The Last of the President's Men
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“We were spectators,” Butterfield said. “Who was going to do something?” Or joke, though it wasn’t true, “Hey, Mr. President, that’s my girlfriend.”
Butterfield later tried to imagine what Nixon might be thinking: “ ‘Jesus, I shouldn’t have done that.’ Bebe and I are amazed. Watching that, we’re sitting on either side of Beverly. I’m sure he could feel her stiffen up too. And this thing went on for a long time. And the poor man. I just thought, the poor, pitiful man. Yes, he was president of the United States.” And yes, Butterfield had some respect and admiration for him at times. “But in this moment, I just thought, the poor, pitiful son of a bitch. The poor, pitiful son of a bitch.
“This was a yearning,” Butterfield said, a longing for intimacy, his unrealized desire for contact. Perhaps the loneliness of command or the loneliness of his marriage. Butterfield added, “That part of it was obvious, and people should understand that. A good psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist or a mature person would see a lot and read a lot into that about Nixon himself. I mean, the average man would not do that.
“It was loneliness. Which hurt me, in a way, again for Pat. It was temptation there. I mean, he wasn’t going to go any further than he did. I don’t mean to imply that he would have. But it was interesting that the desire was so great that he actually made the initial move. It wasn’t a caress. It was simply a pat, pat, pat.”
I remarked that this would be considered wildly inappropriate in 2015.
“You could say it was inappropriate then,” Butterfield said. “He made it seem like the grandfather, an elderly man to a niece or something like that—‘There, there.’ ”
After the incident, Nixon displayed an awkward inquisitiveness about Kaye. According to the tape from the Oval Office on the morning of July 1, 1972, Nixon discussed plans to go to San Clemente, the Western White House, while Kaye was in the Oval Office.
“Are you going out this time?” the president asked.
“Yes,” Kaye replied, not adding the formal “Mr. President.”
“You like California?” the president asked.
“I like California very much.”
“Where do you stay, you and the girls?”
The San Clemente Inn, which was the Western White House press center routinely used by staff and reporters.
“The Inn,” Nixon said. “It’s very nice . . . the man there, such a nice man. He’s all for us. Takes care of all the girls.”
Kaye agreed.
“Well, have fun,” the president said.
“Thank you.”
“Certainly,” Nixon finally said, sounding on the tape a bit gallant.
• • •
Later, according to a tape of a November 20, 1972, conversation with Haldeman, Nixon was trying to determine which secretary could be trusted to transcribe some of his private dictations for his Daily Diary.
Of Beverly Kaye, Nixon voiced a note of suspicion. “Beverly I think, being single—if she’s loyal. I don’t know her loyalty. . . . That’s the only thing. She’s been in the State Department and all the rest. Has anybody ever checked the goddamned loyalty on this girl?”
“Oh, yeah,” Haldeman reassured him. “We’ve checked, run tests. Done—”
“I can’t use Rose on a lot of this stuff, Bob, because she’ll try to get her own judgment involved in it. And she just got too sour.
“I’d like the most brilliant, loyal Nixon secretary. Preferably young, preferably single . . . very, very fast and loyal.”
Nixon again mentioned Kaye. “We’ve had this little girl in the outside office for a long time,” Nixon said. “I like this little girl. She’s nice. Very good. Very smart. . . . This girl is awfully good.”
“She is,” Haldeman said.
“At the present time, she’s better than Rose,” Nixon said.
“Oh, there’s no question.”
• • •
Over the years Butterfield never spoke with Bebe, Nixon or nearly anyone else about Kaye or the incident on the helicopter. Kaye died in December of the next year from a stroke at the age of 43 while she was riding in a White House elevator.
Butterfield said he did not like talking about the helicopter incident, but he had included it in his book draft in the mid-1990s. As we discussed it two decades later, he tried to brush it off. “He’s an older man,” Butterfield told me. “Those legs looked inviting. They’d look good to anybody. We are men. There’s something about a woman. We love them. In a nice way. They’re great.”
Was this the Nixon of Watergate—willing to cross boundaries? No, said Butterfield.
Was this an old man caught in an irresistible impulse to touch those legs? As if his helicopter was a penalty free zone. No, Butterfield said again. He did not see it that way. It was in no way a major or even visible part of Nixon’s personality, but in that short, silent ride, Butterfield believed he glimpsed the unfulfilled, desperately human side of Richard Nixon. It was a side he imagined existed, but had never expected to see so vividly.
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After nearly three and a half years in the job, Butterfield found that he could still be rebuked by Haldeman for a minor infraction—not of the rules but of Haldeman’s expectation of total control.
This time it involved the attempted assassination of Alabama governor George Wallace, who was running as an independent for president. Wallace was seriously wounded as he campaigned in a Washington suburb the late afternoon of May 15, 1972. Wallace had received 10 million votes in 1968 and in a close race in 1972 he could siphon off enough Nixon votes to give the presidency to a Democrat.
Haldeman was furious with Butterfield that the president and he did not get prompt notification of the shooting.
Butterfield sent a two-page memo to Haldeman the next day trying to explain.
