One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  * This foresight proved fortuitous for both men. President Nixon returned the favor three decades later, by appointing Rush, a chemical company executive without experience in government, as the American ambassador to West Germany and then, by turns, deputy secretary of defense and deputy secretary of state.

  * To consolidate his power, Kissinger quickly tripled the NSC staff to thirty-four people. He created and chaired six NSC committees—the Senior Review Group, the Washington Special Actions Group, the Verification Panel, the 40 Committee, the Intelligence Committee, and the Defense Program Review Committee—which handled every major decision concerning the war in Indochina, CIA covert operations, coups, crises, potential conflagrations, and nuclear weapons policies. Kissinger demanded authority to review cables sent by the secretary of state to American embassies. He held private meetings with foreign heads of state and ambassadors. To grasp the scope of the power grab, it is important to remember that the post of national security adviser did not exist until 1961.

  Kissinger set his own staff at war with one another. “Henry would have three different groups working on a problem,” said John Holdridge, Kissinger’s best China hand, later ambassador to Indonesia. “Not one of the members of those groups knew that the others were working on the same problem. That is the way he did it. It was a paranoiac way of doing things, which I hated. I detested it.… Henry is a brilliant man, but he is a shit when you really get down to it.” Mark Pratt, who came to Kissinger’s secret war councils as the State Department’s expert on Laos and Cambodia, put it bluntly: “It’s not that there is a U.S. Government. These are all fiefdoms spinning off from Henry Kissinger, who distributed them as grand duchies to his various minions, and then they would try to use the other structure and play them off one against the other.… Kissinger, of course, was very good in signaling both that he would do exactly what Nixon wanted and secondly in implying—even when it was not true—that he had just raised his own ideas with the President and the President supported them totally.”

  These interviews are taken from the Foreign Affairs Oral History series led by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, an independent nonprofit based at the State Department’s George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center.

  * More than four years passed before Maj. Hal Knight, a former air force officer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had destroyed records of the bombing of Cambodia and substituted false reports of attacks on cover targets in South Vietnam.

  * The Nixon Library holds evidence of the sale of ambassadorships: an undated handwritten note by Haldeman reading: “Farkas—250 for Costa Rica” and memos to Haldeman concerning Kalmbach’s handling of ambassadorships for other well-heeled campaign contributors.

  * The time would come when Nixon had seen one march too many. On May Day 1971, seven thousand protesters were arrested in the vicinity of the Justice Department headquarters and detained in Washington, DC’s football stadium, the largest mass arrest in the history of the United States.

  * DEFCON stood for “defense readiness condition.” There were five escalating levels. DEFCON 5 meant all was calm; 4 was an alert; 3 meant the air force was ready to mobilize in fifteen minutes; 2 was the verge of nuclear war; and 1 was the war itself. The United States had gone to DEFCON 2 only once, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

  * The NSC meeting included President Nixon, Vice President Agnew, Secretary of State Rogers, Secretary of Defense Laird, Attorney General Mitchell, the outgoing Joint Chiefs chairman General Wheeler, Nixon’s congressional liaison Bryce Harlow, Kissinger, and the NSC aide William Watts, the man who three months before had watched from inside the White House as his wife and his three daughters marched against the war. Watts served as the silent note taker.

  * Lake, Morris, and William Watts resigned from the NSC in protest of the Cambodian invasion. Lord stayed on and was rewarded for his loyalty. Two decades later, President Clinton made Lake his national security adviser.

  * Among those who received money from the Townhouse Operation in 1970 was the forty-first president of the United States. Watergate prosecutors concluded that “George Bush received a total of approximately $112,000 from the townhouse operation in connection with his 1970 Senatorial campaign.” Under the 1970 campaign laws, this was not illegal. But the laws governing the reporting of campaign contributions were about to change, posing immense problems for Nixon and his reelection committee. After Bush’s unsuccessful Senate race in 1970, Nixon named him ambassador to the United Nations and, in 1973, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

  * In 1972, Nixon expanded the taping system to Camp David. The last of more than 3,700 hours of tapes was declassified in August 2014, forty years after Congress ordered them released “at the earliest reasonable date.”

  * Nick Veliotes, President Reagan’s future ambassador to Egypt, was privy to Nixon’s decision to deploy the Enterprise; he worked for the deputy secretary of state, a member of Kissinger’s Washington Special Actions Group, which met daily during the conflict. “I went into my boss and I said: ‘Look, this is crazy,’” Veliotes recalled in a State Department oral history. “‘All we can do here is upset the Indians.’” One show of force led to another: before Nixon left office, India tested its first nuclear weapon, leading Pakistan to develop its own bomb. “And, of course, it’s all justified, in retrospect, by the fact Henry was secretly negotiating with the Chinese,” Veliotes said. “We had to prove to the Chinese how tough we were.”

  * Hughes financed Republicans and Democrats alike, currying political favor. In particular, he wanted to stop the testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada, one of his many phobias. In 1970, Hughes secretly left Las Vegas for the Bahamas, where his friends included Bebe Rebozo; that year, he sent Rebozo one hundred thousand dollars in cash for Nixon’s 1972 campaign.

