The Last of the President's Men

by Bob Woodward

  “The microphones are right at the top of the desk?” Butterfield asked in mild astonishment. They were embedded and concealed with a thin coat of varnish? Five?

  “That’s right,” Wong said, to ensure full coverage.

  Pretty aggressive on the president’s desk, thought Butterfield, even cheeky without asking for permission. Wong guided Butterfield over to the mantelpiece, where, he said, the microphones were in the lights resting on the mantel. This is where the president often took his guests, including heads of state. “This is all voice-activated,” Wong added, referring to all the desk and lamp microphones.

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  Any speech or noise would trigger the tape recorder and capture it automatically when the Secret Service locator system showed the president was in the Oval Office. Wong then took Butterfield down to the basement level of the West Wing and showed him where the lines came into Sony 800B tape recorders. His technicians had broken through a brick wall at the end of a small locker room used by Secret Service agents. They had excavated space to house the tape recorders and covered the opening with a solid metal door.

  How to explain all this to Nixon? Butterfield wondered. He believed that Nixon would be embarrassed and wouldn’t want to talk about it. “If I said, ‘The system’s in, do you want me to brief you on it?’ he would definitely say no.”

  “I think when the president comes in,” he told Haldeman, “he ought to know a little bit about this system, so I’m going to tell him. . . . I’m going to brief him on the system.”

  “Yeah, good idea,” Haldeman said.

  “You want to be in on it?”

  “No,” Haldeman said, “I don’t want to do that.” As if distancing himself, he added, “I don’t need to know that.”

  Butterfield knew that Haldeman avoided lots of things like this—things done, decided, finished and somewhat out of the mainstream.

  One Watergate book on Nixon’s tapes has a transcript of Butterfield briefing the president on the system. The tape is virtually inaudible, and Butterfield says he is convinced the transcript is inaccurate.

  He said that he briefed Nixon at the end of the day on February 16, 1971, and that Nixon had very few questions.

  He was uneasy and unusually quiet.

  According to Butterfield, Haldeman and he were in the Oval Office with Nixon, who had his feet up on his desk.

  “On this tapes thing,” Nixon asked, addressing Haldeman, “who knows about that incidentally, Bob?”

  “Just you, Alex and I and Higby and that’s it.”

  “Rose doesn’t know about it?” the president asked.

  “No,” Haldeman replied, and Nixon seemed to approve.

  “Don’t want Henry to know about it,” the president said.

  Haldeman indicated agreement.

  “Ehrlichman?”

  “No,” Haldeman said, “absolutely not.”

  “This has got to be a well-kept secret,” Nixon insisted. “And how many Secret Service people know?”

  “Al Wong knows,” Butterfield repeated, “and his technicians.” Butterfield thought there were three technicians, but there had been four.

  “Goddamn it,” Nixon said, “this cannot get out. . . . Mum’s the word,” Nixon told them. According to an audible portion of the tape that day, this transpired. “I will not be transcribed.”

  “Correct,” Butterfield replied. No one would listen and make transcripts.

  “This is totally for, basically, to be put in the file. In my file. I won’t want it in your file,” he added indicating Butterfield, “or Bob’s or anybody else’s. MY FILE.”

  “Right,” Haldeman said.

  The purpose, Nixon said, is if they want to put out something positive or to correct the record.

  Haldeman was already developing a cover story. “Anytime that anything gets used from it, it’s on the basis of ‘your notes’ or ‘the president’s notes’—”

  “That’s right,” Nixon said. “For example, you’ve got nothing to use from this today. Just forget it. File it. Everything today will be filed.”

  “I think it’s gonna be a very fine system,” Butterfield said.

  • • •

  Nixon later wrote in his memoir that he had the taping system installed because he wanted his administration to be “the best chronicled in history.” Having an aide sit in on meetings, take notes and prepare a memo was not working, he said. The quality of the prose and perception varied radically.

  Butterfield recalled that several times Nixon had lamented the absence of a perfect record of what had happened in the Oval Office. After the 1970, two-week postal strike was settled, Nixon said, “God damn it, we did pretty well. We brought everyone together. And we met there in the Oval Office and it took us a couple of weeks, but by golly, we settled the strike. I wish we had recorded exactly what went on.”

  Nixon had authorized a major military operation to cut the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. It was a major supply route to the Vietcong. In Nixon’s assessment, the operation turned out to be another “military success but a psychological defeat.” He needed a dispassionate, factual record of his decision making.

  Tapes could be used for his memoir or any other books he might author, he wrote. “Such an objective record might also be useful to the extent that any President feels vulnerable to revisionist histories—whether from within or without his administration—and particularly so when the issues are as controversial and the personalities as volatile as they were in my first term.” He was obviously suspicious.

  “Although I was not comfortable with the idea of taping people without their knowledge, I was at least confident that the secrecy of the system would protect their privacy,” he wrote in his memoir.

  Taping selected conversations or phone calls, as Kennedy and Johnson had done, would deprive Nixon of the total objective record, injecting “an obviously self-serving bias,” he wrote.

  “I did not want to have to calculate whom or what or when I would tape.” So his system was voice-activated.

