One night when I came home late, I went to the refrigerator and found a note taped to the door. Joyce had written, I am sure with a smile: “He tackled the job that couldn’t be done; with a smile he went right to it. He tackled the job that couldn’t be done—and couldn’t do it.”
CHAPTER 9
Counsellor
After I left the Office of Economic Opportunity, Nixon appointed me Counsellor to the President, a general advisory position in the White House. I continued as a member of the cabinet, and I moved full time into an office in the West Wing. I began to see the President and his top aides far more regularly than I had while at OEO.
I soon noticed that Nixon liked to ruminate away from the Oval Office. He often took refuge in a separate private office in the Old Executive Office Building, the massive nineteenth-century building adjacent to the White House. There he would meet with small groups of aides to talk about whatever might be on his mind. I would find him there dressed in a suit and tie, his feet up on a stool, the ever-present yellow pad in his lap, thinking his way through a problem.
In 1970, the country remained in turmoil. Tension over Vietnam remained high, and the situation flared in the spring after the so-called incursion into Cambodia—a phrase that seemed to conjure up a sightseeing visit more than the armed invasion it was. On May 4, students at Kent State University shut down the campus with a massive demonstration protesting the administration’s action in Cambodia, which students feared would widen and extend the war. In an attempt to control the chaos, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire, killing four people and wounding others. The incident precipitated a nationwide student strike at more than four hundred colleges and universities—involving as many as four million students.1 Nixon, troubled by the mass demonstration, appeared at the Lincoln Memorial at an early-morning student protest and talked to a group of them who had made camp there. His visit was dismissed by a growing and vocal legion of critics, but I thought it demonstrated an interesting aspect of the President’s character that he was willing to put himself in the middle of such a scene.
On May 15, protests at the historically black Jackson State University in Mississippi turned violent, and two more students were killed. Shortly after these shootings, Cheney (who continued to work as my assistant after I left OEO) and I traveled to Mississippi to get a sense of what might happen and to reach out to the families.2 We found a fluid, unstable situation—everyone was holding his breath waiting to see what might happen next. It was a tense moment, as the country watched Americans—young students and equally young National Guardsmen—turn on one another. The disorder continued across the country for many months, until campuses finally reopened that fall.
Members of Nixon’s cabinet had their own personal experiences with young people expressing opposition to the war and wanting to be part of the so-called youth movement, which was characterized by wearing long hair, beads, and tie-dyed shirts. This provided a challenge for some parents in the cabinet, since most Sundays Nixon invited our families to the White House for a church service, and parents had to work overtime to make sure their children looked presentable enough to read scripture or shake hands with the President. Our own children were friends with some of the antiwar demonstrators, and it was not exactly easy for them to reveal that their dad worked for Richard Nixon in the White House. Valerie once told me that she was thinking of joining one of the demonstrations. “Okay, do it,” I said bluntly, “if you believe in what you are saying.” But I told her I didn’t want her to join a protest simply because she wanted to be part of her crowd. She decided not to go.
Now that I was at the White House full-time, there was speculation in the press and elsewhere that I had moved into President Nixon’s inner circle. That was an outsider’s perspective. Inside the White House the situation was more complex. Nixon had more than one so-called inner circle—and he would swing back and forth among them, depending on his interests and moods. He also used the various circles for quite different purposes.
There was, of course, the well-publicized duo in the Nixon White House, consisting of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. They appealed to Nixon’s political bent, his toughness, and his long-held resentment of those he called the Washington elites. Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s German surnames led the press to dub them the Berlin Wall for their reputation as a united front protecting the President and, it was implied, keeping others out. My experience was that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had quite different personalities and working methods.
As chief of staff, Haldeman was the aide closest to the President. He was a trim man with a crew cut, brisk and methodical, but rarely unpleasant. I liked his meetings, because they tended to be substantive and efficient. I also had a reasonable certainty when I dealt with him that he was providing an accurate version of President Nixon’s wishes and views, which made me comfortable with the guidance he offered. Because of his closeness to Nixon, Haldeman might have been the one person who could have stepped in and stopped Nixon’s decisions regarding the management of the Watergate scandal. Nixon sometimes said things he hadn’t thought through. What he needed was someone to talk him out of those thoughts. I suspect Haldeman’s fault might have been in not insisting to his boss that he was wrong.
