The Wars of Watergate

by Stanley I. Kutler

  Knowledge was control, and it extended even to what did not happen. Early in the first term, the President conveyed to Haldeman his “uneasy feeling” that many of his directives for action were ignored when the staff thought them unreasonable or unattainable. “I respect this kind of judgment,” Nixon remarked. But, he added, “I want to know when that kind of decision is made.” He instructed Haldeman to keep a checklist indicating what action had been taken, “and particularly I want to know when the action that I have ordered has not been taken.” Two years later, the President told Haldeman to let friendly reporters and commentators know that “I am very persistent in checking to see whether my orders are carried out.”14

  Alexander Butterfield, a Haldeman aide who monitored the paper and staff flow to the President and set his schedule each day, saw the President as much, if not more, than Haldeman did. Testifying to the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, Butterfield coolly described Nixon’s conduct of his office.15 Butterfield’s detailed testimony amply corroborated Harry Dent’s general observation that in the last analysis Nixon was the master in his house.

  The President’s day began with Patrick Buchanan’s news summaries, running usually from sixty to eighty pages and including a listing of recent happenings and notice of attitudes toward the President and his policies throughout the nation. Nixon made marginal comments, directing Haldeman or Ehrlichman to take note, or even commanding sudden, dramatic (and often unattainable) changes, such as telling Kissinger to cut American forces in the Philippines by 80 percent in six months. Butterfield regularly saw the President’s personal memoranda to his staff, and he described approvingly their attention to detail. Nixon was concerned about whether curtains were open or closed, on which side of the room the staff should place state gifts to visiting dignitaries, the table and entertainment arrangements for social dinners, whether and when salads should be served, whether the Secret Service should salute and sing during the playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” what aides had what photographs of former presidents in their offices, the comments of visitors on White House paintings, and whether or not to move the tennis courts. He very much wanted to know where his people were and what they were doing. He instructed Butterfield to institute a program requiring Cabinet members to clear travel plans through Butterfield’s office. “[A]ll of these things are understandable,” Butterfield remarked at one point. They were, he noted, “typical of a thoughtful and careful and well-disciplined man,… highly interested in detail.” Such a man was unlikely to give carte blanche to mere gatekeepers.

  Nixon gave lip service to delegating work on details, but he qualified this by asserting personal control over “matters … where I have particular competence and where my decision rather than anybody else’s can make the big difference.” Thus he prescribed the order of seating and serving at dinners and told Haldeman he wanted all musical selections for state dinners cleared with him. He ordered an Army choir to sing for a congressional dinner, later adding that he knew Leonard Garment and others did not approve of such entertainment, preferring instead “some offbeat modern ballet such as that utterly disgusting group we had from New York.” Nixon wanted to know when a baseball player hit his five-hundredth home run so he could properly congratulate him; he dictated a memorandum requesting a waste basket for the washroom off the Oval Office; and he ordered precise word limits on speeches prepared for him. In the spring of 1972, he gave a great deal of attention to “his” gift of a blue Lincoln Continental to Leonid Brezhnev. “For Ford [Motor Company], of course, it would be a pure business deal in any event since they are negotiating with the Russians for putting in a plant,” Nixon told Haldeman. The Chief of Staff dutifully repeated the language verbatim as he delegated the problem to one of his own aides.16

  The Haldeman directives, whether written memos or shouted instructions to awed subordinates, are legendary for their authoritativeness. Even when the staff characterized them as “Mickey Mouse” orders—such as harassing a senator who had said something critical about the President the day before—they knew, as Dent remembered, that the instructions really came from the President. The authority was Nixon’s, that “one well, one spring,” as Dent said. Butterfield vividly recalled how Haldeman regularly emerged from the Oval Office with his yellow legal pad, reading directives to others or going to his “dictating machine [to] spit out instructions to the staff members.” Presidential commands, both important and trivial, were often formulated as the President sat alone at night in his Executive Office Building hideaway or in the Lincoln Room in the White House residential quarters. Nixon “was unquestionably the decision maker,” Butterfield insisted, “and those decisions would normally be brought down in the morning on the yellow pad.” Dent’s former secretary corroborated the technique. Haldeman had taken the woman for his own staff. Her job: to type Nixon’s memos, either handwritten or left on a Dictabelt from the previous evening. Haldeman then turned them into “his” instructions, often repeating the President’s language precisely.17