  “Initially, I was conscious of the taping, but before long I accepted it as part of the surroundings.”

  “The interesting thing to me,” Butterfield recalled, “was, about the tapes, he never seemed to be the least bit intimidated by their presence.” The president seemed oblivious. No one would ever find out about them, and certainly no one would get their hands on them. “The White House is so powerful in many ways,” Butterfield continued. “You’ve got too many things you can do. You don’t think that the tapes are going to be in jeopardy. If there is a conflict about them, the White House will win.

  “You get to feel,” Butterfield recalled, “after a while, I think, that being president, you’re going to win most of the battles just because of the power.”

  If Nixon thought of the taping as part of the surroundings and tuned out, I asked Butterfield, what about you? What was your level of awareness? Did you ever become numb or unmindful?

  “No,” Butterfield said. “No, I never did. No, I’m thinking of them all the time.”

  13

  * * *

  The saga of how Judge Warren E. Burger of the Court of Appeals in D.C. had campaigned for appointment to the Supreme Court fascinated Butterfield. The Burger approach included letters, notes, shared articles and at least one visit to Nixon at the White House.

  Butterfield saved copies of the back-and-forth. It was part of his political education. One letter from Judge Burger shows the future chief justice as a clever and subtle player. He found the buttons on Nixon’s console.

  In his memoir, Nixon found it worth revealing how his connection with Burger went back to 1952, a crucial and perilous point in Nixon’s career. During that year just before Nixon was to give his famous “Checkers” speech invoking the family dog and Pat’s cloth coat to stay on the ticket as Ike’s vice presidential running mate, Burger, then the Minnesota Republican leader, and his wife, Vera, sent Nixon a word of encourage
ment. According to Nixon’s memoir they said, “Your Minnesota friends have complete confidence in your personal and political integrity. We are looking forward to your speech tonight. Please call if there is anything we can do.”

  In May 1969, the first months of Nixon’s presidency, Washington exploded with the revelation by Life magazine that Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas was to receive $20,000 a year from a foundation funded by millionaire industrialist Louis Wolfson. Wolfson had apparently bragged that his friend Fortas would help him with an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Initially, Nixon remained publicly silent.

  With Fortas under fire, Burger sent a personal letter to Nixon along with a brief handwritten note to Ehrlichman asking him to give the letter to Nixon. “I am willing to risk annoying him for what I consider is important to the country—and to him.”

  “Dear Mr. President,” Burger began in the letter dated May 8, 1969, “I had thought to write you Tuesday on what seemed to me an unwise course followed by some in contrast with the carefully correct course you followed in the Fortas matter. . . .

  “The utterances from members of the Congress are, in my view, very damaging to the country, the courts generally and potentially to you.

  “This week is a time for Republican leaders to ‘view with dismay’ and to ‘be saddened’ and ‘disturbed’ but largely silent. They should not ‘attack.’ First there is the matter of basic fairness. Second there are political consequences which will have an impact on the courts and the Supreme Court in particular and especially on the first nomination you send to the Senate.

  “As to basic fairness: if the facts condemn the conduct of the Supreme Court Justice then let the facts do it in their own good time. . . .

  “As to political consequences,” he said, the Fortas supporters “are bound to be bitter over the harsh attacks. . . . As a consequence when your first nomination goes to the Senate, this suppressed rage will likely assert itself and your nominee may become their ‘whipping boy.’ That in turn will exacerbate the distressing situation in which the Court now finds itself; it will be very damaging to the country and it may be bad for your objective of restoring the Court to its former high standing.”

  Six days later, May 14, 1969, Fortas resigned from the Supreme Court. Since Chief Justice Earl Warren had already told Nixon he would resign the next month as chief, Nixon had two nominations. He hoped to change the direction of the court.

  A week later, May 21, Nixon announced he was nominating Burger to the Supreme Court—but not to the Fortas vacancy. Instead he was going all the way and nominating Burger to be the new chief justice. The nomination to the chief justiceship was a surprise.

  After hearings lasting less than two hours without a word of criticism, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously recommended Burger’s confirmation to the Senate. Six days later the Senate did so by a vote of 74–3. The time from Nixon’s announcement to confirmation was only 18 days.

  It was almost as if Burger had appointed himself, Butterfield thought. The new Chief Justice Burger followed up with a series of fawning communications to Nixon.

  Nixon appeared before the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner on May 8, 1971. Many of the reporters received awards for minor exposés of the Nixon administration. There was lots of drinking, laughter and smirking. “I’m not a bit thin-skinned,” Nixon wrote in a memo to Haldeman the next morning, “but I do have the responsibility and everybody on my staff has the responsibility to protect the office of the Presidency from such insulting incidents.”

  On Monday Burger wrote the president. “Your fortitude and forbearance in the face of gross rudeness by your hosts will always have my unbounded admiration. . . . To respond as you did with dignity and charity is a mark of your qualities and I suspect it was not lost on all those present.

  “It is no comfort but it is perhaps instructive to remember how the press treated your predecessors, and particularly Washington and Lincoln. . . .

  “I repeat that Saturday night marked a new measure of your capacities that will in time be recognized, and enlarged my respect and esteem.”

