by Nancy Gibbs
Colson suspected this was all about Kissinger currying favor with Nixon by being the one to bring Johnson into the tent. He told Kissinger that “the president wants me to do it.” Nixon had gone to bed by this time, so Colson proposed a cease-fire.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he told Kissinger. “If you promise me that you won’t try to call the President tonight, I promise you I won’t do anything more tonight to reach Lyndon Johnson.”
Kissinger agreed. Colson didn’t trust him. A few minutes later, Colson asked the White House operator whether anyone had called Nixon that evening.
“Dr. Kissinger called three or four minutes ago,” she replied, “and is talking now.”
In the end it didn’t matter who twisted his arm: Johnson was not going to help. The next day Haldeman wrote in his diary: “Learned later this evening that Johnson had completely collapsed, was in a state of being totally unstrung, feels that the country is lost . . . and that they’re out to destroy him. So that ended any participation by him.”
Two weeks later, on June 30, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in favor of the New York Times’s right to publish. Nixon summoned Haldeman, Kissinger, and Mitchell to plan the next move. He still wanted Johnson’s bombing halt file.
“I want Brookings, I want them just to break in, break in and take it out,” Nixon said. “Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” Haldeman replied, “but you have to have somebody to do it.”
It was as though at that moment Nixon remembered—and then forgot—that nothing said in that office went unrecorded.
“Don’t discuss it here,” Nixon said. “You talk to Hunt.”
That was E. Howard Hunt, man for all seasons when there was a black-bag job to be done. He had helped the CIA topple governments in the 1950s, worked on the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, spied on the Goldwater campaign in 1964 for Johnson. Haldeman said that CIA director Richard Helms described him as “ruthless, quiet, careful. . . . He’s kind of a tiger. . . . He spent twenty years in the CIA overthrowing governments.”
“I want the break-in,” Nixon repeated. “Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. . . . Just go in and take it.”
Nixon needed a special kind of team for the assignments he had in mind. It wasn’t as though the enemy played fair, or observed some kind of due process. “I really need a son of a bitch like [enforcer Tom Charles] Huston who will work his butt off and do it dishonorably,” Nixon said in a meeting on the morning of July 1. He would direct him personally: “I know how to play this game and we’re going to start playing it.”
Because it wasn’t as though this was going to be a fair fight.
“Do you think, for Christ sakes, that the New York Times is worried about all the legal niceties? Those sons of bitches are killing them. . . . We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They’re using any means. We—are—going—to—use—any—means,” he said, drawing out every word. “Is that clear? Did they get the Brookings Institute raided last night?”
“No, sir, they didn’t,” Haldeman admitted.
“Get it done. I want it done!” Nixon said, banging on his desk. “I want the Brookings Institute safe cleaned out.”
All in all, he suggested, turnabout was fair play; it’s not like Nixon invented the political dark arts. He argued to Haldeman that “the Democrats had been doing this kind of thing to us for years and they never got caught.” Roosevelt secretly taped people. Johnson spied on Goldwater. “Remember that any intellectual is tempted to put himself above the law,” he said. “That’s the rule that I’ve known all my life. Any intellectual, particularly—watch what schools they’re from. If they’re from any Eastern schools or Berkeley, those are particularly the potential bad ones.”
In the days that followed, aides later told Senate investigators, Colson talked seriously of a plan to firebomb Brookings, then send White House operatives in with the firemen to rifle the safes and escape in all the confusion. That plan never was executed. But others were; it was because of the Pentagon leaks that Nixon created his Special Investigations Unit, a secret police force nicknamed the Plumbers, to perform the kind of operations that the FBI would not. They would orchestrate the break-in of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in September of 1971. They would eventually be joined by the “ratfucking” antics of Donald Segretti and his team looking to harass Nixon’s potential 1972 opponents; and of course the Watergate break-in itself, which had to be covered up lest the long trail of “horrors,” as Mitchell called them, be exposed.
