The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  Then, the next day, the show started getting interesting. The witness was James McCord, and his description of a meeting with a former official of the White House counsel’s office and current deputy director for criminal enforcement at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms sounded for all the world like a scene from The Godfather.

  “Sometime in July 1972, shortly after I got out of jail, which was in June 1972, about midday there was a note in my mailbox at my residence and when I opened the letter, which had not been stamped nor sent through the mails, it was a note from Jack Caulfield signed ‘Jack’ which said, ‘Go to the phone booth on Route 355 near your home,’ and he gave three alternate times at which I could appear at the phone booth for a telephone call from him.”

  McCord did as he was told. The voice on the telephone had a New York accent and informed him, “I am a friend of Jack’s. . . . He will be in touch with you soon.”

  The story continued, increasingly labyrinthine, like The Maltese Falcon or North by Northwest. In October 1972 the message was conveyed to McCord that the defendants were to plead guilty and go to prison, and that their families would be provided for financially, and they would be given executive clemency after serving a portion of their term, followed by a guarantee of a job. McCord said he categorically refused to play ball. Then he said he had evidence the White House had tapped the phone at his home.

  He spoke of the time, during the burglary trial, when he was finally asked to meet his contact, Jack Caulfield, in person, at “the second overlook on the George Washington Parkway.” There, leaning out of his automobile, Caulfield revealed that he had just attended a “law enforcement meeting in San Clemente, California.”

  Which, everyone in the hearing room and watching TV at home knew, happened to be the location of President Nixon’s “Western White House.”

  His next utterance electrified the room. “Caulfield stated that he was carrying the message of executive clemency to me ‘from the very highest levels of the White House.’ He said that the President of the United States . . . had been told of the results.”

  Two or three times, McCord said, he refused the offer. Each time it was repeated—soon, as a threat: “The president’s ability to govern is at stake. Another Teapot Dome scandal is possible, and the government may fall. Everybody else is on track but you.”

  Another meeting with Caulfield. “He stated that I was ‘fouling up the game plan.’ ”

  (“Game plan”: Nixon buffs knew that to be a favorite presidential phrase.)

  “Get closer to your attorney,” he was told.

  (His attorney had been furnished and paid for by the reelection committee.)

  “ ‘Do not talk if called before a grand jury, keep silent, and do the same if called before a congressional committee.’ ”

  (The congressional committee was rapt.)

  “ ‘You know that if the administration gets its back to the wall, it will have to take steps to defend itself.’ ”

  He then said that on the night before his sentencing, “Jack called me and said that the administration would provide . . . $100,000 in cash if I could tell him how to get it funded through an intermediary. I said that if we ever needed it I would let him know. I never contacted him thereafter, neither have I heard from him.”

  The panel members began their questioning, incredulous. They asked for clarification: Had he actually said operations to spy on Democrats had been planned . . . in the attorney general’s office? That Liddy had proposed a budget of $450,000 in that meeting, and had spent $7,000 just on the charts to lay it out? And then held up typed plans for entry into DNC headquarters while claiming the superior who had approved them was . . . Charles Colson, the president’s closest political aide? That the June 17, 1972, burglary was actually a second break-in, to fix malfunctioning bugs installed weeks earlier?

  All this James McCord blandly affirmed.

  Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii quizzed him about the concept of “deniability”—a new concept for much of the public. Was it true that the operation was designed in conjunction with John Mitchell, but set up so that if it were discovered, the former attorney general could plausibly lie that he had had nothing with it?

  Yes, McCord replied, that was true, too.

  Then Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee diverted the direction of the questioning to a theme the panelists would return to over and over that summer. They never could quite believe the answers they were receiving.

  “Mr. McCord,” asked Senator Baker, “please tell me whether or not you knew that this sort of activity was illegal? . . . What was your motivation? Why did you do this?”

  Because, McCord responded, he believed he was following orders that had come from the attorney general of the United States. And because he was daily receiving intelligence reports that antiwar groups associated with George McGovern were planning violence “that would endanger the lives of people at the Republican National Convention.”