  Butterfield admired Haldeman as a friend and patron, and as his immediate superior, but he had no illusions about the role of the Chief of Staff. Haldeman was only “an implementer,” who did “nothing without the knowledge of the President”; “he was not a decision maker,” Butterfield later told House and Senate investigators. “Haldeman’s preoccupation [was] … to see that things went in accordance with the President’s likes and dislikes.” To that, Haldeman was “dedicated … in a very selfless way.” Inadvertently, Butterfield confirmed the danger that Reedy had sighted four years earlier. The President’s staff, Butterfield thought, sometimes mirrored his personality too readily, and even accentuated his weaknesses rather than compensating for them. Julie Eisenhower was a bit more delicate: “loyalty was demanded of all, not judgment.”

  Sometimes, the staff might create an illusion of self-sufficiency when there was none. In a reflective mood, Butterfield thought “that may have happened” in the Nixon White House. Charles Lichenstein, a sometime aide and ghostwriter, thought that Nixon had a devastating tendency to isolate himself from possibly critical assistants. “This inability to draw on good, skilled people is an inadequacy in Richard Nixon,” he said, and sadly added that he was at a loss to explain it. Vice President Spiro Agnew was contemptuous of the sycophantic quality of Nixon’s staff. Whatever directives came from Nixon, via Haldeman and Ehrlichman, generally were followed, an Agnew aide added, largely because the staff had no principles of their own. Harry Dent, on the other hand, remembered that he and others would simply ignore some of the more outrageous or silly orders. Stephen Bull, who also worked in the Oval Office and later assumed many of Butterfield’s duties, thought that Haldeman occasionally ignored Nixon’s instructions or allowed others to ignore them. Bull thought that Haldeman was merely an “extension” of the President on policy matters, but that he managed the staff on his own. Finally, Communications Director Herbert Klein recognized that Haldeman operated with “the full concurrence and encouragement of the President.”18

  Butterfield portrayed Richard Nixon as a man utterly consumed with his position. Intending his comments as complimentary, Butterfield described Nixon’s total dedication and involvement. “He was preoccupied with the Presidency … with his place in history, with his Presidency as history would see it.” Remarkably, Butterfield anticipated the essence of Nixon’s memoirs and his second “long march”—that is, his search for rehabilitation following the disgrace of his resignation. That kind of man, with that kind of preoccupation with detail, never openly subscribed to managerial theories of loose delegation.

  When Nixon delegated authority, he often would use two men for essentially the same task, but he would work them in different ways. Haldeman had a shrewd perception of Nixon’s different uses for men such as John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and himself. “Most of us operated in watertight compartments, unaware of what Nixon was ordering our colleagues to do,” Ehrlichman wrote. Murray Chotiner, who had worked
with Nixon since 1946, told White House Counsel John Dean that the President did not like his aides to share information he had provided them, thus encouraging an aura of secrecy and a sense of compartmentalization. Henry Kissinger, hardly a neophyte in understanding administrative dynamics, similarly acknowledged the careful compartmentalization of information in the Nixon White House.