It all began with Nixon and Johnson, a poisoned peace process, and the protection of secrets—the country’s, certainly, but especially the president’s.
Another Election—and Another Alliance
If Johnson was not prepared to help Nixon in the moment, events would ensure he’d help in the future. As the Pentagon Papers further inflamed public opposition to the war, the Senate passed an amendment calling for mandatory withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam and an end to all military operations. Haldeman reported to Nixon that Johnson was beside himself at the takeover of his party by the peacemongers, including his defense secretary Clark Clifford, now an outspoken war opponent. Clifford, Johnson said, was “a silly motherfucker.”
He felt roughly the same about the rest of his party. “I’m going to do everything I possibly can to beat the dirty rotten sons of bitches in 1972,” Johnson vowed.
So would Richard Nixon. His reelection prospects were by no means assured; he had not won a majority in 1968 and Republicans had lost twelve House seats in the 1970 midterm elections. But a key to achieving that reelection goal was finding a way to properly deploy Johnson.
For one thing, Nixon saw in Johnson a useful weapon in his mission to divide the Democratic Party in advance of 1972. All the fault lines were there—over the war, foreign policy, law and order, civil rights. Hubert Humphrey may have hesitated to break with Johnson when he was a sitting president in 1968; but his heirs felt no such compunction as the 1972 race approached. The more Democrats threw Johnson overboard, the more easily Nixon was able to reel him in. It was especially useful to Nixon when other Democrats abused Johnson, and the two men could bond in their shared antipathy.
“I am thoroughly disgusted by the outrageous attacks that have been made upon you by the likes of [Kennedy friend] Kenny O’Donnell, [NBC anchor] Chet Huntley, et al.,” Nixon wrote to Johnson in the summer of 1970. “Of course, as political men, we know that we are fair game when we are holding office but attacks upon a man after he has left office and particularly when he is a former President of the United States are completely beyond the pale as far as I am concerned.” He used the club to confer immunity, in the interests of dividing the enemy.
“You can rest assured that history will treat you much more kindly than some of your contemporaries.”
As the 1972 campaign approached, Johnson professed no interest in getting involved: “All I could accomplish would be to make a fool of myself,” he told CBS News producer Bud Benjamin. “I don’t hold public office. I don’t have a party position. I don’t have a platform. I don’t have any troops. The only thing more impotent than a former president is a cut dog at a screwing match.”
But Nixon heard how disenchanted Johnson was at the prospect of South Dakota senator George McGovern as Democratic standard-bearer. This was a man who had denounced the war with eloquence and passion at every opportunity. Johnson pronounced McGovern “the most inept politician . . . in all of history. . . . I didn’t know they made presidential candidates that dumb.” The Democrats convened in Miami on July 10, 1972, to nominate McGovern and whomever he could convince to run with him after Ed Muskie, Ted Kennedy, consumer activist Ralph Nader, and virtually every party titan turned him down. It was a depressing spectacle for Johnson, watching from his bleacher seat back in Texas. Party elders did not invite him to attend; in fact the pantheon of pictures of the great Democratic icons—Roosevelt, Kennedy—did no
t include Johnson at all.
Nixon called Johnson down at the ranch after it was over. He said he kept hearing from discouraged Democrats who wanted to support Nixon. How would Johnson feel about that?
Johnson was hearing it too; he told him about “thousands” of calls and letters coming into the ranch since the convention, of people expressing “total disenchantment with the McGovernites.” The revolt extended to Johnson’s own family; his daughters and sons-in-law were threatening to come out against McGovern, Johnson told Nixon.
Johnson read him a letter he was preparing to send out to friends: given his long service to his party, he’d be supporting Democrats at all levels. But “I have always taken the position that what an individual does in a presidential campaign is a matter of conscience, and I am not going to interfere with that decision.” It was essentially a blanket exemption for Democrats who wanted to defect.
“Now what do you think of that?” Johnson asked Nixon.
“I can only say that I’m very grateful, Mr. President.”