  Concerning the question of executive clemency: why, he was asked by one of the panel’s Republicans, Senator Edward Gurney of Florida, had he testified about it only reluctantly? “Because,” he said, “it involved directly, in my opinion, the President of the United States.”

  At that, Gurney, Nixon’s most dyed-in-the-wool loyalist on the committee, abruptly changed the subject. But now the awful question was out there: was the President of the United States the one behind it all? And what retaliation did witnesses fear if they revealed it?

  THE COMMITTEE RECONVENED TUESDAY AFTERNOON, may 22, with McCord still at the witness table. A man burst into the hearing room, waved his arms in the president’s trademark Churchillian “V for victory” salute, and cried at the top of his lungs, “My name is Ed Kelley and I’m announcing for the President of the United States!” His companion was wrestled from the hearing room before she had a chance to bellow her own intervention: to demand that President Nixon be brought to the witness table—to be asked, she said, “Richard Milhous Nixon, are you guilty?” In fact, she told reporters gathered around her outside the hearing room, “We are all guilty. We all have to come of age and realize where we have been when all this happened.” Even soap opera addicts could plainly see that daytime television did not get much more dramatic than this.

  A housewife wrote to the Louisville Courier-Journal: “I’ve served notice to my family. I do not intend to sauté an onion, dust a tabletop, nor darn a sock while these hearings are on. I wouldn’t miss a word for the world.” Volume at the New York Stock Exchange plummeted; brokers preferred to crowd around portable television sets (Watergate got more coverage than the fact that inflation was at its highest level in twenty-two years). On the funny pages a woman cast a glance over to her husband stretched out on his La-Z-Boy: “During the Watergate hearings, he got hooked on daytime TV and hasn’t done a lick of work since.” Some high schools suspended classes, set up TVs in the cafeteria, and turned the hearings into a makeshift all-day civics lesson. The Boston Globe reported sixty students crowded around the set in “the main corner of one of the great universities,” and that across campus “a faculty group kept another set going all morning and afternoon.” Washington was at a standstill. “A lot of people didn’t show up yesterday,” the maître d’ at the legendary Capitol Hill expense account restaurant Sans Souci complained. “I guess they were home watching television.”

  A Maryland congressman named William O. Mills had been watching. He was found shot to death with a twelve-gauge shotgun the day after it was disclosed that he had failed to report a $25,000 contribution to his congressional campaign from the Committee to Re-elect the President, in violation of Maryland law. In one of his seven suicide notes he said he had done nothing wrong, but since he could not prove his innocence he saw death as the only solution.

  And they were watching at the White House, where a young staffer told an AP reporter, “I sit in constant fear that somehow my name will come up.” But no one was watching, claimed Ronald Ziegler, w
ho Time magazine’s Hugh Sidey wrote now “presides in front of his pale blue backdrop every morning with a large, uncomprehending sadness behind his eyes.” Said Ziegler: “The president had been much too busy to tune in.” Though not too busy, apparently, to release a four-thousand-word statement the day the hearings opened. The New York Times bannered it across the entire front page: “NIXON CONCEDES WIDE WHITE HOUSE EFFORT TO CONCEAL SOME ASPECTS OF WATERGATE; CITES HIS CONCERN OVER NATIONAL SECURITY.”

  The statement read like a forest ranger seeking to contain wildfires. He copped to authorizing a program of wiretaps between 1969 and 1971; to a 1970 “intelligence plan” that included “authorization for surreptitious entry . . . on specified situations related to national security”; and the establishment in 1971 “of a Special Investigations Unit in the White House,” operating “under extremely tight security rules,” to “plug leaks of vital national security information.” He later claimed calamities would have befallen the nation had he done anything different. But each action, he insisted, had been legal and justified.

