After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  III. WHAT’S MISSING?

  A piece last year in Esquire raised the question of how it was that The New York Times at first missed the story of Watergate. One explanation was that Times reporters had been following leads on other stories—drug-taking by a high government official, and so on—stories that did not yield. Many papers ultimately made their contribution. The Washington Star, interviewing a gardener, discovered that a recent visitor at San Clemente had been Judge Matthew Byrne, of the Ellsberg trial; that broke the story of the offer to him of the directorship of the FBI. The Providence Journal broke the story of Nixon’s income tax. The Los Angeles Times, Jack Nelson in particular, broke various stories. Time revealed the seventeen wiretaps. Other reporters uncovered important stories—as, of course, did The New York Times. But the reporting that led most directly to Nixon’s departure from office was unquestionably Woodward and Bernstein’s in the Washington Post. The author of the Esquire piece concluded that The New York Times had been remiss. It seemed more likely, though, that Watergate, and the important revelations it led to, were not the story. And I don’t mean the tip of the iceberg here. I mean that, in spite of all the Watergate cover-up talk on the few known transcripts (out of three years, after all, of recorded conversation), Nixon simply did not think Watergate was the front he was vulnerable on.

  If one bears with this line of thought, that Watergate was not the story, then the problem is what was. It is hard to sustain a belief in a conspiracy within his administration against him. It would be unreasonable to expect to drive from office, by means of tapes in his sole possession, the man who had appointed (and who presumably had compromising tapes of) the presumptive heads of any such conspiracy. Moreover, no evidence on a grand enough scale ever came out about President Nixon to support a view that the intelligence agencies had conspired to produce such evidence. Finally, it is clear from the Church Committee documents and from more recent, almost daily news reports that the agencies had problems enough with secrets of their own to preclude an interest in the removal from office of a chief executive—when that removal would lead, as it inevitably did, to investigations of the agencies themselves.

  Even less convincing are theories that the offenses at the heart of the Nixon administration had to do with a Hughes connection, or with the Bebe Rebozo $100,000. So many people, Republicans and Democrats alike, have had some sort of Hughes connection. As for Rebozo, a memorandum of June 16, 1972, from Gordon Strachan to H.R. Haldeman, does report a complaint from Florida CREEP contributors that they had “already given through Bebe.” But, as events in the intervening years, concerning kickbacks and financial-political scandal of all kinds and on all sides, demonstrate—and as the fact that no article of impeachment having to do with taxes or finances was ever passed confirms—the President could not have been impeached simply over money. Vice President Agnew did have to resign over money, but it seems beyond question that this resignation would not have occurred had it not been for Watergate—when the President viewed the prospect of Agnew’s resignation as protection for himself.

  The minds of assassination theorists run, perhaps, to murder: the shooting of Governor Wallace; or the crash of the plane bearing Mrs. E. Howard Hunt. But it is unlikely that the Nixon scandal had to do with murder—else why not have murdered a few more people, and those more key? One arrives suddenly at the territory of the florid killings, Jimmy Hoffa, Sam Giancana, John Roselli—and at the Church Committee documents—in a most unlikely way. Because what was happening in the name of intelligence activities provided, at least, a context for the way Nixon conducted his administration; and because the Church investigation itself provides an example of not wanting to know too clearly, or to state at all, what your own research unmistakably implies.

  IV. TRANSACTIONS

  The Church Committee’s report on intelligence activities consists of seven volumes. Like most government documents, they are hard to read. The first volume, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, was, politically, the right place to begin. A bipartisan majority of the committee could agree to investigate these matters—past and foreign—precisely and only because they were remote, indifferent, a subject in which nobody had anything politically to lose. If someone had really managed, in the early sixties, to assassinate Fidel Castro, the whole country probably would have been for it. There was, in those days, no Left to speak of. The rest, among investigators, press, citizens at large, was just consensus and hypocrisy. Consensus, because in the matter of old and failed assassinations, all parties could agree to a distraction from the real and serious questions: whether, for instance, the agencies were doing what they were authorized and paid to do, and at what price; whether there was any way to keep them, domestically, within the law. Hypocrisy, because everyone could agree to be outraged that such plots were ever contemplated—when it was, and is, by no means clear that they were not always part of what has been required, from time to time, of an intelligence agency.

  One might even have thought naïveté compounded with consensus and hypocrisy, in that people could seriously entertain the idea that foreign interventions of a high and violent order could be undertaken by underlings, without the knowledge of the various Presidents. This would involve a misunderstanding of the presidency so profound that it brings in just the cast of mind that made it difficult to know what Nixon did: a bureaucratic logic of passing the buck downward, of presuming, in the name of “fairness,” the ignorance of the man in power, beyond the farthest reaches of common sense. What did the boss know and when did he know it makes sense only as the question of a jury lawyer whose client is the boss. The presumption of innocence is, after all, a practical, moral convention for the conduct of fair trials. It was never meant to go any further, to suggest that truth itself, say, consists in the outcome of a conflict of legal strategies. And certainly not to express the Mafia ethic that the lowest takes the rap.

