To be sure, the Vice President sits in on National Security Council meetings, where the gravest decisions of national policy are considered. But no one in an advisory position can prosper without staff help or the ability to follow up. The Vice President either supports the existing consensus, in which case he enhances the prevailing prejudice as to his irrelevance, or he challenges it, in which case he usually lacks detailed tactical knowledge and he risks becoming a nuisance. On one or two occasions when Agnew took a position challenging Nixon’s, he was excluded from a subsequent meeting even though the President adopted Agnew’s point of view. Nixon just wanted to make sure that everyone understood who was in charge.
Moreover, Presidents are encouraged in this tendency by their White House entourage. These men and women derive their power exclusively from propinquity to the President. They guard this relationship jealously against all outsiders. Their stock in trade is loyalty, an attitude that easy access to the President fosters and that shared experience with White House stresses tends to institutionalize. The President and his aides are beset by the same critics and journalists; they fight the same importuning bureaucracies; they are subject to harassment by the same pressure groups. A community of interests is inevitable, as is a joint front against all those with autonomous sources of loyalty and, worse still, independent ambitions.
While Cabinet members are not infrequently the target of these attitudes, they at least have the solace of having responsibility for many problems the President does not wish to touch because he lacks the staff to do so or because they are too controversial. And Cabinet officers have large bureaucracies of their own, more or less loyal to them. The Vice President has no such safety nets; he is the natural victim of the White House staff’s zeal; any consistent attempt to assert himself runs the risk of reducing his prospects for his paramount ambition: receiving the President’s endorsement for electoral succession.
The relationship between Nixon and Agnew illustrated these maxims; indeed, the personalities of the two men accentuated all the latent tensions. Nixon was solitary and chronically suspicious. He started out thinking of Agnew as a political bungler; always sensitive to being overshadowed, he may well have picked him for that reason. Later he came to see Agnew’s utility as a hired gun, attacking targets not suitable for Presidential assault or venting emotions that Nixon secretly shared but did not dare to articulate. He never considered Agnew up to succeeding him. He once said, only partly facetiously, that Agnew was his insurance policy against assassination.
Agnew in turn was ferociously proud. He suffered his peripheral roles in dignified silence. He deeply resented not having been briefed in advance on my secret trip to China. I found him highly intelligent and much subtler than his public image. But his frustrations turned him inward. And my impression on that evening was that Agnew was not exactly heartbroken over the prospect that his tormentors on the White House staff would now be taken down a peg. Throughout the initial period of Watergate Agnew remained conspicuously aloof. And when his own purgatory started, the White House, including Nixon, reciprocated by dissociating from him.
On April 17 that denouement would still have appeared fantasy. But Agnew’s icy detachment from his chief’s travail brought a premonition of imminent disaster. A Vice President eager to succeed would hardly be so cutting unless convinced that Nixon would not be decisive in the nominating process of 1976.
Another man I consulted was Bryce Harlow. Harlow had served on President Eisenhower’s staff and had been in charge of Congressional relations in the early years of the Nixon White House, before retiring again into private life at the end of 1970. An Oklahoman with a drawling voice, gentle manner, and wary eyes, Harlow had spent his adult life studying the ways of Washington, alternating between participant and observer. There has never been any doubt in my mind that Watergate could not have happened had Nixon been more confiding in Harlow or others of comparable stature. Harlow was a man not of soaring imagination but of encompassing prudence. He knew what the traffic would bear in Washington, but, more important, he understood what restraints must not be tested if democracy is to thrive. He had a deep sense for the Presidency, its power, its majesty, and the awful responsibility it imposes. His fundamental loyalty to a President was bounded by his personal integrity, his reverence for our institutions, and a sense of duty to the nation. With such a philosophy, Bryce found himself pushed to the sidelines by eager young votaries who were crudely assertive when it was not really necessary and craven when their careers were unexpectedly jeopardized.
I gave Harlow a brief account of what I knew and asked him what he thought had happened. “Some damn fool,” drawled Harlow, “walked into the Oval Office and took literally what he heard there.” Harlow mused that something like this had become inevitable. “If it had not been this, it would have been something worse.” The procedures had been too erratic, the atmosphere too paranoid. A housecleaning now might be good for the nation and make Nixon a great President. Thus, even Harlow did not conceive of a threat to Nixon’s Presidency itself, no doubt in part because the destruction of a President with its collapse of executive authority was too staggering to contemplate. Like Garment, he saw in Watergate a means to purify the Administration by getting rid of unsavory elements.
“The Germans”: Haldeman and Ehrlichman
THE media tended to portray H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman as Prussian drill masters implementing with their own sadistic frills malevolent orders from the Oval Office. I was generally contrasted favorably with them; it was believed that they “had it in for me,” as the saying goes. I was awarded the white hat, they the black: I returned telephone calls from journalists; I met many leading critics from the Congress, academia, and the media at dinner parties, and some were my friends; I listened to opposing points of view. Whether my interlocutors considered a dialogue a sign of agreement or whether I misled them by ambiguous statements is impossible to reconstruct at this remove — there was probably a combination of both.