“You asked for particulars concerning my delay in getting word to you about the attempt on Governor Wallace’s life yesterday afternoon. The answer, in a word, is that I had nothing but unconfirmed bits and pieces of information until 2–3 minutes before you called me on the telephone (4:19 or 4:20).” Butterfield said his secretary “was at the moment typing a very short paragraph of alleged facts which you were to receive . . . before anyone else . . .”
And he added, “so help me!” virtually swearing an oath.
In the memo, he gave an eight-point tick-tock on the information flow and his decisions over the 19 minutes. At 4:11 he approved a suggestion that the speechwriters be alerted to “the news and the possibility of the need rather quickly of a Presidential statement.” Haldeman wrote in the margin, “First mistake.”
Butterfield insisted that Haldeman was about to get a report. A hand-carried memo was only minutes away.
In closing, Butterfield wrote, “Every action that I took was pre-meditated.”
At the bottom of Butterfield’s memo with his blue felt pen, Haldeman said he wanted “immediate notification in the future—even if unconfirmed—and no notice to others until we decide on a procedure.”
Clearly Nixon was unhappy. Wallace’s candidacy was a sensitive issue. Any possible connection the would-be assassin might have to Nixon, the White House, the Nixon campaign, or any Nixon supporter could be a political disaster.
There was much attention on the would-be assassin, Arthur Bremer. Watergate break-in leader Howard Hunt later testified that Chuck Colson, Nixon’s aggressive White House special counsel, ordered him to break into Bremer’s apartment hours after the assassination attempt.
Carl Bernstein and I later reported this in The Washington Post and in our book All the President’s Men. I met with Colson for the story, and he insisted he was pushing the FBI to get answers. In All the President’s Men, we wrote:
“ ‘The President was agitated and wanted the political background on Bremer,’ Colson said. Informed of the shooting, the President became deeply upset and voiced immediate concern that the assassin might have ties to the Republican Party or, even worse, the P
resident’s re-election committee. If that were the case, Colson noted, it would have cost the president the election.”
There was, in fact, never any evidence that Bremer had any connection to Nixon. He was a loner. “It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace,” he had written in his diary two months earlier. He wanted to do “SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC, FORCEFUL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see.”
Bremer had stalked Nixon but found the Secret Service and police protection tight during an antiwar protest around Nixon’s motorcade. So he was not able to get close enough to fire off a shot.
• • •
On the morning of June 17, 1972, Butterfield was listening to the radio as he drove to the White House. For Butterfield a presence at the West Wing on Saturday was routine, even though Nixon was in Key Biscayne. The news report caught his attention. In the early morning hours five men in business suits had been arrested with bugging equipment and sophisticated photographic equipment in the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building.
“Did you hear about this break-in?” he asked Nell Yates, when he got to his office.
“Yes,” she said.
“You know,” he said, “don’t you, that we had to have done this?”
“Of course.”
Butterfield was a bit surprised by the way she said it, no hint of doubt.
“Who else would it be breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters?” he asked. “Other Democrats? No, I don’t think so. Probably Republicans. Which ones? The guys over in the White House with the Committee to Reelect the President.” He paused. “But what made you say, ‘Of course’?”
“Presidents know everything,” Nell said. “I can’t imagine anything happening in the Johnson era like that that President Johnson didn’t know in advance.”
“That’s exactly the way I see it,” Butterfield said. “It had to be us. We had to have done it. I can’t imagine anything happening in this administration that the president and/or Haldeman haven’t approved.”
• • •
By the fall of 1972, Butterfield found himself stepping over the line into territory he never imagined he would visit, let alone become entangled in.
“Yes,” Butterfield told the president and Haldeman in the late afternoon of Thursday, September 7, 1972. “It’s all taken care of, sir.”
Those seven words can be heard on a tape of the meeting in the Oval Office just two months before the presidential election. Butterfield remembers them well. Those words—“YES. IT’S ALL TAKEN CARE OF, SIR”—have haunted him for years, even up to 2015.
Haldeman had suggested that a spy be placed in a Secret Service detail to be assigned to Senator Ted Kennedy, the younger brother of the assassinated John F. and Robert Kennedy. Nixon liked the idea and had turned to Butterfield to ask, “Alex, can you do that?”
Rose Kennedy, Ted’s 82-year-old mother, had personally asked Nixon for the protective detail as her sole surviving son was about to campaign aggressively for Nixon’s opponent, the Democrat nominee for president, Senator George McGovern.
Butterfield knew that the order, which he had personally taken down the street to the Secret Service headquarters, was illegal. “I could have been indicted for that,” he recalled. “I don’t mind admitting it, but I’m admitting it because I thought I was too smart for that. Not too smart, that’s the wrong word. But wise enough and old enough. But I’m almost glad to admit this, because when the president says, ‘Alex, can you do that?’ my immediate response was to say, ‘Absolutely, yes sir!’ ”
If his role had been discovered, he was certain he would have gone to jail. But mostly he was surprised at himself, even astonished, for going along so quickly. “In a way, I was afraid of myself,” he recalled.
I asked him why he didn’t say, Hey let’s wait a minute.
And he said, with a laugh, “It depends upon how you say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ ”
It was expected, or you expected that you would move without thinking, no pause.
