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

by Nancy Gibbs

  History doesn’t repeat itself, Mark Twain said, but it rhymes. Having feared that Johnson would steal the 1968 election for Humphrey with an October surprise, Nixon now feared what would happen if he—or more precisely, Kissinger—pulled one off. “That son of a bitch,” he told Colson, accusing Kissinger of “wanting me to be in his debt for winning this election.”

  Kissinger’s exhaustive, duplicitous, but ultimately successful negotiations with North Vietnam allowed him to pronounce that “Peace is at hand” a week before election day. Somehow even Kissinger did not always understand the convoluted calculations of the president who had never quite trusted him in the first place: Nixon was afraid that a peace deal before the election, far from sealing his victory, might actually hurt him. “Our great fear,” Colson told Sy Hersh, was that a settlement “would let people say ‘Well, thank goodness the war is over. Now we can go on and worry about peace and we will elect a Democrat because Democrats always do more in peacetime. . . .

  “The other thing was that we didn’t want to appear to be exploiting,” Colson added, “as Johnson had done in ’68 with the bombing pause, which was so blatantly and transparently political. After the 15th of October, it was definitely contrary to our interest to get an agreement.” Haig and Haldeman shared that view. It was a rather beautiful bit of cosmic justice that just as Kissinger had played both sides in 1968, Haig was now keeping Nixon informed of Kissinger’s actions, a loyalty for which he would be much rewarded.

  So Nixon refused to pressure his old ally South Vietnamese President Thieu to accept the terms Kissinger had negotiated. He avoided a “premature” settlement to the war; he protected his reelection margin; and he inflicted enough damage on Kissinger to keep him from entering the second term as a co-president. He all but admitted this particular act of perfidy twenty years later, in a conversation with reporters before the 1992 New Hampshire primary. George H. W. Bush was already looking vulnerable in his reelection bid; but that would not have been the case, Nixon suggested, if he had just had the sense to drag out the first Gulf War a bit longer. “We had a lot of success with that in 1972.”

  On November 3, just four days before the election, Nixon and Johnson reached what appeared to be a temporary truce. Haldeman told Nixon that he had been in touch with George Christian, Johnson’s former press secretary who had joined Connally’s Democrats for Nixon. Johnson had had his staff studying all the files from 1968; he was sure Nixon would deny any wrongdoing when it came to the peace talks. Johnson reviewed with Christian the dramatic finale of the 1968 race, his confronting Nixon with charges that he or his campaign team were sabotaging the talks. “Johnson,” Haldeman reassured Nixon, “said that he decided at the time to interpret this as something foolish that someone did without Nixon’s knowledge.” But would the FBI go along with this version? “If we try to move on this story,” Haldeman said, “it could be a trap. In other words, the FBI could be prepared to leak on this.”

  “That’s right,” Nixon said.

  “Johnson understood that immediately,” Haldeman replied.

  “Good,” Nixon said.

  On January 2, 1973, Nixon called Johnson, ostensibly to bring him up to date on the war, whose end seemed so tantalizingly close; but actually because he had some club business to manage. Harry Truman had died on the day after Christmas, at the age of eighty-eight; at the time he was the third most admired man in America, after Richard Nixon and Billy Graham.

  Nixon proclaimed a thirty-day period of national mourning, calling Truman “one of the most courageous Presidents in our history” and “a man with guts.” Truman had personally approved elaborate military plans for a five-day state funeral (“A damn fine show. I just hate that I’m not going to be around to see it,” he had said). But in the end Bess (the “Boss”) prevailed, and the ceremony was scaled back: no riderless horse, no muffled drums and caisson, just a caravan of cars from the funeral home to the Truman library in Independence. Nixon and his wife came and laid a wreath of red, white, and blue carnations. The modest service suited the man, Nixon told Bess: “He didn’t put on airs.” Johnson and Lady Bird flew up from Texas and paid tribute as well. He was “a 20th century giant,” Johnson declared.