  Compartmentalization ensured fragmentation of power, precisely what Nixon desired. (Of course, the technique was not new; Franklin D. Roosevelt was a past master at such administrative dealings.) In 1972, for example, Nixon appointed John Mitchell as his ostensible campaign director; at the same time, Haldeman directed a good share of the operation from the White House. Haldeman’s task was chiefly to audit Mitchell’s activities, but according to Dent, all this was in order for Nixon to keep control. At one point, Mitchell wanted Dent as his assistant, but the President sent Haldeman’s aide, Jeb Stuart Magruder. “Things didn’t happen around that white House willy-nilly,” Dent insisted. “The man on top was on top.”19

  The top man had elaborate procedures for ensuring that his staff briefed him fully and across an incredible range of subjects, as Butterfield explained. The concerns for presidential briefings sometimes went to ridiculous lengths. In March 1971, Garment was working mainly as house advocate and monitor of civil rights, ethnic, and intellectual affairs. He told Henry Kissinger that “a confidential source”—probably a secretary or a congressional aide—had provided a copy of the remarks that a delegation of black congressmen would make to Nixon about the continued bombing in Indochina. Curiously, Garment asked Kissinger to provide background material, so that the White House staff could properly brief the President for his response. The request seemed improbable. What could the delegation possibly say that would necessitate such activity and concern on the part of the President? After all, this President was supposed to be expert on foreign and military policies.

  The White House staff simply feared the consequences if the President stumbled. Kissinger realized that staffers never knew which Nixon they would encounter: the “idealist[ic], thoughtful, generous” one, or the “vindictive, petty, emotional” Nixon. One was “a reflective, philosophical, stoical Nixon, but its obverse was an impetuous, impulsive, and erratic one.” Kissinger claimed that he could recognize an “impulsive instruction,” and thought it wise to have the “reflective Nixon” go over it before taking any action.20 The observation is instructive for its insight into personality; more important, it demonstrates a president in command—with whatever personality was momentarily dominant in his psyche.

  Nixon diligently struggled to create the illusion that he had broadly delegated authority to experts throughout the government. The creation of his Cabinet is a case in point. He introduced his designated department heads on national television on the evening of December 11, 1968. The President presented his nominees one by one, assuring the country that these were independent thinkers and declaring that not one of them “agrees with me completely on everything.” He insisted he did not want a Cabinet of “yes men” and each officer, he promised, “will be urged to speak out” on the great issues. As Secretary of State he selected his claimed friend William Rogers; actually, Nixon harbored deep resentments against Rogers. “Ineffectual, selfish, and vain,” was how he characterized the Secretary in private. Rogers in turn could not, as Elliot Richardson observed, “psychologically bring himself to subordinate himself to Nixon.” When Nixon made the appointment, he and Henry Kissinger already had worked out a plan for bypassing the State Department in making foreign policy.

  The President-elect also named George Romney to Housing and Urban Development—Romney, his former foe in the primaries, for whom Nixon had nothing but personal and intellectual contempt, having once compared him to Harold Stassen. Within five years, Nixon had a new Cabinet. When his Administration began to disintegrate in 1973, he promised to make greater use of his Cabinet and deal directly with the heads of the departments.21 He never did.

  “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President,” Nixon said in 1967. “All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of State is really important; the President makes foreign policy.” This oft-repeated remark implied that Nixon really had little interest in domestic affairs and was prepared to allow a “competent Cabinet” to run its own course. Nothing was further from the truth. In his eyes, the Cabinet was only an extension of Richard Nixon and the Oval Office; he well realized how domestic affairs intersected with political and public-relations considerations which in turn vitally affected his public standing. As a result, Nixon intimately involved himself in overseeing Cabinet activities, once again using his trusted staff to determine and protect his interests. His interests, as usual, were political and personal rather than those of substantive policies.

  Three days after the outset of the Nixon Administration, Harry Dent complained that some Cabinet members had not been “giving enough weight to political considerations.” Jeb Magruder described the blunt manner in which he or Charles Colson would tell a Cabinet officer: “Mr. Secretary, we’re sending over this speech that we’d like you to deliver.” Cabinet officers basically were “useful spokesmen when we wanted to push a particular line—on Cambodia, on [Supreme Court nominee Harrold] Cars well, or whatever.” Another staffer warned Cabinet officers to “rethink” their positions if they wished to say anything critical about the President or his policies, for they served at the President’s pleasure, and “they should know that it is the President’s intentions and the President’s program that count and not what some cabinet member or undersecretary thinks.” White House aides had to “readjust the compasses of political appointees” lest any develop proprietary interests and err by speaking of “my department” or “my program.”22

  The fate of Interior Secretary Walter Hickel, the former governor of Alaska, gave the lie to the President’s public call for independent thinking. White House staffers such as Magruder thought Hickel to be “one of the most long-winded and egocentric men” in Washington—and soon vented those feelings to the media. One man’s longwindedness, however, was another man’s concern for allowing departments “to develop policy for those activities under [their] control.” Hickel bristled at the White House interference and the prospect of doing nothing except waiting for “marching orders to be issued by the Executive Mansion.”