  But when the Mafia itself, literally, was brought into the story, there was something in the details that began to obscure the drift. The collaboration of the CIA and the Mafia in a plan for a foreign assassination had its initial plausibility. The Mafia had had profitable operations in Cuba; it must have longed to have them back. Then, with Sam Giancana, John Roselli, even Judith Campbell Exner, Frank Sinatra, the rococo elements appear—giving rise to at least one speculation, and one certainty. The speculation: that the whole story is backward, that there might have been a White House connection with the Mafia, perhaps accidentally and carelessly. The connection would have come, inevitably, to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover—whose FBI cannot, as it claimed, have been bugging a Mafia phone, but must have been tapping the White House phones for many years, for the FBI director’s purposes. There cannot have been any other reason to wait fifty-four weeks to bring the Roselli-Giancana matter to President John Kennedy’s attention. To exactly the degree that a connection is dangerous to the national security, its termination, too, is presumably no less than urgent; it took Hoover more than a year to feel that urgency. It was obviously just a moment when, for whatever reason, Hoover felt he must deal this card. As for the CIA, when this Mafia connection, by whatever route, came to its attention, the White House might have said—as it said so recently, in the case of the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—Stay away from that. That’s national security. The CIA’s employment of the Mafia for purposes of assassinating Castro would have become the consensual fiction. Advantage to the Mafia: such private services as having the CIA break into the apartment, years ago, of the singer girlfriend of that jealous lover, Sam Giancana; tax relief; and relief from various other legal pressures, probably.

  That would be a speculation. But a certainty is this: that, at some unspecified point in its history, the CIA began to include the investigation and control of narcotics traffic, without mandate or explanation, in its own interpretation of its intelligence work; that, in recent years, virtually every group that has newly claimed the control of narcotics as part of
its mission (from Egil Krogh’s Plumbers, through the units of John Caulfield and G. Gordon Liddy, when they came from drug-enforcement agencies) has used that claim as a cover for some crime; that the CIA, in the course of the Church Committee hearings, was unable to give any satisfactory account either of its dealings with the opium-running tribesmen of Southeast Asia, or for allegations of drug traffic by its own Southeast Asian airline, Air America. A report by the CIA’s own inspector general concluded that there was “no evidence that the Agency . . . has ever sanctioned or supported drug trafficking as a matter of policy” (italics added). Those words in italics must constitute the weakest disclaimer of criminal activity by a governmental agency ever to be seriously presented in any public forum.

  And looking back, then, at the alleged purpose of the association with Giancana and Roselli, there arises at least this question: Does it make sense for the CIA to have enlisted organized crime as an ally in a plan for an assassination of the highest importance, while, at the same time, it claims responsibility for suppressing traffic in narcotics, which is the most highly profitable enterprise for organized crime? Does either half of this proposition, which would make of the secret collaborator in one international enterprise the bitterest conceivable enemy in the other, make any sense? (The fact is, of course, that Castro was not assassinated. Narcotics traffic, on the other hand, has flourished, supporting not only organized crime but all those bureaucracies whose mission is to suppress it.) The reason the questions are not idle is that there is evidence, scattered throughout the Church Committee report, that, at least since its demoralization in the Bay of Pigs, the CIA has changed from a band of courageous and patriotic amateurs into another sort of band entirely.

  Investigative reporting is not what I intended or what I have done here; my politics, such as they are, tend to be moderate. But one cannot help, in looking at documents which might establish a context for a last inference about the Nixon administration, finding signs, in government in recent years, of something, in economic terms at least, radically amiss—evidence of great improprieties involving immense sums of cash. There are, to take two examples, transactions involving two of the CIA’s “proprietaries”—the businesses which the CIA says it must own, as a cover for its intelligence activities. The first is the sale of an airline, Southern Air Transport, which the CIA bought, in 1960, for use in Asia. The CIA bought the airline, which was based in Miami, Florida, for approximately $300,000, and held the shares in the name of a former board member of its other airline, Air America. In 1973, it sold Southern Air Transport, to its former owner, for approximately $6 million—several million dollars less than its book value at the time, and $2 million less than what had already been offered, in cash, by another buyer. The CIA’s explanation for the sale was this: it sought “to avoid a conflict of interest.” However complicated other aspects of the transaction may have been, one thing is clear: Selling to former associates, at a price millions of dollars below book value and below a competing cash offer, does not so much avoid as it quite openly declares the most direct and glaring conflict of interest.