The tapes show that in the Nixon White House you said Hey wait a minute at your peril. The president’s wish was an order—not reviewable, not to be reconsidered or doubted. Any questioning or hesitation would suggest softness, a fatal character flaw.
Nixon had been clear that Secret Service director James Rowley “was not to make the assignment” of who would be on the Kennedy detail or lead it. Nixon and Haldeman had their man: Robert Newbrand. As an active agent he had been on Nixon’s detail when he was vice president. He had retired from the Service and was an odd-jobs, utility man in the West Wing used mostly by Rose Woods.
Butterfield, who had liaison responsibility with the Secret Service, got Newbrand reactivated as an agent and assigned to the Kennedy detail.
That’s when Butterfield told Nixon, “Yes, it’s all taken care of, sir.” He added: “And we have a full force assigned, 40 men.”
“One that can cover him around the clock, every place he goes,” Nixon said.
The laughter that filled the Oval Office can be heard on the tape. This was going to be a big score.
Haldeman mentioned Amanda Burden, a 28-year-old New York socialite who had been linked romantically with Kennedy, who was married, in recent published reports.
Nixon noted the number of threats against Kennedy. The sheer number of Secret Service agents “builds the son of a bitch up,” suggesting the increased visibility was the only downside.
Butterfield left the meeting at that point.
Now alone with Nixon, Haldeman, on the tape, continued, “Newbrand will do anything that I tell him to . . . he has come to me twice and absolutely, sincerely said, ‘With what you’ve done for me and what the president’s done for me, I just want you to know if you want someone killed, if you want anything, any way, any direction . . .’ ”
“We just might get lucky and catch this son of a bitch and ruin him for ’76,” Nixon said. “That’s going to be fun.”
“Newbrand will just love it,” Haldeman said.
“I want you to tell Newbrand,” the president instructed, “because he’s a Catholic, sort of play it, he was for Jack Kennedy all the time. Play up to Kennedy, that ‘I’m a great admirer of Jack Kennedy.’ He is a member of the Holy Name Society. He wears a St. Christopher . . .”
• • •
Nixon’s obsession with Ted Kennedy had been evident to Butterfield from the first months of the administration. On April 10, 1969, at the president’s instruction, Butterfield fired off a two-paragraph “Action Item” memo to Ehrlichman from the president. It instructed Ehrlichman to get the so-called attack group in the White House to put Ted “squarely on the spot,” and highlight his support for student demonstrations. The group was to mobilize the media so that “Teddy’s support of all-out integration and bussing is widely publicized.”
Two days later in another “Action Item” memo, Butterfield passed word to Ehrlichman about the president’s concern with an article in The New Republic. At a recent Senate hearing, the liberal magazine said that Kennedy had been “cool and clever.” Positive news about Kennedy roused Nixon.
The author of the magazine article said, “If we had been political scouts, and had never heard of his brothers, we’d have made note of him.” The president suggested that Ehrlichman get the attack group to have something publicized about how “very amateurish” Kennedy had been at a recent briefing that Nixon had given.
• • •
Newbrand made weekly reports to Haldeman about Kennedy’s activities but never documented anything untoward.
“I was an accomplice in an act of abusive government,” Butterfield later said, shaking his head, “using a member of the Secret Service for some personal, petty purpose. We wanted to catch Kennedy in the act. If we could get Kennedy in bed with somebody . . . when he went to Paris, they were downright giddy. Hey, he’s going to go to Paris. We’ll nail him now.”
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Sensitive and Top Secret CIA reports regularly passed through Butterfield. They showed, among other things, the extent to which Kissinger was excluded from some reports from sensitive Arab sources. In addition, some of the documents show how the United States intelligence agencies spied on its ally Israel.
On March 24, 1972, CIA director Richard Helms sent a SECRET/SENSITIVE memo to the president with several attachments. It showed that there were two channels feeding information to Nixon on the secret talks between Jordan’s King Hussein and the Israeli leaders, most recently Prime Minister Golda Meir.
In one, Helms said that King Hussein had had “approximately fifty secret meetings with Israeli leaders.”
King Hussein was the CIA’s man. He had been on the CIA payroll since the Eisenhower years.
“You will recall,” Helms reminded the president, “that early in this Administration, you told me to deal solely with the Secretary [of State William Rogers] on this issue of secret Israel/Jordan contacts. This I have done on all reports originating with the Jordanian side.”
As for the Israeli version of the meetings, Helms said, “for the brief, recent accounts of the secret meetings from the Israelis, these have been sent to you via Dr. Kissinger at their request.”
To assure the president that Kissinger was not getting the Hussein/Jordan intelligence, Helms said, “I am sending these two memoranda directly to you. No one on the White House staff has seen them or is familiar with their content.”
Secretary of State Rogers was the point man for the Jordan side, but Helms said Rogers was away and would not be back in Washington before Nixon was scheduled to meet with King Hussein. “I thought it should be in your hands well in advance.”
The source of one attachment from Helms is clearly a tape made of the Hussein-Meir meeting on March 21, 1972. The eight-page account contains several thousand words of verbatim quotes from the two leaders and their advisers.