  The wiretaps had been revealed in a Seymour Hersh Times story ten days earlier. Nixon said they were “legal under the authorities then existing” and necessary to save secret negotiations to end the war and limit nuclear arms. The 1970 intelligence plan story had been broken on May 21 by Senator Stuart Symington: it revealed that a document by a young White House staffer named Tom Charles Huston recommended lawbreaking to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens. The president said that plan had been a response to “gun battles between guerrillas and police,” and the bomb threats sweeping the nation, but had been rejected five days after its submission. As for the “Special Investigations Unit”—that was the group colloquially known as the “Plumbers”—it was necessary to plug leaks that had grown so grave, “other governments no longer knew whether they could deal with the United States in confidence.” About their side activities breaking into offices: well, he said he had known nothing about that. Nor the subsequent cover-ups, clemency offers, “illegal or improper campaign tactics,” bribery of Watergate defendants, offers of executive clemency, nor attempts to implicate the CIA.

  “With hindsight,” he concluded, “it is apparent that I should have given more heed to the warning signals I received along the way about a Watergate coverup and less to the reassurances” he’d been getting from others. But everything he had done, he reassured the nation, was legal. And it had been done only to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic—for reasons of “national security”: the document repeated the phrase twenty-two times.

  This time, the reviews were dreadful. The Times said the statement had “the quality of a lawyer’s brief on behalf of a client trying to defend himself.” A political cartoonist showed Nixon wrapped in an American flag, simpering, “Help! My name is National Security and I’m being threatened!” Another depicted a flag emblazoned across Nixon’s chest covered with hundred-dollar bills and “Mexico” stickers. In a third, the president pulled a giant American flag curtain across a theater proscenium marked “Watergate investigations” and announced, “That’s all, folks!”

  On May 19 the new attorney general nominee, whom the president had introduced in his April 30 speech, Elliot Richardson, appointed Archibald Cox, his former professor at the Harvard Law School, as Watergate independent prosecutor. In Richardson’s confirmation hearings he had pledged Cox would have “full authority” to investigate the scandal. But Richardson’s stipulation that as attorney general he would retain “ultimate power of removal over the special prosecutor” introduced a note of controversy into the proceedings—how independent would the independent prosecutor truly be? So Richardson, a suave Brahmin of the Eastern elite, gave his personal pledge he would not “countermand or interfere with the special prosecutor’s decisions or actions.” Cox stood next to Richardson at a press conference and pronounced himself satisfied he had all the independence and authority he required to bring the guilty to justice even if the evidentiary trail should take him straight to the Oval Office. On May 24, the Senate confirmed Richardson, 82 votes to 3. Ronald Reagan still wondered what all the fuss was about. He said Watergate was “not criminal, just illegal.”

  THANK GOD, NIXON HAD TO think, a president had the power to stage useful distractions. The week before the hearings began, he announced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev would visit the United States in the middle of June, for the first time since 1967 (which surely would consume some of the oxygen that might otherwise be devoted to the first anniversary of the Watergate break-in, on June 17). And then, on the day of Richardson’s confirmation, the Vietnam POWs descended on Washington, D.C., for their most rousing patriotic spectacle yet.

  The festivities began with a presidential speech (officially a “briefing”) to more than five hundred POWS decked out in blinding dress whites at the State Department amphitheater. The subject was his tormenters in the media and on Capitol Hill who accused him of excessive secrecy. “Had we not had . . . that kind of secrecy,” he said, “you men would still be in Hanoi rather than in Washington today.” He added, pumping the words out with rhythmic intensity, “I think it is time to stop making heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in newspapers.” At the reference to the Pentagon Papers, the standing ovation lasted for over a minute.

  The heroes moved out to a mammoth red-and-yellow circus-style tent, two by two with their dates, more than a thousand guests flown in for the occasion at government expense—the biggest dinner in White House history, the press was informed. There, the president toasted the Christmas bombings to another standing ovation. He praised the POW wives as the “First Ladies of America.” Then—the same day a Chicago Tribune cartoon depicted a gaggle of housewives worshipping a golden calf and an anthropologist observing, “I think it started when steak went to three dollars a pound”—they settled down to a sirloin steak banquet.

