American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  In earlier days the United States had conducted successful experiments in foreign policy—or at least had occasionally persisted with a foreign policy strategy long enough to test whether it would be successful or not. Lend-Lease during World War II and its transmutation into the Marshall Plan after the war loomed as a strikingly effective, comprehensive, and long-run collective effort with other nations. More typically since 1932 Washington had tried short, staccato essays at economic isolation, political unilateralism, aid to allies, full partnership with allies including Russia, deterrence, containment, détente, triangular diplomacy with Russia and China, human rights.

  Something important, however, was missing from this list. The transcending experiment Americans had not tried was a sustained, committed political-economic-ideological strategy of comprehensive détente as a road to world peace.

  CHAPTER 12

  Vice and Virtue

  VIETNAM HAD LEFT DEEP and tormenting scars across the body politic. It was not like the century’s earlier wars that had ended with most Americans feeling victorious and the wars’ original opponents at least acquiescent. After World War II those who had rallied against Nazism knew they had helped put down a monstrous and dangerous tyranny. After Korea, those who had supported the final settlement were satisfied to have restored the regional balance of power first upset by North Koreans attacking south and then by Americans attacking too far north.

  After Vietnam, all felt defeated—the hawks who had pressed for a “victory,” the doves who had wanted out, the veterans who returned to a sullen, ungrateful republic, the allies who had been enlisted in a hopeless cause, the Saigon leaders who felt deceived and betrayed, the anticommunist South Vietnamese who faced an anguished choice of fleeing to parts unknown or living under communist rule. Vietnam had displayed the ultimate strategic failure and moral bankruptcy of the “middle way,” of “bipartisan” foreign policy making, day-to-day, step-by-step escalation and de-escalation. An undeclared war for ill-defined goals had ended with Americans frustrated, embittered, and divided.

  “It was the guerrilla war to end all guerrilla wars until it somehow became simply a war to be ended,” wrote Max Frankel in The New York Times a few days after Nixon announced the cease-fire of January 1973. “It was the proxy war to contain international Communism until it somehow became the central embarrassment to an era of Communist-capitalist détente. It was devised by a generation that wanted no more Munichs, meaning betrayals by appeasement, and it spawned a generation that wants no more salvations by intervention, no more Vietnams.” Few could have guessed that the war would come to an even more tragic end two and a half years later, or that already it had helped to trigger the chain of events that would bring about the collapse of the Nixon presidency long before hostilities ended.

  On Sunday morning, September 8, 1974—thirty days after he took office—President Ford granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon” for all federal offenses “he has committed or may have committed” or had helped commit as President. At once a fire storm of outraged telephone calls and telegrams broke upon the White House. Press and television editorialists thundered. But no one could do anything; the presidential power to pardon Presidents—or anyone else—was absolute and irreversible. Appearing on national television with the pardon in front of him, Ford stated that the former President would be excessively penalized in undergoing a protracted trial, “our people would again be polarized in their opinions,” and the “credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.” He then signed the document in full view of the cameras.

  Some Americans believed that nothing would prove the credibility of free institutions more dramatically, or set a better example for dictatorships abroad, than the willingness to put a President on trial. Many simply suspected a Ford-Nixon deal. It was rumored that aides in the Ford White House knew of a call from Nixon to the new President: if Ford refused to grant him a full pardon, Nixon would announce publicly that Ford had promised the pardon in exchange for the presidency. Ford boldly appeared before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice to declare, “There was no deal, period”; but the investigative reporting of Seymour M. Hersh suggested that Ford did have an outright arrangement with the man who had made him Vice President and then President. Another possibility was that such carefully protected multi-channel negotiations were conducted between the two through intermediaries that the parleys aroused hopes that melded into expectations that led to understandings that emerged as clear promises of a pardon, all conducted with the winks and nods, whispers and silences, gestures and mumbles that constitute the language of brokering politicians. Or perhaps Ford acted, as he claimed, in behalf of what he considered “the greatest good of all the people of the United States whose servant I am.”

  In a very different fashion, nevertheless, Nixon went on trial anyway. Ford’s demonstration of presidential power and the debate over its cause and justice, the trials of high Watergate figures in the following months, the voluminous memoirs of Watergate heroes and villains in the following years, and Nixon’s disbarment from practicing law in New York State had the more important effect of putting not merely Nixon but his whole Administration on trial, and even more, of exposing the most extraordinary and pervasive abuse of power in high places. There emerged a frightening portrait of an Administration conducting a political war of attempted extermination against its political enemies at home even while it was waging a military struggle in Southeast Asia. Viewing street demonstrators and student protesters not as legitimate political opponents but as threats to national security and subverters of the national interest, the White House developed a siege mentality.

