“The cover-up is what hurts you, not the issue,” he would assert several weeks later in a conversation with Colson. “It’s the cover-up that hurts.” As the crisis deepened, he would comment, again to Colson: “A cover-up is, is the main ingredient.” When Colson agreed, he added: “My losses are to be cut. . . . The President’s losses got to be cut on the cover-up deal.”
Nixon was well aware that involvement in a cover-up could bring him down. Yet it is utterly clear, with the advantage of access to the tapes released since his death, that he connived in such a deception from the very beginning. He is implicated in page after page of the transcripts, sometimes directly and sometimes by nuance. Even without the new tapes, however, that conclusion is unavoidable from the recording of a meeting with Haldeman just over a week after the Watergate arrests.
On that day, Friday, June 23, Haldeman learned the FBI was only a short step away from discovering that CREEP was the source of the cash that had been found on the burglars and in their hotel rooms. It was now indeed urgent to turn off the FBI investigation.
In his discussion with Nixon that morning, Haldeman offered a solution. Because it had established that some of the money involved had been laundered through a Mexican bank, the FBI was wondering if it had stumbled across a CIA covert operation. The bureau could almost certainly be persuaded to stop pursuing the Mexico angle, or at least change course, if the CIA so requested. He and Ehrlichman, Haldeman suggested, could call in CIA Director Richard Helms and Deputy Director Vernon Walters, an old Nixon associate, and get them to make the request.
“All right, fine,” Nixon responded to this proposal to obstruct the course of justice. He again said, “Right, fine,” and then yet again, “All right, fine.” Then: “You call them in. Good. Good deal. Play it tough. . . .” Then, in two other conversations that day, he proceeded to offer his own ideas on the best way to pressure the CIA.
It was at this juncture, as reported earlier, that the president urged his aides to warn the CIA chiefs that further inquiry would expose their own former agent Howard Hunt. It would also likely “blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA and for the country.”8 Any exposure of early anti-Castro operations, of course, would also likely have been unfortunate for Nixon himself, and a study of that day’s taped conversations may reflect that. One tape, examined repeatedly on the author’s behalf, appears to contain at least six unexplained erasures.9
Helms and Walters were summoned that afternoon, and for the time being the ploy worked. The agency did intervene with the FBI, and key interviews were stalled.10 “No problem,” Haldeman was soon reporting to Nixon. The president and his men had bought a delay, but at immeasurable cost.
“The thing that bothers me about this thing,” Haldeman observed days later, “is that it’s a time bomb.” It was indeed, and one of Nixon’s own making in more than one respect. On his first day in the office after the arrests at the Watergate, the president had worried briefly about the hidden microphones and the recorders whirring away in a nearby closet. The recording system, he had told Haldeman thoughtfully, “complicates things all over.” Haldeman assured Nixon the tapes were “locked up . . . super-secure—there are only three people that know.” The moment of disquiet ended, and the talk moved on to other things.
Twenty-five months were to pass before Nixon would confront the cost of having said, “That’s fine” to Bob Haldeman. With the existence of the recording system exposed and with the Supreme Court ordering him to surrender key tapes, those two words alone would become the bullet in the “smoking gun.” They were proof that the president was guilty of criminal obstruction, evidentially lethal.
The months ahead would be a time of not only political crisis, but also personal collapse.
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The president was to recall that when the news of the arrests reached him in Florida, he had been “trying to get a few days’ rest” after his visit to Moscow. He had returned from Russia, though, more than two weeks earlier and for nearly a week of that time he had been at Key Biscayne or Camp David. In July, when Nixon spent three weeks at San Clemente, aides blamed his fatigue on the China trip of four months earlier.
“According to associates who see him in his private moments,” a senior correspondent reported carefully, Nixon had for some time shown increasing signs of needing rest. The recollections of two Secret Service agents suggest this was an understatement. One evening either just before or after the fateful break-in, in a rerun of his bizarre 1970 nocturnal adventure, the president suddenly decided he wanted to visit the Capitol.
The senior man on duty, Agent Dennis McCarthy, recalled how Nixon emerged through the White House’s diplomatic entrance, then “stood staring out toward the Washington Monument. Finally, I opened the door and said, ‘We’re ready anytime you are, sir’ . . . he seemed to have forgotten why he was waiting. . . .” Nixon was waiting, as it turned out, for his dog, an Irish setter named King Timahoe. The dog was loaded into the limousine alongside him, and off they headed to Capitol Hill.
As in 1970, both houses of Congress were locked and barred, and the Secret Service had to get a policeman to open the building. Nixon then walked in, past the marble statues of statesmen long gone, through the dimly lit hallways, to the office he had used when vice president. No one could find a key so, silent and apparently lost in thought, he returned to the White House.
A former officer with the uniformed branch of the Secret Service, the Executive Protection Service, also observed odd behavior in that period. “I used to see the president outside the Oval Office or outside the Executive Office Building,” said Lou Campbell,” and he would just sit there and stare off into space, for thirty to forty-five minutes at a time. You could cut the tension with a knife.”