  Hickel went public with his criticism during the Cambodia invasion in the spring of 1970, urging the President to break away from his White House isolation and his dependence on his subordinates. The President conveyed a clear message that it would be “a good idea” for Hickel to return to Alaska and run for governor. Hickel ignored the warning. Five months later, Nixon ordered an audit of the Interior Department, specifically looking for excessive spending by the Secretary on his office remodeling and his travels. On Thanksgiving Eve, the President saw Hickel and asked for his resignation. Hickel wanted to know if that was to be effective on the first of the year. “That’s effective today,” Nixon replied. Later, when Robert Finch, in charge of Health, Education and Welfare, similarly tried to move the President in a different direction, his fate was no different from Hickel’s, albeit a little less harsh. Finch was invited to serve in the White House as a presidential assistant, but he soon discovered he had no access to Nixon. “My utility was so badly diminished,” he recalled, “I thought I had better get out. I did.”23

  Henry Kissinger, who worked within both the White House and the Cabinet, saw the President’s relations with his Cabinet as psychologically complex. He thought “students of psychology” could explain why every President since Kennedy trusted his immediate aides more than his Cabinet.24 The answer, of course, lies in presidential perceptions of political and personal needs, the need to enhance his image and power, as well as to protect his public standing. The Nixon White House staff was particularly attuned to those requirements. Simple g
estures were weighed with political consequences always in mind. In March 1969, a staff aide proposed that the President stop in Atlanta on Good Friday on his way to Florida and meet privately with Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. More than a gesture was involved, for it was suggested that the President then go on television and talk about nonviolence in the context of Easter week. The act, it was believed, would improve the Administration’s relations with blacks and defuse black militants’ calls for violence.

  The visit to Mrs. King seemingly had support across a wide ideological spectrum in the Administration: Leonard Garment, Arthur Burns, Richard Kleindienst, Herbert Klein, and Patrick Buchanan. In fact, however, Buchanan reached the President through another door, reminding him of the political consequences of such a visit in terms of the constituency that Nixon had carefully cultivated in the 1968 campaign. “It would outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue, and perhaps worse. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history—some believe him a Messiah, others consider him the devil incarnate.” Buchanan knew which he believed. King’s background, he reminded the President, “was a sordid one, if we can believe our friends in the Bureau.” Haldeman and Ehrlichman similarly advised against the move. The President and his immediate entourage went directly to Key Biscayne for his vacation.25

  Just after the turn of the new year, 1969, Daniel P. Moynihan, a Democrat who had agreed to serve as a presidential aide (“Unlike so many liberal academics, Moynihan was free of professional jargon and ideological cant,” Nixon recalled), told the President-elect that his task was clear: “To restore the authority of American institutions.” Moynihan worried that the United States might be in a position analogous to that of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s—in danger of collapse as a result of assaults from the extremes. Restoring unity—“bringing us together”—was essential to preventing that collapse. Unfortunately, as even his admirers admitted, Richard Nixon made his famous promise of unification “just once, never before, nor after.” William Safire, one of the President’s speechwriters and often identified with Nixon’s “good side,” told his chief on Armistice Day 1970: “The war is ending. Let’s turn on the lights.”26 But all the wars were not over for Nixon; he still had need of the dark. Even in the first term, life in the White House demonstrated an enormous preoccupation with imagery and with the exploitation of social divisions for immediate political gain. That first term uncannily reflected the style and process of the 1968 campaign.