  This was not the first time an Administration had hunkered down into a psychology of besiegement; the previous Administration had exhibited similar signs and strains. But ultimately there was a difference between Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Until the end LBJ’s instinct had been to move out to people, to consult Republicans like Dirksen, to include critics like George Ball. It was better, he liked to tell intimates, to have such people “inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” And in the end Johnson was willing to quit voluntarily. Nixon’s instinct was for exclusion—to suspect anybody and everybody, ignore them, fire them, exile them. And in the end he in effect was forced out of office.

  But before that end the Nixon White House had abused power with awesome ingenuity. They had set up an extensive “enemies list” that ranged from political opponents like Jane Fonda, Shirley Chisholm, and Edmund Muskie to the heads of eastern universities and foundations, along with media figures, actors, even athletes, and included a mistake or two—non-enemy Professor Hans Morgenthau made the list because he was confused with enemy Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney in New York City. They conducted a private investigation of Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1969 automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in which a woman drowned. They tapped their foes and one another with wild abandon. They tried to subvert the IRS, the CIA, the FBI for political purposes. Though the so-called Huston Plan, which outlined a sinister program of surveillance of American citizens and proposed the use of “surreptitious entry”— burglary—for intelligence-gathering, was blocked by a nervous J. Edgar Hoover, it revealed the illegal lengths to which the Administration was willing to go in its war against political enemies. Parts of the plan were later implemented, and it was the inspiration of the “Plumbers” unit that burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s California psychiatrist and of the team that broke into the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington’s Watergate complex.

  Not only the political war plans but the planners told much about the Nixon White House. Some of the inmates were of the order of Charles Colson, who liked to call himself a “flag-waving, kick-’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic” and “the chief ass-kicker around the White House.” Others were younger men like White House counsel John Dean, attr
active, clean-cut, affable, flexible—ever so flexible. And willing—ever so willing. When Nixon asserted to Dean on September 15, 1972, that the White House had not used the FBI or the Justice Department against its enemies, but that “things are going to change now. And they are either going to do it right or go,” Dean exclaimed, “What an exciting prospect!”

  The more that Watergate unfolded in the trials and memoirs of participants, in the brilliant reporting of Washington Post correspondents and of Hersh and J. Anthony Lukas and others, the more it appeared to be a morality tale, complete with villains and saints, winners and sinners, and a Greek chorus of Washington boosters and critics.

  Watergate: A Morality Tale

  The Polo Lounge, the Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles, June 17, 1972. Jeb Stuart Magruder, deputy director of the Committee to Reelect the President— called CRP by its friends, CREEP by its foes—was breakfasting with aides when the phone call came from Washington. It was G. Gordon Liddy, insisting that Magruder drive ten miles to a “secure phone.” “I haven’t got time,” Magruder replied impatiently. “What’s so important?” Liddy said, “Our security chief was arrested in the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate last night.” Magruder: “What?”

  Magruder knew what. If the men who had tried to plant listening devices in the Democratic National Committee could, through CRP security chief James McCord, be linked to Liddy, counsel to CRP, they could be linked to himself, to his boss, CRP director John Mitchell, and therefore to his boss, the President of the United States. Magruder and his assistants hurried to Mitchell’s suite in the hotel. They had only one thought at this point, Magruder remembered later: How could they get McCord out of jail? Some way must be found. “After all, we were the government; until very recently John Mitchell had been Attorney General of the United States.” The break-in was not just hard-nosed politics; it was a crime that could destroy them all. With White House power behind them, it seemed inconceivable that they could not fix the problem. The decision for a cover-up was immediate and automatic; no one suggested anything else.

  For Jeb Stuart Magruder, like many others caught in the Watergate web, this was a moment of truth, a point of passage. Magruder was no hard-boiled, cynical politico who had fought his way up from the precincts. A Staten Island high school and Williams College graduate, he had worked for IBM and other big corporations, run two small cosmetics companies in Chicago, managed southern California for Nixon in 1968 and accepted with alacrity a White House post as deputy director of communications the next year. Considered the perfect PR man, he was to go through much of the same anguish, the same passage from arrogance to humiliation, in the following nightmarish months of exposure as others in the White House, but he later related his experience more reflectively and revealingly than his colleagues.

