What the Times had acquired was a copy of a massive study commissioned by Robert S. McNamara shortly before his resignation as Secretary of Defense. The Pentagon Papers, as the newspaper called the archive, had been assembled by thirty-five scholars, including analysts from the Rand Corporation think tank, in an office adjoining McNamara’s. Altogether there were forty-seven volumes of typescript—4,000 pages of records and 3,000 pages of explication, a total of 2.5 million words. It was all secret, but the secrets were not military. None of it compromised American troops still in Vietnam, and there was nothing from the Nixon years. McNamara had wanted to know how the United States had become entangled in Vietnam’s swamps. The papers told how. Some of the documents went back to the Truman administration. They made a lot of officials look inept, foolish, or worse. Among other things the documents revealed that Lyndon Johnson had ordered the drafting of the Tonkin Gulf resolution months before the alleged incident there. Worse, on the very day in 1965 that he had decided to commit American infantry in Vietnam he had told a press conference that he was aware of “no far-reaching strategy that is being suggested or promulgated.”
Clark Clifford, McNamara’s successor as Secretary of Defense, had never found time to read the study. Henry Kissinger had been one of its researchers, but he hadn’t seen the completed project. President Nixon didn’t even know of its existence until that fateful Sunday morning that the Times began publishing it. Although it affected neither him nor his conduct of the war, he was infuriated. He felt that the ability of a government to keep secrets was vital. The fact that none of his own confidences were involved here was, he thought, beside the point; next time could be different. Furthermore, at a time when he and Kissinger were carefully defining their own Vietnam policy, these documents opened old wounds and raised again the ugly issue of the government’s credibility.
On Monday, June 14, the Times published its second installment of the papers. Mitchell called the White House and suggested that the administration tackle the newspaper in the courts. Nixon agreed. Mitchell telegraphed the paper, “respectfully” suggesting that it print no more. If the editors went ahead, he warned, they could be convicted under the espionage statute, fined $10,000, and sentenced to ten years in prison. And the government would prosecute; the leak was causing “irreparable injury to the defense interests of the United States.” The Times ran a front-page account of the attorney general’s threat, and published the third installment of the papers alongside it.
That was a wild fortnight in city rooms and courtrooms. A team of government lawyers under Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian went into federal court in New York on Tuesday, asking for an injunction against the editors. The judge, who had been on the bench exactly five days, scheduled a hearing for Friday and issued a temporary restraining order. The Times obediently stopped publication, but on Friday the Washington Post began running its own account of the papers. Clearly the Post’s editors had access to the same source. Four days later the Boston Globe began printing the documents. Meantime the Associated Press had begun sending the Post version around the world. Among the papers printing it was the New York Times.
Mardian took the Post to court, but the federal judge in Washington refused to hand down even a temporary order. The government, he found, could not “impose a prior restraint on publication of essentially historical data.” The U.S. Appellate Court voted 2 to 1 to restrain the Post. The New York judge refused a permanent injunction against the Times but extended his temporary order until appeals courts could rule. Finally, on the following Friday, the two cases—numbers 1873 and 1875—came before the U.S. Supreme Court, which found for the press 6 to 3. Then nine justices handed down no fewer than six opinions. Along with John Harlan, Nixon appointees Burger and Harry A. Blackmun were in the minority.
Mardian had taken the position that the Justice Department was merely attempting to recover stolen papers necessary for national security. The identity of the putative thief was unmentioned then, but the FBI knew. He was Daniel Ellsberg, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard who had written his doctoral dissertation on the decision making process, worked for Rand, become a McNamara protégé, and helped put the Pentagon Papers together. A hawk at first, he had, like so many others, been transformed by events into a dove. Resigning from Rand because he had become an embarrassment to it, he had become a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had brooded long over whether to make the papers public. The invasion of Cambodia had finally decided him.