The conventional perception of my relationships in the White House vastly oversimplified everybody’s role. For one thing, Haldeman and Ehrlichman was not a single firm; in some respects they were rivals. On the whole, Ehrlichman’s views were on the liberal side of the spectrum; he was truly interested in substance; he sponsored or supported domestic policies that were humane and progressive. In our internal deliberations he spoke in favor of reducing defense expenditures beyond a point I considered prudent so as to free resources for social programs; several times I appealed his interventions to Nixon. Ehrlichman was shaken by the student protest following the Cambodian incursions. He had three teenage children caught up in the campus upheaval and their travail touched him deeply. But no one could survive the White House without Presidential goodwill, and Nixon’s favor depended on the readiness to fall in with the paranoid cult of the tough guy. The conspiracy of the press, the hostility of the Establishment, the flatulence of the Georgetown set, were permanent features of Nixon’s conversation, which one challenged only at the cost of exclusion from the inner circle.
Rough talk and confrontational tactics did not come naturally to Ehrlichman. Every Presidential Assistant is tempted to purchase greater influence by humoring a President’s moods. Ehrlichman overcompensated; he felt compelled to translate some of Nixon’s musings into action, and as the official in charge of Nixon’s domestic programs he was in the front line of bitter tests of strength. To the mounting protest demonstrations, the massive leaks of documents, and the drift of the dissenters into extralegal activity, Ehrlichman responded with a zeal that was sometimes excessive and a boastfulness that later damaged him severely.
Toward me Ehrlichman showed a mixture of comradely goodwill and testy jealousy. He respected my views though not the assurance with which they were presented. But he would have been superhuman had he not resented the contrast drawn between us by the media. He had been associated with Nixon for too long for the President to tolerate on his part socia
l contacts and attitudes that in my case were treated as a congenital, inherited defect. Torn between his prohibited predilections to conciliate and his political survival, Ehrlichman made a virtue of necessity. He adopted a supercilious manner. Outsiders considered it a mark of arrogance; its real fount was ambivalence.
He had some solace scoring points against me by pretending to be more watchful against Nixon’s enemies than recent recruits from the Ivy League on my staff were and by conducting the investigation of some security leaks so as to reflect on my associates. But these were more in the nature of harassments than serious challenges. Despite occasional tensions, Ehrlichman and I were essentially friendly. I respected his goodwill and tough competence; he admired, as he envied, my prominence.
Haldeman was made of sterner stuff. He had been with Nixon for a decade and knew intimately the complexities and foibles of his master. Though by instinct conservative, he was at bottom uninterested in policy. Genuinely admiring of Nixon, he considered it his paramount duty to smooth out the roller coaster of Nixon’s emotions and to project to the outside world the appearance of steady, calm, unflappable leadership.
Convinced that image defined reality, Haldeman went along with, and frequently encouraged, Nixon’s nearly obsessive belief that all his difficulties were caused by inadequate public relations and that public relations was essentially a technical problem. Nixon never could rid himself of the delusion that only the inadequacy of his media staff kept him from receiving the acclaim he associated with John F. Kennedy (forgetting that after the first year his own approval rating in the polls was consistently higher than that of his martyred predecessor in office). Haldeman tended to confuse policy with procedure and substance with presentation. Much of the time between President and chief of staff was devoted to discussing how to manipulate the press — a quest doomed to futility so long as both rejected the most obvious, and indeed only possible, strategy: conducting a serious, honest, and continuing dialogue with the hated, feared, and secretly envied representatives of the media.
This was all the more remarkable because Nixon and Haldeman seemed to grasp very well that personal contact and credibility made a crucial difference. A shower of memoranda rained down on the hapless White House staff from the Oval Office via Haldeman, detailing the “line” to take with the press and meting out punishment to offending journalists, usually the denial of access to officials (which most of us ignored most of the time). This “line” was occasionally some dig at a political rival; more frequently it consisted of a recital of our leader’s sterling qualities. Since I was considered to have special entrée, ascribed to my membership in the Georgetown set (whose members I had never met before coming to Washington), I was the recipient of a disproportionate number of these missives.
I never understood why the other members of Nixon’s entourage did not strive for the same relationship with the Washington media as I had. Diffidence must have played a large part, a failing of which I am rarely accused. Even though I had never held a formal news conference before being appointed security adviser, I did well and as a result was treated in the White House as if I possessed some special advantage in public relations. Perhaps, so my associates reasoned, it was because of my Ivy League background and my tangential relation in the early Sixties with the Kennedy Administration. (The Kennedy White House, it must be recorded, saw no such gifts in me; I was kept miles away from any representative of the media.) At any rate, I was encouraged to cultivate the media and was then resented when my press relations were better than those of my associates.