  * The Executive Office Building taping system was faulty, and a ticking clock near a hidden microphone in the president’s desk has driven transcribers to distraction for decades.

  * After midnight on May 19, a bomb planted by members of the Weather Underground, the most violent far-left group in America, exploded in a bathroom inside the Pentagon. No one was injured, but the attack was audacious. The group set off thirty-eight bombs during the Nixon years; the FBI made no arrests. In frustration, the FBI reinstituted its practice of black-bag jobs and burglaries in the hunt for the bombers. Eventually Gray, his second-in-command Mark Felt, and his intelligence chief Ed Miller would be indicted for illegal searches and seizures carried out against friends and relatives of the Weather Underground. Charges against Gray were dropped. Felt and Miller were convicted—and President Reagan pardoned them a few weeks after he took office.

  * The central role of Kissinger’s top-secret Verification Panel in setting the ill-conceived terms of the arms-control talks—and setting no limits on the warheads known as MIRVs—was uncovered when the panel’s minutes were partially declassified in September 2010.

  * Haig sent a second cable to Kissinger on May 25 saying that Defense Secretary Laird, Director of Central Intelligence Helms, and Admiral Moorer insisted on an agreement limiting the Soviets to no more than 950 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Moscow would have to dismantle 240 older missiles to reach that limit.

  * “We know what’s leaked and we know who leaked it,” Haldeman told the president on October 19 (Nixon White House Tapes, Oval Office). “Is it somebody in the FBI?” Nixon asked. “Yes, sir,” said Haldeman. “Very high up.”

  NIXON: Somebody next to Gray?

  HALDEMAN: Mark Felt.

  NIXON: Now why the hell would he do that?

  HALDEMAN: It’s hard to figure.… If we move on him, then he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI.… Gray’s scared to death.…

  NIXON: What would you do with Felt?… Christ! You know what I’d do with him? Bastard!

  Attorney General Kleindienst, following orders from the White
House, told Gray five times to fire Felt. The acting director could not find the will to do it.

  * Strachan actually was twenty-nine at the time. He was carrying the cash under Haldeman’s orders. Indicted in 1974, he testified truthfully through his ordeal. All charges against him were dropped.

  * “Who’s causing the most violations of the agreement, the South Vietnamese?” Kissinger asked Admiral Moorer a month later. “Yes, the South Vietnamese,” the Joint Chiefs chairman replied. (Minutes of Washington Special Actions Group Meeting, Washington, DC, February 23, 1973, FRUS X: Vietnam, January 1973–July 1975.)

  * Felt was not the only source reporters had at the FBI; at least four top agents fed the press. But Felt indisputably leaked to Bob Woodward at the Washington Post and to Sandy Smith at Time magazine. A corporate lawyer for Time ordered Smith to reveal his source; the attorney then called his good friend John Mitchell, which was how Nixon knew what Felt did off-duty.

  * Questioned under oath in 1975, Nixon denied ever selling an ambassadorship to anyone. Pappas never was charged in the Watergate scandal. Ambassador Tasca helped keep America the only developed nation friendly to the Greek junta; the United States provided arms and intelligence to dictators who jailed and tortured political foes. Congress later tried to investigate Nixon’s dealings with the Greek junta. The hearings were quashed on national security grounds.

  * Nixon buzzed in his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, that afternoon, and asked how much money was in a certain White House safe. “I know we still have that four hundred,” she said, on tape. The four-hundred-thousand-dollar slush fund was a secret cache only she and Nixon knew about.

  * All did except for Liddy. McCord was released on bond pending the Senate hearings. The sentences Sirica imposed were arguably a form of coercion to force the defendants to incriminate themselves. He wasn’t called “Maximum John” for nothing. The prison time actually served by the “Watergate Seven” ranged from two months for McCord to fifty-two months for Liddy.

  * The president pointed out that Mitchell had collected hush money for Hunt from Thomas Pappas five weeks before and that Nixon had personally thanked Pappas in the Oval Office.

  * Did Mitchell green-light the Watergate burglary? Magruder said so; the charge is uncorroborated. If he did, said Ray Price, Nixon’s favorite speechwriter, it would have been on March 30, 1972, in a late-night telephone call to Magruder from Key Biscayne, when Mitchell was likely intoxicated.

  * Ruckelshaus arrived at the FBI to find a letter on his desk—Hoover’s desk—signed by Mark Felt and every one of his top aides, protesting his appointment. It wasn’t personal, Ruckelshaus said: “They just felt it was inappropriate to have a bird-watcher as Hoover’s successor.” (William D. Ruckelshaus, “Remembering Watergate,” speech before the National Association of Former U.S. Attorneys, Seattle, Washington, October 3, 2009.)