  The president seemed almost giddy. He shook hands with every single one of the more than six hundred men, some for a minute at a time, as if their energy might rub off on him. He led a rousing chorus of the “POW Hymn,” composed by Air Force Colonel Quincy Collins in the Hanoi facility known as the “Zoo” in 1969. He went to bed looking forward to the next day’s blanket coverage. But the utterances from the green witness table sucked up all the media oxygen instead.

  The former FBI agent who had monitored the DNC bugging from a listening post in a Howard Johnson’s hotel room across the street explained how he’d been dispatched to spy on congressional offices. Cuban burglar Bernard Barker was asked why he’d been willing to participate in burglaries. He replied that the operation had been presented to him as “a matter of national security” ordered by a level “above FBI and CIA.” Senator Baker wondered what would motivate a World War II hero, a successful businessman, “to do something that you knew to be illegal.” At that things got downright surreal: “Senator,” Barker replied, “E. Howard Hunt, under the name of Eduardo, represents to the Cuban people their liberation.” Herman Talmadge of Georgia asked who he thought backed the operation. He answered, Nuremberg-style, “Sir, I was there to follow orders, not to think.”

  The gallery laughed. Barker, however, choked up. “I am part of a team with which I am very proud to be associated. We’ll have to live with the term ‘burglar.’ But we resent, very emotionally, the words that we were ‘hired.’ There was no need to buy our silence. We were not for sale. . . . We’re just plain people who very truthfully believed that Cuba has a right to live.”

  With material like that, who cared about Richard Nixon’s little garden party for POWs? ABC gave nine minutes to Watergate and forty seconds to the gala—concluding, over footage of the cheering men at the State Department auditorium, with the latest Watergate revelation: that John Dean had surreptitiously removed incriminating Watergate documents from the White House. The most widely distributed UPI story about the party concerned the unfortunate tale of POW Michael Branch. He had initially turned down his invitation becau
se of dental work scheduled at Fort Knox, then traveled to Washington to attend when that work finished ahead of schedule. He was turned away at the door—almost certainly because he’d been a member of the Peace Committee in Hanoi.

  A titillating AP wirephoto from the party, captioned “WHITE HOUSE GUESTS: Playboy magazine model Miki Garcia, who has a 38-22-36 figure on a 5-foot-4, 108-pound frame, arrives for gala dinner with her date, ex-POW Galand Kramer,” might have been the most damaging PR all. For it obliterated the very political purpose of Operation Homecoming—to reassure Americans they had returned to the innocence they had supposedly once known.

  Pointing up the POWs’ solid, stand-up American families had been key to the day’s choreography. To many Americans that was what the POWs were for. Evangelical Christians had practically adopted them as mascots: signing them up to fill stadiums at “Youth for Christ” rallies; turning their memoirs into TV movies; recruiting them for spiritual retreats in the Colorado Rockies hosted by astronaut-cum-evangelist Jim Irwin. A Playboy bunny at the White House on the arm of a recently divorced POW queered the sale. It served as a reminder of how badly out of joint the nation had become, and how little anyone, whether evangelist or president, could do about the revolution in sexual mores.

  A dominant narrative in newspapers about POWs now was that their families were disintegrating just as quickly as everyone else’s—including Vietnam veterans, 38 percent of whom, according to one study, separated from their wives within six months of returning to the States. One could read of how Fred Cherry sued his wife for divorce on grounds of adultery, then filed a lawsuit to get the back pay she had spent while he had been in captivity; or how the fifth-longest-held POW, Ray Vohden, returned home to learn his marriage was over and was amazed to find that his wife, and his comrades’ wives, now openly “admit to relationships with other men that we regard as misconduct”; or that the first captured flier, Lieutenant Everett Alvarez Jr., returned to divorced parents and a wife pregnant by a new husband—a situation, he told the press, that felt like being “back in torture.” At the gala, POWs had been wary of greeting any comrade’s female companion by name for fear she was not the wife their comrade had spoken of so lovingly and longingly in their cells.