On June 23 Ellsberg, still in hiding, appeared on television at an undisclosed location and identified himself as the source of the documents. The United States, he declared, was to blame for the Vietnam tragedy: “There has never been a year when there would have been a war in Indochina without American money.” He said, “I felt as an American citizen, a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American people. I took this action on my own initiative, and I am prepared for all the consequences.” On June 28 he surrendered to authorities in Boston and was released on $50,000 bail. That same day he was indicted in Los Angeles for stealing government property and violating the Espionage Act. Six months later twelve more criminal charges, including conspiracy, were leveled against him. A former Rand colleague, Anthony J. Russo Jr., was also indicted, together with a Los Angeles advertising woman and a former South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States. Ellsberg said: “I stole nothing and I did not commit espionage. I violated no laws and I have not intended to harm my country.”
Surveying the Watergate wreckage in 1973, a team of London Sunday Times reporters concluded that “The Pentagon Papers tipped the Nixon administration over the edge.” The White House Special Investigations Unit—the Plumbers—acquired the services of two former New York cops, a Runyonesque pair named Jack Caulfield and Tony Ulasewicz. They had been hired by John Ehrlichman two years earlier for political investigations; their assignments, first from Ehrlichman and then from John Dean, had included inquiries into Chappaquiddick, My Lai critics, the drinking habits of anti-Nixon senators, the private life of a Washington columnist, and reports that the brother of an eminent Democrat was a homosexual. In the aftermath of the Pentagon Papers case they received their first assignment as Plumbers.
Anyone who had worked with Ellsberg had a lot of explaining to do in those days, and a man high on everyone’s list of possible co-conspirators was Morton B. Halperin, who had directed the assembly of the Pentagon Papers. Halperin had been an Ellsberg friend and later a Kissinger aide. Leaving the government, he had moved to the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in Washington. Charles Colson believed that Halperin had been a source of leaks and probably still had classified material. If so, it might be in his Brookings office. Colson sent Ulasewicz on a reconnoitering mission; the ex-cop returned to report that there was no way to burglarize the institution. According to a subsequent account by John Dean, Colson, a hard man to discourage, told Caulfield that “if necessary he should plant a fire-bomb in the building and retrieve the documents during the commotion that would ensue.”
That was too much for the New Yorkers. Someone, they felt, should restrain the impulsive Colson. They took the story to Dean, who caught the next plane to San Clemente. He laid the tale before Ehrlichman; Ehrlichman phoned Washington, and no more was said about fire-bombs. It was a costly triumph for Caulfield and Ulasewicz, however. The White House suddenly lost interest in their talents. Jobs which would have come their way in the past now went to the two rising stars in the Plumbers unit: E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. After three months in the cold, Caulfield decided to devise a master plan for political espionage. He hoped to sell it to the Committee for the Reelection of the President. Its code name was Operation Sand Wedge. On November 24 Dean secured an appointment for him with Mitchell. The presentation was not a success. Caulfield had a hunch that someone else was going to get the work, and as he left he knew he was right; sitting in the attorney genera
l’s outer office was Gordon Liddy.
***
During the spring and summer of 1971, when Richard Nixon was secretly having his White House offices wired for sound, his popularity rating in public opinion polls continued to sag. Presidential aides were agonizing over the refractory nature of the Vietnam War, still the most important issue before the country, and debating among themselves how best to reverse the electorate’s political mood, so discouragingly expressed in the previous autumn’s off-year election. This much was clear to them: they were going to need a lot of money. Fortunately, they were in much better shape than the debt-ridden Democrats. Herbert Kalmbach, the President’s personal attorney, had custody of nearly two million dollars in unspent campaign funds from 1968. In January 1971 Kalmbach deposited the first $500,000 of the 1972 war chest in the Newport Beach, California, branch of the Bank of America. It is a matter of some interest that the money was in the form of cashier’s checks which he had bought, with cash, in the Security Pacific National Bank branch just across the street. Even then he was taking steps to see that contributions could not be easily traced, because even then he knew that much of the means for the coming campaign would be coming from dubious sources.