  On August 5, 1972, Burger wrote a two-page CONFIDENTIAL letter to Haldeman about his inability to get the White House to arrange military aircraft for his travel. Burger said that in 1969 the president himself had advised him on security and “to especially avoid use of commercial airlines” because of possible skyjackings.

  It had been suggested, Burger wrote Haldeman, that he get the Justice Department to pay for the use of military aircraft. He was unwilling to do this. “I cannot be placed in that position with the principal litigants in the Federal courts. Neither am I willing to be placed in the position of a supplicant asking for a ‘favor’ since it is distinctly not my idea that I have government transportation.” So he could find no alternative than to cease asking for government air transportation. “I want it to be clear that I am not ignoring the strong request of the President.”

  Burger’s request was accommodated.

  • • •

  Butterfield closely monitored the rise of his old friend Colonel Haig. As Kissinger’s deputy, Haig had been promoted to brigadier general in the fall of 1969. When Nixon wandered the West Wing after hours as he often did, nearly all offices were vacant. The staff had gone home—that is everyone except Haig, who was almost always there. Nixon frequently dropped in and found that Haig translated his slightest wish into action. Haig had quickly become a part of the president’s inner circle. In a formal endorsement of an officer efficiency report in 1970 Nixon said that Haig should “be rapidly moved to the highest ranks of the Armed Forces.” The next year Henry Kissinger said in his endorsement that Haig “is the most outstanding flag officer in the Armed Forces.”

  It is unusual for the national security adviser or the commander-in-chief to become so directly involved in an officer’s formal evaluations.

  On January 18, 1971, Nixon ordered the U.S. military to support an incursion by the South Vietnamese army into Laos. By February it was clearly a disaster. Haig sets the scene in his second memoir, Inner Circles. Over the years it became clear that he often exaggerated and provided dramatically self-serving accounts. But it is clear that Nixon was singularly impressed with Haig.

  Haig wrote: “The president was in a cold rage. Without preamble he told me that he was relieving General [Creighton] Abrams of command in Vietnam immediately.” Then the president told him: “Go home and pack a bag. Then get on the first available plane and fly to Saigon. You’re taking command.”

  “Good God, Mr. President, you can’t do that!”

  “Why not? Lincoln fired McClellan for sitting on his ass in 1862. That’s what I’m doing now. Abrams is the problem, and in situations like this one it’s the president’s job to remove the problem—the sooner the better.”

  Even the ambitious Haig, who had served in combat in Vietnam, saw the absurdity of a one-star brigadier general taking command in the major war theater from a four-star general who at the time was the most popular man in the Army, a hero of three wars. As Haig wrote, “I will not pretend that I was not tempted. I had no doubt that I could do the job; I knew the ground, I knew the enemy, and I knew what the President wanted. It is a very unimaginative soldier who has not dreamed of having supreme command thrust upon him in the hour of crisis.”

  Haig says he suggested that Nixon wait until the next day before making a final decision. In a calmer mood, Nixon ordered Haig to go to Vietnam not as a new commander but to make an in-depth assessment of conditions on the ground.

  On March 1, 1972, Haig was promoted to major general, two-star rank. The next month Haldeman asked him to make an assessment and give recommendations for Nixon’s campaign for a second term. This was pure politics and dangerous territory for an active duty military officer, clearly improper for an active duty two-star general working in the White House. Pentagon directives prohibit such participation in partisan politics by all military personnel. A m
ore prudent officer might have found a way to sidestep the request. Haig took the view that he should obey the orders of the commander-in-chief. Period. Haldeman was the unassailable pipeline from the president.

  Haig produced a four-page EYES ONLY memo to Haldeman that sounded unabashedly like a political consultant, passionate about his candidate.

  “Many of our political strategists are taking for granted that McGovern will emerge as the Democratic candidate,” Haig wrote. “This was evident in the strategy discussions held in last week’s Cabinet meeting.” But Haig offered a different prognosis about the upcoming Democratic convention. “We must be prepared for an emotional convention consensus in favor of Teddy Kennedy. It is difficult to conceive of the old Democratic Party machinery, which relies essentially on a power base of Labor, Jewish money and nouveau riche resources, merging to support a candidate of McGovern’s ilk since each of these sources of power could be seriously threatened by his stated policies.”

  Nixon’s obsessions, Haig knew, included “Teddy Kennedy” and “Jewish money.”

  “Obviously McGovern is our most vulnerable opponent,” he wrote. “The one theme which I believe is best stressed between now and the Democratic Convention is McGovern’s irresponsible posture on the war in Vietnam in which we emphasize the fact that he is pushing a strategy which can only encourage the enemy not to negotiate and which in many respects is less stringent on Hanoi than even Moscow and Peking contemplate.”

  Haig also had views on domestic policy. “Concurrently, we should prepare, but not use, a host of themes which attack McGovern’s strategy on domestic spending, inheritance, welfare programs, busing, aid to schools, national defense, etc., that can be used following the Republican Convention in August. The most important aspect of our anti-McGovern strategy should be to keep the homerun balls to the last phase of the campaign in a way which ensures that the President peaks off in the last three weeks of October” right before the election.