Nixon reported the call to his other favorite Texan, John Connally, who had resigned as Nixon’s treasury secretary and launched “Democrats for Nixon.” He told him how Johnson had actually agreed with most of Nixon’s policies and none of McGovern’s. The real problem, Nixon concluded, was what LBJ would do when McGovern went to pay a formal call to get his blessing. A statement of support and picture “could be harmful to us.” Connally agreed that Nixon should enlist their mutual friend Billy Graham once again, to reach out to Johnson and persuade him to keep his endorsement of McGovern as cool as possible.
Graham undertook the mission eagerly; he flew down to the ranch that weekend and reported back to Haldeman about his visit, passing along Johnson’s advice to Nixon: “[Johnson] advises the P to ignore McGovern. He says he should go all out and identify with people, to ball games, factories and so on. He thinks the McGovern people will defeat themselves. He feels very strongly anti-McGovern. Says the P should not do much campaigning, stay above it, as Johnson did with Goldwater.”
Graham reported that when he raised the Watergate break-in, which had been reported earlier that summer, Johnson just laughed and said, “Hell, that’s not going to hurt him a bit.”
The following week, Johnson hosted McGovern and his running mate, Sargent Shriver, at the ranch. He made it clear he was merely acting as a loyal Democrat, and insisted there be no press, no pictures. Johnson called Graham as they were leaving, who passed along the report to Haldeman.
Johnson had told McGovern he thought he was “crazy as hell” about his approach to Vietnam. He refused to campaign for him. “He cited all the good things the P’s done for him,” Haldeman recorded in his diary on August 22, “says that McGovern is associating with amateurs, that he ought to shake up half his staff and he ought to stand up and say what a wonderful place America is.
“He made it clear to Graham that he would be happy to see Nixon if he wants to come and visit him.”
Watergate
Nine months later, on May 14, 1973, after Nixon had swept to a landslide victory, Walt Rostow wrote an extraordinary classified “Memorandum for the Record,” summarizing what Johnson knew about Anna Chennault and the Nixon campaign’s activities before the 1968 election—the decision to put her under surveillance but then remain silent about what they learned. He ended with a remarkable observation: “I am inclined to believe,” Rostow wrote, “the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways to the Watergate affair of 1972.”
First, he noted, the 1968 race was desperately close at the end, and the Nixon team had reason to believe that their shady interference with the peace talks stalled Humphrey’s surge and gave Nixon his victory.
Second, “they got away with it.” Though there were rumors, the matter was never fully investigated. So for those involved, as the 1972 election approached, “there was nothing in their previous experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn them off; and there were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit—or beyond.”
In other words, the Nixon team’s success at secretly manipulating the 1968 election emboldened them to do it again four years later.
The break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, had been such a stupid crime, such an unnecessary overreach, that it took official Washington an especially long time to realize it was directed from the very heart of the Nixon White House. Nixon was piling up triumphs on the national stage; he had made his historic breakthrough with China; he was just back from Moscow, making peace. The Democrats were self-destructing right on schedule.
But the investigation into the break-in, pursued initially by the Washington Post’s intrepid Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and eventually by the FBI and a Senate committee, did pose a threat. On September 15, 1972, the Watergate grand jury handed down indictments of the five burglars, plus co-conspirators E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. The evidence of a wider conspiracy, the existence of a campaign slush fund, the many markers pointing toward the White House all appeared to have been dropped. White House counsel John Dean was called to the Oval Office; Nixon and Haldeman were there, grinning and celebrating the sense that the damage had been contained. It was to this meeting that Watergate prosecutors would point to show Nixon’s complicity in the cover-up. And once again, the secrets that Nixon and Johnson shared played a crucial role in what happened next.
“Is the line pretty well set now on, when asked about the Watergate, as to what everybody says and does, to stonewall?” Nixon asked Haldeman that morning, and was reassured.