Often genial with those who guarded him, Nixon could also be irrationally unpleasant. “Right after Watergate,” Campbell recalled, “he was coming from the Oval Office to the steps to go to the EOB, and I was standing there. He walked by, and looked right at me, and I said, ‘Good evening, Mr. President.’ If looks could kill, I’d have been dead. There was such arrogance on his face, such disdain. And the next morning a memo arrived for all Secret Service personnel, saying, ‘You will no longer address the president by anything like “Good morning” or “Good evening.” Keep contact to a minimum.’ ”
Whatever his emotional state or his other preoccupations, Nixon had his hand firmly on the helm of the election campaign. Nothing was to stand in the way of an overwhelming victory, and not even the Watergate arrests had given him pause so far as that goal was concerned.
Although it is hard to conceive of now, for months Watergate made barely a mark on the public consciousness. Gallup estimated as late as the fall that only half the electorate had heard of the break-in. Two young Washington Post reporters named Woodward and Bernstein, however, were already boring toward the truth. So too were the Los Angeles Times’ Jack Nelson and the New York Times’s Seymour Hersh—never to get sufficient recognition for their Watergate work. Most of the media, however, long remained supine.
“In terms of the reaction of people,” Nixon had said within days of the arrests, “I think the country doesn’t give much of a shit . . . most people around the country think that this is routine, that everybody’s trying to bug everybody else . . . it is not going to get people that excited . . . because they don’t give a shit about repression and bugging and all the rest.”
To “the average guy,” he would still be insisting months afterward, “whether or not the Republicans fuck the Democrats doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.” Even a year later, with his presidency beginning to founder, the president would still be calling Watergate “chicken shit.”
As few are aware, the criminal plotting continued. Just two weeks after the arrests, again in the Oval Office with the tapes running, Nixon and Colson twice discussed the notion of faking a break-in at his own party headquarters to make people think the Democrats wer
e as guilty as the Republicans of this sort of activity. “There should be a rifling . . . missing files,” Nixon said, “something where it’s really torn up, where pictures could be taken.”11
No such phony break-in ever took place, but a similar one may have done. Three months later, in an apparent break-in at the office of the president’s California physician, Dr. John Lungren, cash was ignored, but a file containing Nixon’s patient records left disordered on the floor. Haldeman and an aide then called the FBI at the highest level fifteen times, urging that the bureau issue a press release on the case.
Assistant Director Mark Felt turned down the request, saying it was a matter for the local police. Such was the persistence of Nixon’s men, though, that Felt came to suspect someone at the White House, fearing news of the break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office would surface sooner or later, “wanted to be able to show that President Nixon had also been a victim of such tactics.”12
At a more serious level, covert operations against the Democrats and Larry O’Brien continued unabated even after the Watergate arrests. CREEP’s Jeb Magruder recalled Haldeman asking him to “get someone into McGovern’s headquarters in July, so that we could get his schedule further in advance than the press release was telling. . . . Even with the problems of the break-in, they were still talking in those terms.”
According to the state’s attorney for the Miami area, Richard Gerstein, the abuse went much further than simply tracking down schedules. His investigators concluded that the Fontainbleau Hotel, headquarters for the Democratic convention, was bugged from a listening post established in a nearby apartment building. The groundwork for the operation had been laid by Watergate burglar Howard Hunt before his arrest and carried out nonetheless.
Gerstein and his staff had been probing local Watergate angles from the start because most of the burglars were Miami-based. Their own office had been broken into within weeks.
There had also been a break-in at the Texas home of Lawrence O’Brien’s close colleague Robert Strauss. The house had been ransacked, but jewelry worth thousands of dollars left untouched.13
“Go gung-ho on O’B—& the others,” read a Haldeman note of an instruction from Nixon in the late summer of 1972. “What, if anything, is being done on the Democratic candidate?” Nixon said into the Oval Office mikes around the same time. “I mean for example on his income [tax], on O’Brien. Have we got anything further on that, Bob? . . .” As for McGovern, he hoped the candidate “might have feet of clay . . . kick him again . . . keep whacking, whacking, whacking . . . on O’Brien . . . if you could dirty up O’Brien.”
“Get everything you possibly can,” Nixon demanded in the early fall. “Any little crumb or lead involving anyone. I don’t care. O’Brien, another senator. Anything that involves a Democrat . . . Goddamn it.” His aides tried, hard, unlawfully bullying the IRS to get compromising financial information on O’Brien, by then heading the Democratic campaign. “I wanted them to turn up something and send him to jail before the election,” Ehrlichman would admit later. Nothing materialized; O’Brien’s records were in order.
After the election Nixon would direct his public relations staff to prepare propaganda pointing out that he had run “one of the cleanest campaigns in history.”
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In the end, all the undercover operations would prove to have been unnecessary. By mid-July there was virtually no question who was going to be president. The Democratic convention had been a disastrous, chaotic affair guaranteed to alienate vast numbers of party members. The television coverage had shown viewers an explosion of disaffected youth and wild-looking advocates of every fashionable demand for freedom: “women’s lib,” abortion rights, rights for homosexuals, black militancy, freedom to smoke marijuana. The picture the public saw was of a party and a culture out of control.
