building was reporting a probable break-in in progress, just weeks after a previous burglary. The police responded promptly, and the burglars were caught in the act, arrested, and taken to headquarters.

  Hunt and Liddy, who had been sitting out the action in the Watergate Hotel, got away that night, as did Baldwin, the lookout in the Howard Johnson’s. So too did Louis Russell, Nixon’s former investigator on the House Un-American Activities Committee, who later admitted privately what he denied to the FBI: that he too had been “watching.” Like the others, he managed to skulk off, never to be fully unmasked.1

  Police Inspector Thomas Herlihy caught the essentials of the story in the six-page report he wrote the following day. Five men had been arrested in the DNC with electronic equipment, Minolta cameras, and dozens of rolls of film. One of them, posing as “Edward Martin,” had been identified as “James McCord, Security Director, Committee to Re-Elect the President.” In the search that followed the arrests, moreover, police had found a check signed by “E. Howard Hunt . . . holder of a White House pass and employed as a Special Consultant to Charles Colson, on the President’s staff.” “It is reported,” wrote Inspector Herlihy, “that Hunt was used as a consultant by the White House on highly confidential matters.”

  The slow collapse of Richard Nixon’s presidency had begun.

  _____

  When and how the president first learned of the arrests is a matter shrouded in contradiction. He would tell the nation he found out from news reports within hours, on Saturday, June 17. In his memoirs, though, he claimed he did not become aware of them until the next day, Sunday, after flying back to the mainland from the Bahamas. He heard the news, he said, over coffee in the kitchen of his house on Key Biscayne while scanning the Miami Herald.

  Nixon’s two companions that weekend later offered their own versions of the discovery, which merely increase suspicion that the truth was concealed. Abplanalp, his host in the Bahamas, supported the Sunday Key Biscayne version, claiming he was with Nixon at Key Biscayne that day when Haldeman phoned with the news. Yet the official record of the president’s movements on Sunday, and the helicopter manifests, indicate that Abplanalp did not fly back to the mainland with Nixon and Rebozo.

  Rebozo in turn maintained that Nixon got the news on Key Biscayne on Saturday—at a time the president was in fact still in the Bahamas. The detail Rebozo added, moreover, suggests the three friends concocted a story and then muddled it. “I was with him when he got word,” Rebozo said. “We were swimming in front of my house. . . . They came out and told him.” That scenario was totally at odds with both of Nixon’s versions.

  How did Nixon react? “Hell, I was with him in the room,” Abplanalp asserted, remembering the call from Haldeman. “I heard him say, ‘They did WHAAT?’ . . . He was so astonished he was practically shouting. He came off the phone shaking his head.” Rebozo, on the other hand, said Nixon just “sat down and laughed about it. He said two or three times, ‘What in God’s name were we doing there?’ ”

  Haldeman, who spent the entire weekend in Florida, in accommodations not far from the president’s, said he heard the news on Saturday. His first reaction, he claimed, was to think: “Good Lord, they’ve caught Charles Colson.” That fear was assuaged, he said, when he spoke with Nixon on Sunday. The president, Haldeman observed, “wasn’t concerned at all by the break-in. In fact, he was amused.”2

  Colson, whom the president called twice on Sunday, painted a different picture. He recalled Nixon’s saying he had reacted in a manner unlike the calm described by Rebozo and Haldeman. “He was so furious,” Colson gathered, “that he had thrown an ashtray across the room.”

  “I had seen Nixon blow up in towering rages,” Haldeman observed when he learned of this episode, “but never throw anything. Why did he telephone Colson so angrily, yet hide that emotion from me and everyone else?”

  All these years later the question hangs there still.

  _____

  Whether he was “amused” or “furious,” Nixon exercised control over the situation from the start. “Track down Magruder and see what he knows,” he had ordered Haldeman when he called on Sunday. Haldeman did so, and immediately conspired with CREEP’s deputy director on how t
o mislead the press with the first official statement on the break-in. “Idea,” read a line in Haldeman’s notes of the conversation, “to get it as confused as possible.”

  The cover-up and the destruction of evidence began at once. Gordon Liddy had been at the shredder within hours of the arrests, while others organized little domestic bonfires.