Some of those sources emerged during the next few months. The first, in March, was the dairy industry. Early in the month Secretary of Agriculture Clifford Hardin announced that price supports for “manufacturing milk”—used to make cheese and butter—would be $4.66 per hundredweight, unchanged from the year before. The milk manufacturers took steps to reverse the decision. On March 22 they formed a GOP slush fund called the Trust for Agricultural Political Development and put $10,000 in it. The next day sixteen leaders of dairy cooperatives were invited to meet Nixon and Hardin in the oval office. They told the President and the secretary that they wanted a higher federal subsidy. The following day they gave the Nixon war chest another $25,000. The day after that Hardin changed his mind and pegged milk supports at $4.93. The dairy leaders then poured a total of $527,500 into Republican bank accounts.
Another lode was opened a few weeks later. Since the early days of the Nixon administration Harold S. Geneen, president of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT), had been trying to block a Justice Department task force which was working to prevent a merger of ITT and the Hartford Fire Insurance Corporation. Department career lawyers were determined to establish the principle that business competition is illegally crippled by huge sprawling conglomerates like ITT. The government’s campaign was being directed by Richard W. McLaren, head of Justice’s antitrust division. McLaren was reporting to Deputy Attorney General Kleindienst; Mitchell had supposedly withdrawn from the case because his New York law firm had represented ITT. On April 19, 1971, McLaren and Kleindienst conferred and agreed to carry an appeal to the Supreme Court. Kleindienst telephoned ITT’s lawyer to tell him of the decision.
Later that same day Kleindienst received a call from John Ehrlichman, who told him that President Nixon was “directing” Kleindienst to drop the ITT case entirely. The deputy attorney general said that was impossible; he, McLaren, and Solicitor General Erwin Griswold were committed. “Oh?” Ehrlichman said curtly. “We’ll see about that.” A few minutes later Kleindienst’s phone rang again. It was Nixon, who began by saying, “You son of a bitch, don’t you understand the English language?” He ordered Kleindienst not to appeal. Disturbed, the deputy attorney general told Mitchell that he would resign rather than capitulate, and he thought McLaren and Griswold would go with him. Shortly thereafter Mitchell told his deputy that he had talked to Nixon and “He says do anything you want on antitrust cases.”
The President and the attorney general were being less than candid with Kleindienst. In a subsequent memo to Haldeman, Colson said he was trying to suppress all White House—ITT correspondence because it “would lay this case on the President’s doorstep.” And Mitchell, for all his talk of having turned the whole thing over to his deputy, had been holding regular meetings with Geneen for the past year. As early as September 1970 Ehrlichman had written to Mitchell criticizing McLaren’s attitude and mentioning an “understanding” with Geneen.
Bargaining between the administration and the conglomerate was apparently concluded at a lunch given by the governor of Kentucky at the Kentucky Derby the month after Kleindienst and McLaren thought they had committed the government to a Supreme Court trial. The mediators were Mitchell and Dita Beard, ITT’s salty Washington lobbyist. ITT agreed to pay $400,000 and the administration agreed to forget about the antitrust action. In a highly incriminating memorandum dated June 25, 1971, Mrs. Beard told her immediate superior that the only Republicans to know “from whom the 400 thousand commitment had come” were Nixon, Mitchell, Haldeman, and the lieutenant governor of California. She said: “I am convinced that our noble commitment has gone a long way toward our negotiations on the mergers eventually coming out as Hal [Geneen] wants them. Certainly the President has told Mitchell to see that things are worked out fairly. It is still only McLaren’s mickeymouse we are suffering…. Mitchell is definitely helping us, but it cannot be known.”
She ended the memo, “Please destroy this, huh?” It wasn’t destroyed, and when it surfaced in a Jack Anderson column the following February 29, ITT’s response was to shred all other documents relating to the case and claim that this one had been a forgery. But the Dita Beard note does not stand alone. It is braced by the Ehrlichman correspondence, including a May 5 letter to Mitchell referring to a talk between the President and the attorney general in which they had settled the “agreed-upon ends” in the ITT case. Certain events of that time are also supportive. On May 15 Geneen pledged the $400,000 to the GOP, and at the end of July the Justice Department and the government settled their differences without an appeal to the Supreme Court. ITT was allowed to keep Hartford Fire. “Quite clearly,” Fortune commented, “Harold S. Geneen has achieved something of a victory.”