  A second case concerns a $30 million “insurance complex,” which the CIA claimed it was obliged to set up abroad, as a result of the death of four agents in the Bay of Pigs. Leaving aside the question of whether it might not have been possible to compensate four surviving families by some means other than an enterprise costing millions, the CIA went on to claim that for reasons of “cover” the insurance complex had to make investments, in foreign and American stocks, and also to keep some “non-interest bearing deposits” in foreign banks. The only “issue” which a section of the report obviously written by the CIA itself could find in the matter of these deposits was that the selection of the banks was “non-competitive”—as though the Agency might have been showing favoritism in its choice of banks, or attempting to influence their policies. That is not, of course, the real issue at all. An “insurance complex,” in foreign banks, with a portfolio of foreign and American stocks, and deposits on which it claims to get no interest, is not a necessary or even plausible “cover” for intelligence work but an opportunity—stated with a brazenness that insults the committee which investigates—for fraud on a scale that no private corporation could contemplate. Since the CIA refused, on grounds, it says, of national security, to disclose how much money it has at all, and since Congress has so far indulged that refusal, the Agency continues in its special capacity for making illegal profits and never having to account to anyone for them, or to give any explanation of who or what has that money now.

  As for the FBI—as portrayed in the Church Committee report, it seems so locked in obsessions of its own that it hardly bears on the Nixon case. In federal government, it has always been vital interests such as defense (and more recently, medical care) which present special opportunities for impropriety, because of their intense importance to a public that, lacking expertise, is helpless in terms of oversight. All this by way of a cursory outline of situations which existed in government, quite apart from the Nixon administration; and to establish a context for what I think the Nixon scandal itself had to be. It would have to be of an entirely other order than any of these, as it were, more normal scandals; and it required not the most florid and aberrant explanation but the worst and perhaps the most obvious. And here’s what I think, inescapably, it has to be.

  V. BOTTOM LINE

  People are accustomed to speak of the tragedies of Vietnam and Watergate, or of the post-Vietnam post-Watergate morality, as though they were linked only in some abstract, ethical sphere. Then, one looks at those transcripts once again. In his conversation of February 28, 1973, with John Dean, President Nixon discussed an allegation that, in 1968, at President Lyndon Johnson’s insistence, the FBI tapped conversations between Agnew, the candidate for Vice President, and Anna Chennault, widow of General Claire Chennault and president of Flying Tiger Airlines. The rationale for this tap was supposed to be that Mrs. Chennault was urging the South Vietnamese to slow down or stop the peace negotiations in Paris, to help assure the election of a Republican administration, under which, she was supposed to be telling the South Vietnamese, they would get better terms.

  Mrs. Chennault says she did not even know Spiro Agnew in 1968; but that is not the point. She says she knew Richard Nixon very well. On February 28, 1973, President Nixon was preoccupied only with whether there had been such a tap, not with the rationale behind it. One remembers that, less than a week before the 1968 election, the South Vietnamese did stop the negotiations cold. Less than a week. One remembers, too, the remarkable suddenness and, even for refugees, unprecedented hysteria and chaos with which the war, in March 1975, finally did end; and the apparently real fury and sense of betrayal President Thieu expressed when he so precipitately, and it seemed spitefully, gave up. And one cannot help thinking back on 1968 and believing that, in 1972, there must have been a deal. On October 26, 1972, two weeks before the election, Henry Kissinger said of Vietnam, “Peace is at hand.” Peace is at hand. There can and could be no doubt that he sincerely meant it. Within the week, however, Alexander Haig flew to Vietnam. There was unprecedented bombing and the mining of Haiphong. After all that, in January 1973, when the accords were signed, the terms were in no substantial way different from the ones Henry Kissinger had gotten, months earlier, when he genuinely thought peace was at hand. Then, one remembers we were pouring huge amounts of money into South Vietnam; and that the government there, being famously corrupt, was getting a lot of it. One remembers that President Nixon himself was getting a lot of illicit campaign contributions, from a lot of strange sources, and diverting at least some of them to his personal use. And one can’t help thinking that, in 1972, the South Vietnamese administration, not wanting peace to be at hand just yet, used some of the enormous amounts of money we were pouring in there to bribe our administration to stay in.

  All right, it is difficult, monstrous; and, of necessity, only an inference, impossible to prove. But one looks
back—thinking, not laundered money, foreign money. It is hard to recall the sums and characters, where they came from and where they went. But, early in the Ervin Committee hearings, there is the dim sound of the testimony of CREEP Finance Chairman Maurice Stans. He mentioned a contribution, $30,000 in cash, from a “Philippine national”—a contribution, Stans said at the time, he had been too fastidious to keep. Gordon Liddy’s successor as counsel to the Finance Committee to Re-Elect, Stans said, had told him that it would not be legal to accept such money. So Stans had arranged, he said, with Fred Larue, an assistant to John Mitchell at CREEP, to return that $30,000 to its source. “Since then, and this is more irony, Senator,” Stans went on, amiably, in the ensuing colloquy, he had learned from a Justice Department official that it would have been “perfectly proper” to accept that money from a foreign national, “so long as he is not an agent of a foreign principal.” That is what Stans testified on June 12, 1973.