The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

by Nancy Gibbs

  “Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

  Johnson found ways to show his gratitude a few months later: in February 1970, one of his aides let Haldeman know that reporters had been calling looking for Johnson to discuss Anna Chennault and the 1968 finale; Johnson had refused, and instructed his aides to do likewise. Haldeman, needless to say, was surprised and pleased, and thanked Johnson again for his support for the president. The night after Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia in May of 1970, Johnson made his first speech since leaving office, at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Chicago, and placed the blame for the violence on Hanoi. “This nation can only have one President at a time,” he said, and urged that all Americans support “our president.” The nation’s campuses erupted; National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State. The two presidents conferred at the White House: “You know in these times of difficulty,” Johnson wrote to Nixon afterward, “I stand ready to help whenever possible.”

  Johnson would soon have some advice for Nixon regarding his legacy. Don Kendall, chairman of PepsiCo, was planning Nixon’s presidential library, and consulted with Johnson about the whole challenge of memory management. Nixon had been foolish, Johnson told Kendall, to rip out the taping system; he would need it when the time came to write his memoirs. Nixon himself worried that there was too much room for misunderstanding or misrepresentation in his conversations with foreign leaders—or for that matter, with advisors like Kissinger, whose recollections of Oval Office conversations might conveniently shift over time. So after ripping up Johnson’s recording system, he had a new one secretly installed in February of 1971; five microphones were planted in his Oval Office desk, two on either side of the fireplace; two in the Cabinet Room, then four more in his Old Executive Office Building hideaway. How could so private a man risk what became the ultimate public exposure? “Because he was convinced left-leaning historians would try to deny him his place in history,” Safire argued, “because he wanted to write memoirs better than Churchill’s; and because he was sure he would have the same total control of his tapes that Kennedy and Johnson had of theirs.”

  But unlike their manual system, his was automatic, voice-activated.

  “For want of a toggle switch,” one White House staffer said, “the presidency was lost.”

  The Pentagon Papers

  One can’t understand the fate of the Nixon presidency without understanding that he was a man forever at war. His critics charged that he would do anything to protect his power and his right to abuse it; he would forever insist he was protecting the presidency, which is one reason he had faith that Lyndon Johnson, for all their differences and complex history, was more ally than enemy. It was a young David Broder, writing in the Washington Post less than a year after Nixon took office, who foresaw the battle lines. “It is becoming more obvious with every passing day that the men and the movement that broke Lyndon B. Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard M. Nixon in 1969,” he wrote. Nixon’s opponents cast an unpopular and expensive war as an immoral and indecent one, which must be ended by whatever means necessary—even if that meant destroying a president’s capacity to lead, to negotiate, to maneuver in the global arena. Broder all but dared them to “put their convictions to the test by moving to impeach him. Is that not, really, the proper course? . . . Rather than leaving the nation with a broken President at its head for three years, would not their cause and the country be better served by resort to the constitutional method for removing a President?” That was October 1969.

  “They” had driven Johnson from office and they were out to break Nixon. Or that’s the way it looked to the president’s men when the first shots were fired in the battle that would end with his presidency in ashes.

  The front page of the New York Times on June 13, 1971, featured a charming picture of Nixon with his daughter Tricia, smiling proudly on her wedding day. It was the first outdoor White House wedding in 171 years; he had gotten regular updates from the Air Force, guiding him on whether the weather would hold. Nixon used to say that only people running for sheriff danced in public; and yet there he was, dancing with Pat for the cameras, and Tricia, and Julie, and even Lynda Bird Johnson.

  The article next to the photo told a different story. “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.” There were three thousand pages of narrative, four thousand pages of secret supporting documents, 2.5 million words in all, a secret history of the Vietnam War commissioned by Robert McNamara, directed by Leslie Gelb, and passed to the Times by former Marine captain and Pentagon aide Daniel Ellsberg. It was the largest leak of classified documents in American history; and if it did nothing else, it would reveal to the American public how baldly their presidents had lied to them about a war many wished had never been fought.

  Nixon’s first reaction was calm; the history ended in January of 1969, five days before he took office—so it was Kennedy’s secrets that were being revealed, and especially Johnson’s. When Kissinger’s assistant Alexander Haig first called him just after noon to discuss the leak, Nixon said he hadn’t even read the Times story. Haig called it a devastating security breach. “It’s brutal on President Johnson,” he said. “They’re gonna end up in a massive gut-fight in the Democratic party over this thing.”

  In other words, this was really just a Democratic family feud. When Nixon and Kissinger, now national security advisor, talked that afternoon, Kissinger was reassuring: “I think they outsmarted themselves,” Kissinger said of the Times, “because . . . they had sort of tried to make it ‘Nixon’s War,’ and what this massively proves is that, if it’s anybody’s war, it’s Kennedy’s and Johnson’s.”