  There would be another memorial service in Washington, and that was the point of Nixon’s call. He had heard that Johnson was not going to attend, Nixon said, and just wanted to make sure that was the plan.

  “If you were coming I didn’t want it to appear that I was not going,” Nixon said. On the other hand, since they’d already gone to the private service, “I rather thought as if we were exploiting it if we just went again. How do you feel? I don’t want anyone to think that we were affronting President Truman.”

  Johnson affirmed that he was not coming to Washington. For one thing, he was conscious that his own health was failing; his heart pains were getting worse by the day. Men in his family tended to die young. “I don’t want to linger the way Eisenhower did,” he would tell friends. “When I go, I want to go fast.” He had become a chain-smoker. Every afternoon the pains would come, jolting and jabbing the breath out of him.

  Nixon had just the antidote Johnson needed. He renewed an offer for Johnson to make use of Bebe Rebozo’s place down in Key Biscayne. “Cause ole Bebe is a great guy to have around. He cheers people up, you know. He never brings up any unpleasant subjects.”

  By this time Nixon was increasingly preoccupied by the prospect of the Senate’s Watergate investigation, with public hearings set to begin in the spring.

  It was so unfair; Nixon continued to be obsessed with how much less wiretapping and bugging he had done than his predecessors. “We were limited as hell,” Nixon told John Dean. “I mean Hoover, good God, we could have used him forever. . . . Johnson had just apparently used him all the time for this sort of thing . . . used the FBI as his own private patrol.” Get that story out, Attorney General Richard Kleindienst told Nixon, and “really turn it into something . . . it might be the thing, the thing that’ll save us.”

  Once again, the “Johnson did it, they all did it” defense was irresistible. So many people had crossed so many lines over the years that Nixon and his men hoped they had a kind of mutual assured destruction deterrent. On January 8, 1973, the day the criminal trial of the Watergate burglars began, Dean reported on the state of the Senate investigation. He was setting up a strategy group with Colson, to figure out “the Hill guys’ vulnerabilities and see if we can’t turn off the Hill effort before it gets started.” If the administration could just produce some hard evidence that Nixon’s campaign plane had been bugged in 1968, Haldeman argued, they could “force the Congress to investigate hanky-panky in both ’68 and ’72,” rather than just the 1972 campaign. Haldeman had heard that the Washington Star maybe had the story; but did they have any proof? Because the only evidence Nixon had was J. Edgar Hoover telling him . . . and Hoover was dead.

  But who cared? They weren’t trying to make a case in court. The point was to put the fear of God into the Democrats that if they push about Watergate, the whole ugly history of their own dirty tricks will be fair game. “All you have to do is have it out,” Nixon said, “and the press will write the Goddamn story, and the Star will run it now.”

  Or else, Nixon said, maybe they could pressure Hoover’s deputy DeLoach into admitting to bugging the plane.

  Or, Haldeman suggested, “we could start pushing on the other buggings that Johnson did, because he did a hell of a lot of his own staff and everyone else.”

  The real problem they faced, Ehrlichman observed, was public ignorance. “It isn’t commonly understood around the country that this is done or has been done in prior years.”

  “Well,” Nixon concluded, “let me say we have to use the material on the Johnson thing, and if Mitchell doesn’t have the hard evidence, we just put it out. We’ll float it out there . . . for now.”

  But as they talked, the strategy, the sense of opportunity started to shift. Maybe this wasn’t about changing p
ublic opinion. Maybe it was safer to play in the shadows, some quiet threats, a gentleman’s agreement. As in any club, the more dubious the motive, the more underhanded the means: threaten Johnson and key Democrats with exposure, and they might have less appetite for an aggressive investigation. “LBJ could turn off the whole congressional investigation,” Haldeman said. Or Hubert Humphrey: he’d been right next to Johnson in 1968; imagine how ugly the revelations would be for him if the full story of the campaign were known. They could deploy another powerful Minnesotan, Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas: “Andreas has got to talk to Hubert and say now this is the situation,” Nixon proposed, “what the hell do you want to do, kill Johnson?” Humphrey would deny any knowledge of wiretapping, of course, but “nobody will believe him,” Nixon concluded. “Andreas to Hubert I think is the way it’s got to be played. So you’ll follow through rigorously on that.”