McGovern’s chances plummeted even further after the convention when it emerged that his running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, had been hospitalized three times for psychiatric care that had included electroshock treatments for depression. McGovern eventually dropped Eagleton but only after damaging prevarication. Nixon’s response, by his account, was compassionate and he would later quote in his memoirs a long handwritten letter of sympathy that he had sent to the humiliated senator’s son. The truth may have been shabbier.
“Supposing,” McGovern aide Frank Manckiewicz asked Eagleton early in the crisis, “Chuck Colson has the [psychiatric] records before him, and he’s going in to tell the President. . . .” That dire possibility was then merely an imagined horror, but it may have been prescient. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward was told by “Deep Throat,” his mysterious inside source, that the exposure of Eagleton involved Nixon’s undercover operatives.14
CREEP had had a plant in the McGovern camp at the Democratic convention, a private detective who later admitted having overheard a discussion about Eagleton’s personal history. There was a report too, again in the Washington Post, that not long before the senator’s medical records were leaked to the press, they were in John Ehrlichman’s possession.
“Bob Haldeman once intimated to me,” Nixon’s aide Alexander Butterfield revealed recently, “that they had stuff on Eagleton: that electroshock therapy. They were just waiting to spring it, waiting for the right time. They knew it would be explosive.”
As for Nixon’s professed sympathy, a recently released tape indicates that just as the news was breaking publicly, he discussed with Haldeman how best to exploit the Eagleton revelations. It would be a fine idea to plant hecklers at Eagleton meetings, the pair agreed, to badger him with accusations of dishonesty.
The Republican convention, in mid-August, presented an image the very opposite of that of the Democratic shambles. “Everything was scheduled and organized,” observed journalist and Republican aide James Cannon, “not for the delegates in the hall but for middle America, to convey a sense of order at home and the promise of peace in the world. The Republicans arrived united in the cause of four more years for President Nixon.”
Theirs was a convention that followed a script written and produced by Bob Haldeman, staffed by bland men in blue suits and ties carrying walkie-talkies. The young people in attendance, a different species entirely from those who had thronged to the Democrats’ gathering, were praised by Ehrlichman as individuals who had “come here spontaneously, sometimes at great hardship, to support Nixon.” The truth was that a party committee had subsidized their attendance, and a cheerleader orchestrated their chants.
A television audience of some sixty million Americans, it was calculated, was treated to packaged movies tracing the high points of Nixon’s presidency, from grandeur in the White House to the Beijing and Moscow summit meetings. At the crowning moment the president himself appeared in triumph on a podium designed by the art director of the program The Dating Game, its floor constructed to rise or fall at the flick of a switch, to ensure that no other speaker could appear taller than Nixon.
“I ask everyone listening to me tonight,” he said in his acceptance speech, the fifth in two decades, “Democrats, Republicans and independents—to join our majority. . . .” It was already becoming clear that that majority would be massive. A Gallup poll in the wake of the convention gave Nixon 64 percent to McGovern’s 30 percent.
The election, when it came, was the predicted landslide. Of people who identified themselves as Democrats, more than a third voted for Nixon, a defection without precedent in American political history. With George Wallace out of the race, moreover, Nixon even carried the South. In the final tally he won more than 60 percent of the national vote, only marginally less than Lyndon Johnson’s massive majority of eight years earlier.
The victory was not quite as impressive as it first seemed, however, for almost half the electorate had chosen not to vote at all. “Americans, numbed by words, headlines and TV shows, cross-analyzed by canvassers, telephone banks and statisticians,” noted Theodore White, “simply drew in on themselves.” A
lso, the people returned a Congress in which the Republicans remained a minority, a factor that was to prove pivotal for Nixon in the ordeal that was coming.
For a man who now had the “coronation” he had so long desired, Nixon seemed joyless on the night of his election. He appeared “preoccupied, somber instead of elated, and somewhat sad” to a reporter who encountered him hours later, walking alone in the White House precincts. The cap on one of the president’s front teeth had snapped off, and some attributed his melancholy to that.
Nixon spent most of the evening in the Lincoln Sitting Room, listening to Victory at Sea again and some light classical music. Later, at 2:00 A.M., he was ensconced in his room in the Executive Office Building with Haldeman and Charles Colson. Nixon ordered a scotch and soda, downed most of it in one swallow, and soon called for another. Haldeman also seemed surly, angry almost. “The picture was out of focus,” thought Colson. “If this was victory, what might these three men have looked like in defeat?”
By the next day the sourness had spread. “The good feeling was shattered within twelve hours,” Henry Kissinger recalled. “The White House staff had been asked to assemble at 11:00 A.M. in the Roosevelt Room. At the dot, Nixon strode in. He was grim and remote as if the more fateful period of his life lay ahead. Nothing in his demeanor betrayed that he was meeting associates from perilous and trying times; he acted as though they were from a past now irrevocably finished.”
The Arrogance of Power Page 66