The key figure in a third deal between the administration and people trying to solve legal problems was Robert L. Vesco, a controversial financier with several ties to the Nixon family. Vesco had given $50,000 to the 1968 Republican campaign through the President’s brother, F. Donald Nixon. He was close to the President’s other brother, Edward, and beginning in the summer of 1971 he employed the President’s nephew Donald as his personal assistant. “He is the one person who has never lied to me, ever,” Donald once said of Vesco, a strange statement from a young man with such an eminent relative, and one not many people would make; within two years Vesco would be a fugitive from American justice, living in Costa Rica rather than face Securities and Exchange Commission charges that he had looted Investors Overseas Services, a mutual fund, of 224 million dollars.
Vesco was already in trouble in the early summer of 1971, when, according to the indictment against him, he involved Mitchell and Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce, Maurice Stans, in an attempt to buy his way out of the SEC accusations. The understanding was that Vesco would give Stans $250,000 in cash and Mitchell, according to the charges, would “exert his influence on the SEC on behalf of Robert L. Vesco.” Edward Nixon later acted as bagman, delivering to Stans $200,000 in a brown attaché case. (The remaining $50,000 came in a second installment.) Mitchell set up meetings between Vesco, the SEC chairman, and the commission’s general counsel. The SEC continued to prosecute anyway.
While cash began to accumulate in the GOP war chest, the White House was engaging in various parapolitical activities in 1971, most of them with a view toward the next year’s presidential election. One was the compilation of a list of political enemies, which under Colson’s guidance expanded to fill a file four inches thick. It included the names of Jack Anderson, James Reston, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, and Carol Channing. The president of the Otis Elevator Company was there—apparently because the Otis elevator in Nixon’s San Clemente house didn’t work properly—and so was Detroit’s black Congressman John Conyers. A notation after Conyers�
��s name read, “Has known weakness for white females.” On September 9, 1971, Colson designated twenty names for “go status,” but no one on the presidential staff could think of an effective method of attack. Daniel Schorr of CBS (“a real media enemy,” Colson called him) was subjected to an FBI check that summer, but the sole consequence was frustration for the White House. Ronald Ziegler put out the explanation that Schorr had been investigated because he was being considered for a government job.
Various Nixon aides—Huston, Dean, Caulfield—tried to talk the Internal Revenue Service into harassing selected taxpayers. All failed, and Commissioner Randolph Thrower resigned for reasons which, he said at the time, were “between me and the President.” The White House was driven to the absurd lengths of writing anonymous letters to the IRS hinting at tax evasions by people on Colson’s list. It was perhaps an inevitable outgrowth of this malicious foolishness that at some point the conspirators should conclude that someone was conspiring against them. The someone, they thought, was J. Edgar Hoover, who kept in his office safe logs of wiretaps he had carried out on White House orders. Robert Mardian persuaded one of Hoover’s assistants to steal the logs, and they were locked up in Ehrlichman’s safe. Hoover missed them in July 1971. He was enraged.
Men who did not shrink from doing a bag job on the director of the FBI had no qualms about playing rough with Democratic presidential candidates, and it was in these months that what later became famous as Republican “dirty tricks” made their appearance. Mailings critical of Ted Kennedy went out in fake Muskie envelopes; a spurious Muskie aide phoned the Associated Press bureau in Boston with charges that Kennedy was a “divisive influence”; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were gulled into printing counterfeit Muskie memos which seemed to suggest that he was engaging in questionable activities. On December 1, 1972, Donald H. Segretti gave fifty dollars to the president of the Tampa Young Republicans Club with the understanding that it would be used to discredit the primary campaigns of Senators Muskie and Jackson in Florida. It was the first installment on a project which would eventually lead to Segretti’s disbarment, conviction, and imprisonment.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 185