  Papers McCord kept at the office were removed by his secretary for burning, while others were destroyed by his wife in the living room fireplace. Howard Hunt also burned documents at home. John Dean and a colleague, wearing surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, picked over the contents of his White House safe. Potentially incriminating papers they found, including material on Ellsberg and Edward Kennedy, would eventually be burned by Nixon’s compliant acting FBI director, Pat Gray.

  “Maybe you ought to have a little fire at your home,” Magruder was to quote John Mitchell as suggesting, and his GEMSTONE material duly went up in flames. Mitchell himself would destroy his campaign correspondence with Nixon and Haldeman.

  Having flown back to Washington with Nixon, Haldeman called a Tuesday morning meeting with Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Richard Kleindienst (Mitchell’s successor as attorney general), and John Dean. They discussed how to handle Watergate, and afterward Haldeman saw his aide Gordon Strachan. When the aide, “scared to death,” showed his boss the compromising political action memorandum of early April memorializing approval of Liddy’s plan, Haldeman ordered: “Make sure our files are clean.”* Strachan headed for the shredder.3

  While his closest colleagues debated damage control that morning, Nixon sat alone for more than hour, neither making nor receiving calls. Then he met with Ehrlichman. Watergate was discussed, although no tape of the conversation has ever been produced. The tape of the president’s next meeting that morning, with Haldeman, became known around the world not for what it contained but for what was obliterated.

  Visitors to the National Archives today may don a pair of headphones and listen solemnly to what remains of the part of that morning’s conversation that, according to Haldeman’s skeletal notes, dealt with Watergate. They will hear no words, however, but only more than a quarter of an hour of audio buzz. This is the infamous eighteen-and-one-half minute gap.

  “It looks a very serious thing, Your Honor,” Nixon’s principal Watergate lawyer would admit to Judge Sirica during the legal fight for the tapes. “. . . It doesn’t appear from what we know at this point that it could have been accidental.” The president had assigned his secretary Rose Woods to transcribe the tape in late September 1973 and it was she who was ultimately blamed for its destruction. There ensued the ludicrous reenaction scene for prosecutors in which—equipped with tape recorder, earphones, and foot pedal—Woods tried to convince the court she could have erased part of the recording by accident, while distracted by the telephone.

  Experts, approved by the White House as well as the prosecutors, would later conclude that the tape’s long stretch of buzzing, clicks, and pops reflected a series of overlapping erasures. Someone had manually set the machine to erase at least five times, suggesting the tape was intentionally wiped.4 Who was that someone? Woods herself insisted that, at worst, she was responsible for the loss of only five minutes of dialogue.

  When Woods had rushed into the Oval Office to explain that she had erased a portion of the June 20 recording, she testified the president had merely said casually, “Don’t worry about it.” At some point in the court furor, it seems, she began to feel she was being made the scapegoat. On the phone to an old friend, former press secretary James Bassett, that most loyal of Nixon retainers, declared she was “being framed.”

  Nixon did personally review critical tapes during the Watergate crisis, and Woods said in testimony that at Camp David he had “pushed the buttons on her recorder back and forth.” Was he, then, responsible for having created the eighteen-and-one-half-minute gap? Several people believed so.

  “Most likely it was the president,” the prosecuting attorney who interrogated Woods in court, Jill Wine-Banks, said in 1999. Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski offered a less qualified judgment. “Only the President,” he noted, “had access to both the tape and the machine [at the likely time of the erasure] . . . what was on the tape, and what portion might be incriminating. . . .”5

  Having struggled to recall precisely what was said during the erased phase of the conversation, Haldeman later suggested Nixon had worried aloud about what might come out about Charles Colson. “I know one thing,” Haldeman’s reconstruction had Nixon asserting, “we can’t stand an FBI interrogation of Colson. . . . Colson can talk about the President, if he cracks.”

  As for his other conversations with Haldeman and Colson that first Tuesday, Nixon was to refuse to release the relevant tapes. If we examine the two that have since become available, it is obvious why.

  Nixon met with Colson for more than an hour after lunch that day and—although the sound quality is poor—the audible portion of the recording is a curious mix of concern about Watergate, mutual back scratching, and insistence that political spying is routine. “A lot of people think you oughta wiretap . . .” said Nixon, and most people “knew why the hell we’re doing it, and they probably figure they’re doing it to us, which they are.”6

  If this discussion did not include an admission of involvement in Watergate, it involved none of the flat denials that Nixon was to spout in public and private for the rest of his life. After Colson departed, Nixon had another meeting with Haldeman, at which they spoke of the Democrats’ reaction to the arrests: O’Brien had promptly brought a suit for wiretapping and invasion of privacy. The available transcript contains two deletions in quick succession for privacy reasons, one of them after a Nixon reference to the “bizarre” aspects of the story. Was this an allusion to the sex activity the CREEP bugging had picked up?