Ehrlichman was less pleasant to deal with. He seemed to have a high degree of certainty about his views that bordered on arrogance, a trait that did him no favors as he gathered more influence in the White House. Certainty without power can be interesting, and even amusing. Certainty with power can be dangerous. It was never clear to me whether Ehrlichman was basing his guidance to others on the President’s views or his own. I did not follow his guidance without checking his suggestions out with others, and then only if I agreed with them.
One person who made his way through the Berlin Wall was Chuck Colson. He served as Nixon’s special counsel and seemed to become increasingly close to him as the 1972 election approached. A former Marine, a troubleshooter, and a self-described hatchet man, Colson was bright and tough. The President boasted that Colson would do anything for him, including walk “right through doors.”3 Nixon no doubt valued Colson’s loyalty, but in my experience unquestioning obedience rarely serves a president well.
There was another group—another so-called inner circle—in the White House that included former California lieutenant governor Bob Finch, Pat Moynihan, George Shultz, and me. We were what Bill Safire once described as “youngish intellectual types” who appealed to Nixon’s inner policy wonk. Unlike members of the Haldeman group, each of us had backgrounds in elected office, government, or academia that predated the Nixon administration. We all respected the President, but none of us awoke every morning planning to bash through closed doors for Nixon’s political purposes.
During his early years as president, Nixon tried to merge these two groups into meetings Haldeman called FRESH, constituting Finch, Rumsfeld, Ehrlichman, Shultz, and Harlow.4 We were an informal sounding board for Nixon on policy and political issues. It was an interesting opportunity to watch Nixon’s mind at work. He was a strategic thinker, often looking two or three steps ahead of a given decision and always musing about and considering a full range of options.
There were, of course, times that Nixon would rant about something that had angered him. He’d go on about members of the press or certain administration figures who weren’t carrying the ball well enough. I wasn’t surprised to learn that sometimes I was the subject of these harangues. Contrary to the impression from the secret Nixon tapes—and the occasional deleted expletives—I did not find the President anywhere near as profane as some portray him. As historian Stephen Ambrose noted, most of those expletives were milder words, like crap and hell and damn.5
One of the things I took occasion to discuss with the President was the administration’s outreach to minorities—a perennial problem for Republicans and something government needed to be attentive to if it hoped to be truly representative. Some people blamed the widening gap between minorities and
the GOP on Nixon’s Southern strategy, a political effort that sought to win the votes of Southern Democrats, many of whom tended to be unsympathetic to civil rights legislation. Whether the strategy was a good idea or not, the fact is that the Democratic Party had successfully engaged in exactly that sort of maneuvering for decades—these voters were called “Southern Democrats” for a reason.
While I did not favor racial quotas, I believed it was important for the administration to make a serious effort at diversity. In the Nixon administration there were too few individuals from minority groups involved in policy-making positions at a time when issues with significant racial ramifications—school desegregation, riots, inner-city school problems, and drugs—were front and center. I suggested that the White House form a group to monitor minority hiring, marshal aid to black colleges, and focus on other efforts in support of minorities—including speaking to minority organizations.
In making my case to the President, I cast it in political terms that I thought might appeal to him. Strained relations between the Nixon administration and minorities, I noted, were eroding support for his priorities, such as the economy and ending the war in Vietnam. “A critical factor in altering the present perception of the Administration is hiring,” I suggested in one memo. “Minority groups will be far more likely to see the administration in a favorable light if they are in fact a part of it.”6
As the tapes have revealed, Nixon occasionally made offensive remarks about minorities. I didn’t know exactly how he felt, however, since my experience was that his comments seemed in part generational, and I found his actions regarding minorities were not consistent with his sometimes inappropriate words. Nixon generally seemed to agree with my arguments about minority outreach, and his administration made serious efforts in that regard, including the major effort on school desegregation and the successful work by Bob Brown, Nixon’s White House lead on minority affairs.
President Nixon occasionally gave me assignments that involved foreign policy, which he knew was among my interests. He also thought my having that exposure could be helpful if I sought a seat in the United States Senate—which was a frequent suggestion of his. He thought many Republicans in the Senate were weak-willed and poor advocates for his policies. He wanted people he considered his protégés to get to the Senate and “toughen them up.” I tended to put off his suggestions that I run for a Senate seat in Illinois. But Nixon did persuade George H. W. Bush to run for a seat in Texas, a campaign Bush lost.
In September 1970, the President asked me to be a member of the U.S. delegation to the funeral of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser, a close Soviet ally, was the beneficiary of millions of dollars in Soviet arms. As a result of our country’s strained relations, no senior American foreign policy official was assigned to the delegation.