  On January 11, the day Johnson’s old friend North Carolina senator Sam Ervin officially agreed to head the Senate’s investigation, Nixon sat with a legal pad making notes called “Goals for 2d term.” He had three categories: “Substance,” which included “Russia—SALT; China—Exchanges,” plus a Middle East settlement and better trade with Latin America. Under “Political” he wanted to strengthen the party and recruit better candidates for 1974.

  And under “Personal”: “Restore respect for office; New idealism—respect for flag, country; Compassion—understanding.”

  That day, Nixon ordered Haldeman to find out whether “the guy who did the bugging on us in ’68 is still at the FBI, and then [FBI acting director L. Patrick] Gray should nail him with a lie detector and get it settled, which would give us the evidence we need,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. Now he was fully on board with the blackmail strategy. The Washington Star was back on the story. “That’ll stir Johnson up,” Haldeman noted, “and that gives us a way to get back to Johnson on the basis that, you know, we’ve got to get this turned off, because it’s going to bounce back to the other story and we can’t hold them—and scare him.”

  “I know,” Nixon agreed.

  “He may decide to get word out to his troops,” Haldeman said, meaning Johnson’s allies in Congress, “and, if he did, that could be very helpful.” They discussed reaching out to Connally and Christian, to warn Johnson that once the whole issue of who was bugging whom becomes public, no one will emerge unscathed. Christian should “go tell Johnson that we’re trying to keep an eye on it,” Nixon said. “We’ll do our best, but he [Johnson] better get hold of [Johnson aide Joseph] Califano and Humphrey and anybody else he knows and tell them to pipe down on this thing. . . . We will use it without question, Bob, if it comes to nut time.”

  That would refer to nut cutting, a favorite Nixon term for the ruthless endgame.

  But to their dismay, Johnson was in no mood to be muscled. A newspaper reporter had indeed called Johnson, starting to ask questions about Johnson’s own wiretapping activities. Johnson in turn had called DeLoach at home.

  “If they try to give me any trouble,” Johnson warned, “I’ll pull out that cable from my files and turn the tables on them.” DeLoach in turn warned Haldeman not to mess with Johnson “LBJ got very hot,” Haldeman recorded in a handwritten note, “and . . . said to him that if the Nixon people are going to play with this,” he’d play too: Johnson did not bug Nixon, he insisted; he just tapped Chennault, and if Nixon accused him of eavesdropping, he would release the intercepted cables from the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington to Saigon, showing how Nixon’s campaign had interfered with the peace settlement. And just in case, there was that part about the secret contributions to the Nixon campaign from the Greek military dictatorship, which Johnson had kept to himself, a club insurance policy.

  With Johnson threatening to expose Nixon for undercutting Johnson’s peace talks in 1968, Nixon and his men backed off.

  Inauguration day was barely a week away.

  Johnson had asked a speechwriter to start working on a statement to mark the occasion when the war finally ended. He never lived to give it. Nixon was inaugurated for his second term on January 20; later that day, he announced his plans for dismantling the Great Society. It was a moment Johnson had long foreseen. Doris Kearns Goodwin recalled his telling her how he thought of his Great Society like a beautiful woman. “I figured she’d be so big and beautiful that the American people couldn’t help but fall in love with her, and once they did, they’d want to keep her around forever, making her a permanent part of American life. . . .

  “But now Nixon has come along and everything I’ve worked for is ruined. . . . I can just see him waking up in the morning, making that victory sign of his and deciding which program to kill. It’s a terrible thing for me to sit by and watch someone else starve my Great Society to death. . . . Now her bones are beginning to stick out and her wrinkles are beginning to show. Soon she’ll be so ugly that the American people will refuse to look at her; they’ll stick her in a closet to hide her away and there she’ll die. And when she dies, I, too, will die.”