  During the “siege” days of 1970, Magruder recalled, the White House existed in “a state of permanent crisis.” Now, after the Watergate break-in, the spacious mansion turned into a Hobbesian world of all against all, a Shakespearean stage of suspicious, frightened men shaken from their pinnacle and clawing for survival. To cover up the burglary White House chiefs and operatives destroyed their own documents, pried open and emptied the safes of others, pressured the CIA to pressure the FBI to limit its investigation. They arranged hush money for the burglars, though, as John Dean noted, “no one wanted to handle this dirty work. Everyone avoided the problem like leprosy.” The White House “thought Mitchell should ‘take care’ of the payments because he had approved the Liddy plan” to burglarize the DNC, while the former Attorney General blamed the White House for sending him Liddy and pressing him for intelligence. Finally a “fund-raiser” was found in the President’s personal attorney, Herbert Kalmbach, who over the next two months gathered $220,000 in $100 bills—soon to be known as CREEP calling cards. Now the frightened men in the White House began to jettison not only records but themselves and one another. Kalmbach quit while under FBI investigation.

  In October 1972, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, after months of patient sleuthing and with the guidance of a well-informed source—“Deep Throat”—whose identity only Woodward knew, tied the Watergate break-in to “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by” White House and CRP officials. During the January 1973 trial of the burglars, Judge John J. Sirica, dissatisfied with the efforts of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst’s prosecutors, questioned defense witnesses from the bench. Late in March, McCord, whom “the government” had failed to spring and who feared a severe sentence if he refused to cooperate, charged that others besides the burglars had been involved and that perjury had been committed at the trial. The President was following every move.

  The Oval Office, February 28, 1973. John Dean was once again reporting to the President. The two discussed ways to obstruct the select committee the Senate had established under Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina and Dean assured Nixon that despite the setbacks, the cover-up was still viable:

  DEAN: We have come a long road on this thing now. I had thought it was an impossible task to hold together until after the election until things started falling out, but we have made it this far and I am convinced we are going to make it the whole road and put this thing in the funny pages of the history books rather than anything serious because actually—

  NIXON: It will be somewhat serious but the main thing, of course, is also the isolation of the President.

  DEAN: Absolutely! Totally true!

  But by March 13, the scenario Dean presented to the President was less optimistic:

  DEAN: There is a certain domino situation here. If some things start going, a lot of other things are going to start going, and there can be a lot of problems if everything starts falling. So there are dangers, Mr. President.… There is a reason for not everyone going up and testifying.

  And on March 21, against Nixon’s enthusiasm for continued hush-money payments—“You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten”—Dean warned:

  DEAN: I think that there is no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got. We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing. It is growing daily. It’s compounded, growing geometrically now, because it compounds itself.… Basically, it is because (1) we are being blackmailed; (2) People are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people in the line. And there is no assurance—

  NIXON: That that won’t bust?

  DEAN: That that won’t bust.

  Dean by this time was wondering who “would have to fall on his sword for the President.” Himself? “Yes, I thought. Then, no. There had to be another way.” But if he refused to fall, he might be pushed. Dean’s other way was to beat his co-conspirators in the White House to the federal prosecutors and the Ervin committee and cut a deal.

  Senate caucus room, hearings before the Watergate Committee, testimony of John Dean, June 25-29, 1973. Ponderously, inexorably, the two rival branches of the federal government were wheeling up their artillery against the abuse of presidential power. The judicial branch had demonstrated its power in Judge Sirica’s court; there was talk of impeachment in the House, though it had yet to initiate such proceedings; the Senate select committee hearings had opened on May 17.

  The counter-tactic Dean, and fellow Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, in consultation with the President, had devised the White House taking “a public posture of full cooperation,” as Dean recalled, while privately trying to “restrain the investigation and make it as difficult as possible to get information and witnesses.” But with White House and CRP officials—Magruder and Dean himself among them—now jumping ship, the dark and criminal underside of the Nixon White House was being exposed to the Ervin committee and the full glare of television lights. On June 25, Dean began his testimony:

  DEAN: To one who wa
s in the White House and became somewhat familiar with its interworkings, the Watergate matter was an inevitable outgrowth of a climate of excessive concern over the political impact of demonstrators, excessive concern over leaks, an insatiable appetite for political intelligence, all coupled with a do-it-yourself White House staff, regardless of the law.

  Dean’s reading of his 245-page opening statement took up the entire first day of his testimony. The next day, Georgia Democrat Herman Talmadge questioned him:

  TALMADGE: Mr. Dean, you realize, of course, that you have made very strong charges against the President of the United States that involves him in criminal offenses, do you not?

  DEAN: Yes sir, I do.

  But Dean kept his finger coolly pointed at the President. Later that day, Joseph Montoya, Democrat of New Mexico, questioned him:

  MONTOYA: Now, on April 17, 1973, the President said this: “I condemn any attempts to cover up in this case, no matter who is involved.” Do you believe he was telling the truth on that date?