  * The Supreme Court banned the warrantless wiretapping of Americans on the Monday after the Watergate break-in. The president had claimed he had an unassailable right to wiretap at will. In a unanimous decision, the Court wrote that the government had to obtain a judge’s warrant for a wiretap: “This inconvenience is justified in a free society to protect constitutional values [and to ensure] that indiscriminate wiretapping and bugging of law-abiding citizens cannot occur” (United States v. U.S. District Court, 407 U.S. 297 [1972], also known as the Keith case). The White House wiretaps also kept Kissinger in court for two decades. Morton Halperin, his aide at the NSC, sued Kissinger over the taps, seeking a formal written apology, not a financial windfall. It took until 1991, and a ruling from the Supreme Court, before Kissinger wrote that letter.

  * Richardson’s appointment as attorney general began the second reshuffling of Nixon’s Cabinet and inner circle in 1973 (a third was soon to come). James Schlesinger took Richardson’s place as secretary of defense. William Colby succeeded Schlesinger at the CIA. Former defense secretary Mel Laird and former treasury secretary John Connally returned to the White House to offer Nixon advice and counsel alongside the new chief of staff, Al Haig. But no one could replace Haldeman and Ehrlichman. “I had cut off one arm and then the other” by dismissing them, Nixon wrote. “The amputation may have been necessary for even a chance at survival, but what I had had to do left me so anguished and saddened that from that day on the presidency lost all joy for me” (RN, p. 849).

  * A federal grand jury was working on a case captioned United States of America v. Spiro T. Agnew. Nixon had learned that Agnew was suspected of taking kickbacks from contractors while governor of Maryland—and while the vice president of the United States. Still, Nixon was pleased to have him. He saw Agnew’s sleaze as insurance against his own impeachment.

  * It will be recalled that Nixon spoke on Sunday, April 15, with both men. Petersen, clad in a filthy T-shirt, had rebuked Nixon for defending Haldeman and Ehrlichman, saying it “does not speak well of you as a president.” Dean, in turn, intuited that Nixon’s contrived conversation and skulking conduct that night “made me wonder (as I later testified) if he was recording me.” Peterson had told Cox that Nixon had offered to let him, Petersen, listen to “a tape of a conversation” with Dean recorded that night—as Buzhardt informed Nixon on June 6. Amazingly, this tape did not exist: either a negligent Secret Service agent had forgotten to set a new reel spinning or the tape was discovered and destroyed.

  † John Dean had hired a criminal lawyer, Charles N. Shaffer Jr., to help him prepare for his testimony. Dean recalled in his book Blind Ambition that he told Shaffer what he knew and asked the attorney what he thought. Shaffer said: “The president is a goddamn criminal, that’s what I think.”

  * King Timahoe was the president’s unaffectionate Irish setter.

  * In a memoir published posthumously in 2013, Bork said he went to see the president that evening, and that Nixon offered him the next available Supreme Court seat. President Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, but the Senate rejected the nomination—in part due to Bork’s role in the Saturday Night Massacre.

  * “Actually Al Haig was the President of the United States,” said William Lloyd Stearman, at the time the chief of the NSC’s Indochina staff. And “it became unpatriotic to attack Kissinger,” said E. Wayne Merry, then a State Department aide for congressional relations, “even when members of Congress were very dubious about some of the things he was doing.” These quotations are from the Foreign Affairs Oral History collection.

  * The IRS also had discovered that Bebe Rebozo had been holding $100,000 in cash from Howard Hughes for Richard Nixon, a purported campaign contribution never delivered to Nixon’s campaign. Nixon had suggested that Rebozo hang on to it for the future. But when the tax men came calling, Rebozo returned the cash to the Hughes organization. This, too, appeared unseemly to the American public when revealed in October 1973.

  * Ten months later, to the day, Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman were convicted of conspiracy and perjury. Each served a substantial sentence. Colson became a born-again Christian, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, went to prison, and spent most of his life as an evangelical devoted to prison reform. Additional defendants were former assistant attorney general for internal security Robert Mardian (convicted at trial but acquitted on appeal); CREEP lawyer Kenneth Parkinson (acquitted on all charges); and Haldeman aide Gordon Strachan (who won a separate trial and was found not guilty). The special prosecutor struck again on March 7: Ehrlichman, Colson, and Liddy were indicted for the Plumbers’ break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. All were convicted. Ehrlichman, in a memoir, called that break-in the seminal Watergate episode, the one that set the stage for all that followed.

  * Haldeman’s mordant comment concerned Nixon’s nomination of Pat Gray as FBI director. Gray hung himself, and John Dean, with his testimony. In turn, that set Dean toward bearing witness against Nixon.

  * Before taking the job, Doar chatted with David Miller, a future American ambassador; they were friends from Doar’s days at the Justic
e Department. Miller ran the White House Fellows program under Nixon; he knew many key players in Watergate. Miller left in 1971, sensing disaster approaching. “Mr. Doar knew that I had worked for President Nixon,” Miller recalled in a Foreign Affairs Oral History interview. Doar asked Miller: “Is there any chance that the President did not know about what these people were doing?” I said, “Absolutely none.” President Nixon was a detail-oriented control freak and the odds that the president was not personally involved were nil. Doar said, “That’s interesting.”