  He turned out to be right. On January 22, Johnson was alone in his room taking a nap, when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

  The next night, in a national address on all three networks, Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War.

  He handwrote a letter to Lady Bird that evening:

  I only wish Lyndon could have lived to hear my announcement of the Viet Nam Peace Settlement tonight.

  I know what abuse he took—particularly from members of his own party—in standing firm for peace with honor.

  Now that we have such a settlement, we shall do everything we can to make it last so that he and the other brave men who sacrificed their lives for this cause will not have died in vain.

  The next day’s cabinet meeting started late; Nixon was in a reflective mood. When you reach the age of sixty, he told them, your days are numbered. And he started listing the ages of all the presidents when they died—many of them younger than sixty. “We need to make every day count,” he said.

  Years later, Nixon reflected on his sometime ally, sometime nemesis.

  “I think President Johnson died of a broken heart, I really do. Here’s Johnson, this big, strong, intelligent tough guy, practically getting so emotional that he’d almost cry, because his critics didn’t appreciate him. He, til the very last, thought that he might be able to win them. And the point is, rather than have them love him, he should have tried to do what he could have done very well—have them respect him. And in the end, he lost. He neither gained the love nor retained the respect.”

  In his final remarks to the White House staff, on the day he resigned his office, Nixon applied a version of the lesson to himself.

  “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

  NIXON AND FORD:

  Mercy at All Costs

  Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford’s relationship lasted forty-five years, from their earliest days in the U.S. House of Representatives together until Nixon’s death in 1994. They began as colleagues; they became friends, and then allies; they served as president and vice president; at one point, they even carpooled together. Twice, in 1960 and 1968, Nixon appeared to dangle the vice presidency at Ford. But he only offered it to him once, in 1973, when he essentially had no choice—and then only on the strict understanding that Nixon favored someone else as his party’s 1976 presidential nominee. That had to hurt.

  Nixon, of course, was in no position to play kingmaker: in 1974, he would resign the top job.

  An unelected president, Ford would soon—perhaps too soon—pardon his old friend so that his own presidency could begin. That decision, selfless and patriotic, helped consign him to a two-year term; in 1976, when he sought the voters’ acceptance, the ghost of Nixon and the pardon were still too strong.

  Years later, he tried to engineer a censure—to avoid an impeachment—for another president facing an impla
cable Congress. He would try to get it right that time.

  14

  “I Had to Get the Monkey off My Back”

  —GERALD FORD

  Only eight men in American history have served two full terms as vice president. The job, one of them noted, wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss. That was true the first two times Richard Nixon toyed with giving Gerald Ford the job.

  But when round three unfolded, in October 1973, Nixon faced every kind of trouble. He had a small army of lawyers fighting the demands of a special prosecutor who was busy untangling all kinds of grimy political stunts by Nixon’s henchmen. Each week seemed to bring news of yet another once-loyal West Wing aide who was peeling off and turning into a government witness. His vice president meanwhile was in even more danger. Spiro Agnew had taken $100,000 in bribes as a public official in Maryland and federal prosecutors were closing in on him fast. The White House was in no mood to mount two criminal defenses at the same time. Besides, there was an easy way out for Agnew: prosecutors hinted that the vice president could plead to a lesser charge if he simply resigned.

  And so he did. It was a safe bet that Nixon would be next. Which meant, in the fall of 1973, the vice presidency was worth more than ever.

  But at that point, it was no longer really Nixon’s to bestow.

  Friends and Allies

  In the first week of 1949, a few moments after Speaker Sam Rayburn administered the oath of office to the freshman class of lawmakers, a rail-thin, dark-haired man approached Gerald Ford in the well of the House of Representatives. The thin man stuck out his hand and offered his congratulations. “I’m Dick Nixon, from California,” the stranger said. “I heard about your big win in Michigan and I want to say hello and welcome you to the House.”