  But it didn’t take much to spin the president around. Just because it was not Nixon’s secrets being revealed did not mean he wouldn’t be damaged by them. If one president can stand accused of barefaced lying to the American public, it damages the credibility of all of them. And if a president can’t protect the country’s secrets, he looks weak and vulnerable. Nixon’s entire foreign policy strategy depended on secrecy: secret bombing of Cambodia, sensitive disarmament talks with the Russians, clandestine efforts to lay the groundwork for his historic opening to China. Kissinger’s first secret trip to China was just three weeks away. Breakthroughs on those fronts would give him the leverage he needed in his secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese. If the revelations fueled public demands to end the war, Hanoi might feel less need to compromise.

  Everything was connected; the White House could not afford to look as though it was not in control of events. “This is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out,” Nixon told Kissinger.

  “Exactly, Mr. President,” Kissinger agreed. “I’m absolutely certain that this violates all sorts of security laws.”

  This was indeed a Nixon soft spot, dating all the way back to the Hiss case—the way the bureaucrats, the liberals, the in-house traitors would put national security at risk to pursue their own agendas.

  “People have gotta be put to the torch for this sort of thing,” Nixon said.

  John Mitchell, now attorney general, sought and won an injunction to halt the papers’ publication while the government assessed whether they posed a national security risk. But Nixon needed to swing public opinion against the leaks, make it clear how damaging this kind of rogue operation was to national security.

  He needed, in other words, some help from Lyndon Johnson. This fight was not just about Nixon’s presidency. It was a fight about the presidency itself.

  On Monday, June 14, Walt Rostow, Johnson’s national security advisor, had called Kissinger on Johnson’s behalf. “He said that it is Johnson’s strong view that this is an attack on the whole integrity of government,” Kissinger reported to Nixon and Mitchell. “That if whole file cabinets can be stolen and then made available to the press, you can’t have orderly government anymore.” If Nixon acts to defend the integrity of America’s national security, “any action
we take he will back publicly.”

  Mitchell offered his own tidbit from Rostow: that the prime suspect for the leak was “a gentleman by the name of Ellsberg.”

  That had to be a bad moment for Kissinger. He had assembled his own Best and Brightest at the National Security Council, including bright Democrats who had worked for Johnson as well—like Ellsberg, who consulted for both administrations and helped Kissinger on a review of Vietnam policy.

  In fact it was Ellsberg, of all people, who tried to warn Kissinger about what happens when a new president and his team suddenly come into office and have access to the top secret intelligence reports. “First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all—so much! incredible!—suddenly available to you,” he told Kissinger after the election. “But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess.” You’ll be amazed that the insiders tolerated the bleatings of the outsiders without divulging what they knew, he explained, and you’ll feel like a fool. But soon, “after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input . . . which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t . . . and that all those other people are fools.” The warning captured perfectly how presidents become isolated, their circle of trust constrained by knowledge that is theirs alone.

  Over the next few days, Nixon’s obsession grew. He instructed everyone to refer to “The Kennedy-Johnson papers,” to reinforce that this was the Democrats’ problem—but at the same time to emphasize the illegal interference with the government’s ability to conduct foreign policy. Other papers should denounce the Times for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. No newspaper was above the law. Above all, get Johnson to weigh in.

  At twilight on June 17, 1971, Nixon met in the Oval Office with Haldeman, Kissinger, and Ehrlichman. It was one year to the day before the Watergate break-in.

  You could say that’s when it all began.

  Kissinger had to put some distance between himself and Ellsberg. “He’s a genius,” Kissinger said. “He’s the brightest student I’ve ever had”—an interesting observation given that he had never taught him, but had indeed hired him, and invited him to speak at his Harvard seminars. “He may have been a Marine once. But at any rate, he then flipped. Late ’67, he suddenly turned into a peacenik.” Kissinger suggested that deviant sex and drugs were to blame. And now Ellsberg was the ultimate enemy, a fanatic with an agenda and the evidence that could paralyze policymaking if things went badly. He had gone to work at the RAND Corporation, Kissinger explained, which had a set of the Pentagon Papers.

  “I think he stole one set of the RAND documents, filmed them or Xeroxed them, and put them back in.”

  And the New York Times of course would be all too eager to take them. So how to maximize the damage to the Democrats? Nixon wondered whether they could leak material on Kennedy’s role in the coup that toppled Diem.

  “You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman said.

  “How?” Nixon wondered.

  “The Bombing Halt stuff is all in the same file,” Haldeman explained. “Or in some of the same hands.”

  Which reminded Nixon: why hadn’t Haldeman and Kissinger come up with that file? “Damn it, I asked for that, because I need it.”

  “Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years,” Kissinger said.

  “. . . But there is a file on it,” Haldeman said. Now Nixon was interested. Tom Charles Huston, Nixon’s enterprising young internal spymaster, swore that there was a top secret file on the bombing halt at Brookings. It was Huston who had written an infamous 1970 memo advocating burglary as a means of law enforcement, which Nixon approved but J. Edgar Hoover got cold feet about and shut down. Huston had proposed breaking into Brookings to rifle the safe.