Later, Haldeman was accused of exercising a baleful influence on Nixon by isolating him. This was unjust. Nixon’s isolation was self-imposed. He dreaded meeting strangers. He was unable to give direct orders to those who disagreed with him. When he did see a new personality, he avoided any risk of tension by seeming to agree with everything his interlocutor said. The vaunted Haldeman procedures were an effort to compensate for these weaknesses. Access to the President was restricted because even a tightly limited schedule of appointments brought forth constant Presidential complaints. A White House staffer sat in on every meeting with an outsider so as to ensure some follow-up on Presidential promises (and to be aware on occasion of the need to disavow them). As much staff business as possible was conducted by memoranda because Nixon was much more likely to express his real views in writing than face to face.
At the same time, those White House aides with whom he felt secure served frequently as lightning rods upon which Nixon released nervous tension. One would sit for hours listening to Nixon’s musings, throwing an occasional log on the fire, praying for some crisis to bring relief, alert to the opportunity to pass the torch to some unwary aide who wandered in more or less by accident. But no one logged even approximately Haldeman’s hours or listened with similar goodwill. And if Haldeman was eventually destroyed because he carried out the President’s wishes too literally, it is also my impression that many instructions given in the heat of emotion never went further than the yellow pads where Haldeman dutifully noted them as if their execution awaited only his exit from the Oval Office.
Haldeman’s lack of interest in policy had its advantages. One could be certain that he would report scrupulously to the President and not skewer one’s views on his own biases. Indeed, not infrequently I used him as a conduit for views that ran counter to Presidential preferences, because Nixon was less likely to brush off the bearer of unwelcome intelligence than the originator and because Haldeman would do his utmost to see to it that Nixon would consider even subjects distasteful to him (provided one succeeded in convincing Haldeman first that to ignore it would cause some damage to the President). Haldeman was free of personal ambition or at least his ambition was fulfilled in the position he occupied. Precisely because there was nothing more to achieve, he had no need to engage in bureaucratic backbiting.
And yet, there resided in this almost inhuman detachment the seeds of the eventual destruction of the Nixon Administration. Haldeman had no deep experience in national politics; his feel for the propriety, scope, and limits of Presidential prerogative was simply not equal to the role he imposed upon himself. His second mistake was in the manner in which he sought to cope with the erratic vacillations of his client, the President. Haldeman’s chilly discipline here was functional; he sought unquestioning obedience from his staff in part to short-circuit apparently wayward Presidential commands. But there are two ways of achieving discipline: by motivating subordinates so that they want to agree with the principal’s objectives; or by establishing a rigid hierarchy, making it inconceivable that an order is ever challenged because no subordinate is granted the privilege of independent judgment. Haldeman chose the latter course. He selected miniature editions of himself — men and women (mostly men) with no political past, whose loyalty was determined by a chain of command and whose devotion was vouchsafed merely by the opportunity to play a part in great events.
But men who lack a past are unreliable guides to the future. They grow euphoric in authority and panicky at the thought of losing it. During Nixon’s ascendancy, too many staffers were overbearing; they sought surcease from Haldeman’s insatiable demands in the browbeating of their own subordinates, including the established Cabinet departments that were not technically subordinates at all. Thus Haldeman’s lack of direction was aggravated by an even more rudderless group of associates.
The upshot was that the White House staff’s attitude to the President resembled that of an advertising agency — whence indeed most came — to an exclusive, temperamental client. They might differ with some directives; they would seek to mitigate excessive demands insofar as they had standards for gauging them; but at the end of the day they would be judged by their efficiency in carrying out difficult assignments. They were expediters, not balance wheels. And once the machine started skidding, they accelerated its descent over the precipice rather than braking it in time.
Haldeman’s relations with me had ingredients f
or friction. He was a conservative middle-class Californian, with all the sentiments, suspicions, and secret envy of that breed. He had rarely met and had never needed to deal consistently with a man of my background (though he overestimated how close I really was to the despised Establishment). He had stuck with Nixon after the gubernatorial defeat of 1962 when only a congenital outsider would remain with so unpromising a figure. He genuinely believed in Nixon’s mission. It was bound to be irritating to him to see a newcomer, a member of the Rockefeller team, one who had consistently opposed Nixon, garner so much publicity. But he rarely showed jealousy. The key to our relatively quiescent relationship was that he did not feel competitive with me. He affected tolerant amusement about what he took to be my excessive passion for policy and, in fact, he treated any indication of more than routine interest in substance as excessive. We sometimes clashed when he insisted on his prerogative to screen access to the President in a manner that I considered mindless or when the obsession with public relations was pushed to a point where I thought it harmed policy. But such disagreements were in fact much less frequent than might be expected between chief of staff and national security adviser.
Haldeman’s attitude to me was fundamentally a reflection of Nixon’s. When Haldeman harassed me, I could be sure that it was to carry out some design of the President. For despite his pretense of being above the battle, Nixon did not really mind the tug-of-war that developed between Secretary of State Rogers and me. Usually Haldeman was instructed to side with me but also to make sure that no issue was ever settled conclusively. (And, of course, I had no way of knowing what Rogers was told behind my back.) Nixon, moreover, was convinced that my special talents would flourish best under conditions of personal insecurity; as I have noted, he periodically saw to it that I developed some doubts about his purposes or priorities or about my standing with him.3
Years of Upheaval Page 15