That afternoon, Dean marveled at the resources that had been devoted to investigating the break-in—“It’s truly a larger investigation than was conducted . . . [into] the JFK assassination.”
Once again they debated putting out the story of how Johnson had bugged the Republicans in 1968—confirming, as Barry Goldwater had declared, that “everybody bugs everybody else.” But whatever they knew about Johnson’s 1968 wiretapping, Nixon was still respectful—and wary—enough of Johnson not to want to expose him.
“The difficulty with using it, of course, is that it reflects on Johnson,” Nixon said. “He ordered it. If it weren’t for that, I’d use it. Is there any way we can use it without reflecting on Johnson?” Maybe they could say the Democratic National Committee did it? No, Nixon recalled, “the FBI did the bugging, though.”
Dean wondered if maybe they could blame it on Humphrey. “Oh, hell, no,” Nixon said.
“He was bugging Humphrey too!” Haldeman said. And the men all laughed.
But there would be a time for vengeance, using the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS. “I want the most comprehensive notes on all those that tried to do us in,” Nixon said. “They are asking for it and they are going to get it. . . . We have not used the power in the first four years, as you know . . . but things are going to change now.”
A month later, on October 10, the Washington Post’s front-page headline declared that “FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats.” Woodward and Bernstein detailed the efforts of Donald Segretti and his merry band of dirty tricksters all through the primaries, who would, at their frat boy best, forge letters, disrupt rallies, hire a plane to fly over the Democratic convention pulling a sign saying PEACE POT PROMISCUITY—VOTE MCGOVERN, and at their worst, did much worse. The Post called it “a massive campaign of spying and sabotage” that represented “a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.”
So once again Nixon returned to the double standard of liberals and Democrats jumping up and down over dirty tricks and wiretaps when they’d never been squeamish about using them in their own campaigns. “Edgar Hoover told Mitchell that our plane was bugged for the last two weeks of the campaign,” Nixon said in an Oval Office meeting on October 17 with Haldeman and John Connally. “Johnson had it bugged. He ordered it bugged. And so was Humphrey’s I think. . . . But
the reason he says he had it bugged is because he had his Vietnam plans in there and he had to have information as to what we were going to say about Vietnam. . . . Johnson knew every conversation. And you know where it was bugged? In my compartment. So every conversation I had for two weeks Johnson had it.”
This was not actually true, at least according to the oral history Hoover’s deputy DeLoach did for the Johnson library two decades later. Johnson did demand a report on any calls from the Nixon camp to the State Department or the South Vietnamese embassy. “But the President did not ask me to put a microphone on the plane,” DeLoach said. He expanded the denial in his memoirs: “The bugging of a campaign plane would have to be categorized as ‘Mission: Impossible.’ No one could have approached such an aircraft without being apprehended and questioned by the Secret Service. You might as well try to put a bomb on board.” Even that, however, doesn’t mean that Hoover hadn’t led Nixon to think he had been bugged.
Just over a week later, Haldeman told Nixon they’d figured out that leaks about Watergate to Woodward and Bernstein were coming from a high-ranking FBI agent named Mark Felt (whose identity as the key source known as Deep Throat Woodward would not confirm for another three decades). But you can’t move on him, Haldeman warned, or he’ll spill. “He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI. He has access to absolutely everything.”
As Nixon’s men celebrated their Watergate reprieve, Kissinger was in Paris preparing to exchange peace proposals with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho. After a spring offensive that had failed to deal a decisive blow, and with Nixon’s reelection looking all but certain, Hanoi had decided it was prepared to make a deal. For Kissinger, it would mean global glory, future leverage, invaluable gratitude from a president. But for Nixon, the prospect of a historic triumph before the election left him, at best, ambivalent. He wanted to be able to blame the Democrats for the war dragging on, as though the communists were hanging on in hopes of getting a better deal from the liberals: back in February, he said that the antiwar Democrats “might give the enemy an incentive to prolong the war until after the election,” when actually he was the one prolonging the war.