  “But couldn’t we go over?” Kissinger asked. “Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”

  “I want it implemented on a thievery basis,” Nixon said, which suggested that he didn’t want anyone but him taking a second look at those files. “Goddamn it get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

  Haldeman came back to the Johnson gambit. “My point is, Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t know for sure that we don’t have them.”

  Kissinger still didn’t follow. “But what good will it do you, the bombing halt file?”

  “To blackmail him,” Nixon said. “Because he used the bombing halt for political purposes.”

  “The bombing halt file,” Haldeman said, “would really kill Johnson.” That assumed that it would reveal that Johnson had timed the halt for political advantage—which the record suggests he didn’t—and that he had illegally bugged Nixon’s plane, which he hadn’t.

  Kissinger knew at least some of this. He had been there, playing both sides, keeping Nixon informed even as he was being briefed by the U.S. negotiators in Paris as they worked their way toward a peace deal. He didn’t see it as an election gambit—in fact, he’d never heard any discussion about timing the halt for maximum political advantage. “To the best of my knowledge,” he said, “there was never any conversation in which they said we’ll hold it until the end of October.”

  Nixon knew this too; but the point of the bombing halt file was not that it would allow Nixon to pressure Johnson; he feared that it could be used against him if his efforts to derail the peace talks were revealed.

  This was getting complicated. Nixon still wanted to find a way for Johnson to join him in denouncing the leaks, make the whole issue bipartisan. “Anyway, why won’t Johnson have a press conference in your view?”

  “Because he’s smart enough not to,” Haldeman said. “If he has a press conference . . . the thing that that will accomplish is clearly put this as a battle of Lyndon Johnson’s credibility versus the world.”

  Haldeman was right; Johnson was dragging his feet. Each day’s installment of classified documents was a body blow. Johnson was accused of campaigning in 1964 on a promise not to widen the war when he was actually drawing up plans to expand it; of sending American boys to die not to stop communism or liberate the South Vietnamese, but, according to a memo from the assistant secretary of defense, “to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat”; of pursuing a lethal bombing campaign long after he’d been informed it was militarily useless. He may have liked to protect the presidency by denouncing leaks—but he had his own legacy at stake as well. He needed to figure out how to defend it.

  Half an hour later Nixon called his aide Charles Colson to find out what luck they had had getting Johnson to make a statement. “This is terribly important,” Nixon said. “Johnson’s got to step up to this, and he’s got to step up to it on the basis that there is a hell of a lot going to come out on a lot of other things, too.” Colson reported that various Johnson associates were urging him to give a press conference, lest his silence be misinterpreted. But now Rostow was advising Johnson not to say anything, because the legal case against the New York Times was pending.

  “Oh, no, no, no, that’s just an excuse,” Nixon said. “Rostow just doesn’t want to get him involved and put all the blame on us, that’s all.” Of course they both understood that with Johnson tucked away on his ranch and Nixon in the Oval Office suing the Times in court, the furor would continue to focus on the White House. If Johnson spoke out, at least it would shift the focus back to him.

  This inspired Nixon to add a little threat. “Right now he is a villain,” Nixon said. Even leading Democrats—Humphrey, Senator Ed Muskie—were killing Johnson in the press. “If he doesn’t defend hims
elf, he’ll go down in history and by God, I’ll quit defending him.” Tell their mutual friend Bryce Harlow to call Johnson tonight, Nixon ordered.

  “Put it this way to Johnson,” Nixon said. “Either he defends himself or I have no choice but to . . . to let the chips fall where they may. Just use those terms. . . . I don’t want to blame him for the war. . . . I don’t think he lied. . . . But if he will not defend himself, I will have no choice but also to refuse to defend him, and I don’t want to do that.

  “Now you tell Bryce to get off his ass and do this now.”

  When Harlow called, Johnson was in a rage. He’d been reading the Texas newspapers, which were hitting him hard, and throwing them around his office. He was “just as upset as hell,” Harlow warned Colson. Anything he said publicly, Johnson said, would just be turned against him by a New York Times eager to “re-execute” him.

  Nixon’s next call was to Kissinger, urging that he reach out directly to Rostow. “Johnson ought to have a press conference,” Nixon said. If Rostow balks, make the same threat. “That unless he has a press conference, I’m not prepared to defend him. Now just as cold as that. They’ve just got to know. I’m not going to defend him, why should I?”

  Kissinger remained skeptical that Johnson would go along. “It would certainly get a tremendous brawl started between Johnson and the press.”

  “That’s right, and it’d get off of us,” Nixon replied. “You see what I mean?”

  “Well, it would get it off us on the immediate problem,” Kissinger agreed, “but it would also drag the whole issue down to the level of ‘was Johnson guilty or not?’”

  “That’s a hell of a lot better than having whether I was guilty or not, Henry, that’s my point.”

  So now Nixon had tasked both Colson and Kissinger with bringing Johnson into line. The two lieutenants conferred; Kissinger told Colson they weren’t going to get anywhere calling Johnson directly. He would reach out to Rostow himself, and in the meantime, Harlow and Colson should stop pestering Johnson.