  At another point Haldeman remarked that “this financial thing” may have justified the bugging of the DNC. CREEP’s spies, he said, “thought they had something going on that.” Was the “financial thing” a reference to O’Brien and Howard Hughes’s money? Or perhaps to illicit funding from the Greek colonels? Nixon’s laconic response—“Yeah, I suppose”—certainly suggests that he knew exactly what his aide was talking about.

  By now the game plan was clear. The president’s “public line,” he told Haldeman, was going to be that the DNC was not worth the effort of bugging. Also, he had told Colson, “We are just going to leave this where it is, with the Cubans.” The Cubans had to plead guilty, he and Haldeman agreed, explaining that their espionage had been to expose “crazy” McGovern’s “sellout to the Communists.” It was, Nixon thought, “a very nice touch.”

  Early that evening Nixon spoke on the telephone with John Mitchell, the first-known contact between the two since the Watergate arrests. Nixon’s lawyer would later explain that there had been no record made of the conversation because the call had been placed on a line from the president’s private quarters, one that was not hooked into the recording system. Later still, it emerged that Nixon had made a note of the conversation on the Dictabelt machine on which he recorded his daily diary. While the transcript of this recording includes nothing of import, it is significant for another reason: There is a forty-two-second break in the dictation, followed by an unintelligible remark: “[T]he Dictabelt,” a Watergate Special Prosecution Force document states, “appears to have been tampered with.”7

  We have no tapes of four further calls Nixon received that evening from Haldeman and Colson, even though three of them were made from an office where recording was automatic.

  During one of the evening calls, according to Haldeman, the president told him Watergate might now be “under control” because of the Cuban involvement. “A lot of people think the break-in was done by anti-Castro Cubans. . . . I’m going to talk to Bebe and have him round up some anti-Castro Cubans. . . . Those people who got caught are going to need money. . . . I’m going to have Bebe start a fund for them in Miami.
Call it an anti-Castro Fund, and publicize the hell out of the Cuban angle. That way we kill two birds with one stone. Get money to the boys to help them, and maybe pick up some points against McGovern on the Cuban angle.”

  Bebe Rebozo’s name kept being mentioned on the tapes over the next few days, in a way that suggests Nixon was nervous about his friend’s vulnerability. At one point, while discussing the fact that Howard Hunt’s name had turned up in two of the burglars’ contact books, he suddenly asked an odd question:

  PRESIDENT NIXON: Is Rebozo’s name in anyone’s address book?

  HALDEMAN: No . . . He told me he doesn’t know any of these guys.

  PRESIDENT NIXON: He doesn’t know them?

  Here the released tape features another “privacy” deletion. Nixon was evidently concerned, and with reason: We now know that there was a degree of connection between two of the burglars, Bernard Barker and Rolando Martinez, and Rebozo. Martinez was vice president of a real estate firm with which Rebozo had extensive dealings, and one of the firm’s directors was on the board of Rebozo’s bank. The firm had also brokered the purchase of Nixon’s house on Key Biscayne. Both Martinez and Barker, moreover, were leading lights in a second real estate company, Ameritas Inc., which had been used by the burglars as cover when they came to Washington to break into the Watergate.

  On Thursday, June 22, in his first press conference since the arrests, Nixon made his first misleading public statement on Watergate. The White House, he insisted, “has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident.” He would not comment further, he said in tones of respect for due process, because the police and the FBI were investigating the matter. Yet, behind the scenes, he and his closest aides had already been puzzling how to get the FBI “turned off.”

  Nixon’s taped comments over the months about covering up and lying are confused and confusing. “You can’t cover this thing up, Bob,” he would tell Haldeman two weeks after the arrests. “The worst thing a guy can do, the worst thing,” he would remark two weeks after that, “two things and each is bad. One is to lie and the other one is to cover up. . . . If you cover up, you’re going to get caught. . . . And if you lie you’re going to be guilty of perjury . . . basically, that was the whole store of the Hiss case.”