The large population of Cairo had at least doubled for the funeral of their leader. Many delegations from around the globe gathered in a huge tent to await the official events. For hours, passages from the Koran were broadcast over loudspeakers. Egyptian women on the mobbed streets wailed in a ritual chant. I left to see what was going on in the streets and ended up with the crushing mob of mourners following Nasser’s body across the Nile.
While in Cairo our group met with the then Vice President and acting President, Anwar Sadat. We were advised in our Department of State and intelligence briefings that Sadat was unremarkable and not likely to successfully succeed Nasser as president. As it turned out, he proved to be a bold, courageous leader who successfully mended Egyptian relations with the West and moved the Soviet troops out of Egypt in short order.
In the spring of 1971, the President proposed that Bob Finch and I go to Europe and North Africa to discuss the growing illegal drug problem. As we prepared to leave, Nixon made an unexpected request. Stressing the need for the utmost secrecy, the President asked us to pass a message to a Romanian official that Nixon wanted to establish a channel of communications with the leadership of the People’s Republic of China. We were to ask that Chinese leaders make contact with Nixon through Major General Vernon Walters, then the U.S. defense attaché in Paris. It was an unusual request to make—and I didn’t know if Secretary of State William Rogers was privy to it. But Nixon sometimes had people doing things in secret. As it happened, the Romanian official in question was traveling and we were not able to pass along the message. But Nixon had given us an early indication that he had decided to make a direct and bold overture to China.
It was during this period that I first worked with National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. I was impressed with Kissinger’s uncommon ability to arrange matters as he wanted them. Kissinger was not in anyone’s circle within the White House and over time became a force unto himself. The conventional wisdom about the Nixon-Kissinger relationship was that they worked as equals, or even that Kissinger was the teacher and Nixon the student. Though Kissinger is now properly recognized as a critical figure in modern American foreign policy, he did not enter the Nixon administration with that same stature. Kissinger had come from an academic world of theoretical rather than practical experience. By contrast, Nixon had real-world experience and had been actively engaged with foreign leaders in scores of countries for decades. If anything, at the outset, Nixon was the professor and Kissinger the student, though an unquestionably brilliant one at that.
A problem that came up time and again was something I would become familiar with over the ensuing decades: the complicated relationships between the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Defense Department. Once at a cabinet meeting a discussion arose as to how State, Defense, and the NSC were working together. Kissinger, then serving as the National Security Adviser, scribbled a note and handed it to me with a smile. It said, “As a team of barracudas.”7
Tensions appeared to come to a head in one meeting, when Kissinger expressed his concern that the State Department was doing things without coordinating them with the National Security Council, meaning him. Specifically, he believed that Secretary of State Rogers had communicated with the Soviet leadership without his knowledge. Haldeman, who was not intimidated by anyone, even the formidable Kissinger, responded that Kissinger had done the exact same thing when he met with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin without informing Rogers. Kissinger bristled at Haldeman’s suggestion. He rumbled that he had only spoken to foreign officials outside of regular channels when the President directed him not to inform the State Department. He was, of course, ignoring the possibility that Rogers had also acted at Nixon’s direction. In any event, Kissinger then stormed out of the room.8
Fifteen minutes later, Kissinger returned. He informed the group that Haldeman’s comment was “inadmissible.” Cryptically, he added that he was now reconsidering “the other matter” he had discussed with Haldeman. I later learned that the other matter Kissinger referred to was choosing between resigning from the faculty of Harvard to stay on in the Nixon administration—and losing tenure—or returning to academia. Kissinger, who at times used the threat of resigning as a bargaining chip, was suggesting that he might change his mind and return to Harvard unless Secretary Rogers stopped dealing with foreign governments without his knowledge.
Ultimately, Kissinger would replace William Rogers as secretary of state while retaining his position at the NSC. During the period when Henry wore both hats, all he had to do was talk to himself to ensure good communications between State and the NSC. But a president benefits from a range of viewpoints. I thought Kissinger was most effective, and President Nixon and the country better served, when he was filling a single post.
I preferred having more substantive responsibilities to functioning as a general adviser and troubleshooter in the White House. The President and I had several conversations during this period in which we discussed possible future assignments for me, such as U.S. special trade representative, deputy secretary of state, and U.S. ambassador to NATO.9 He seemed to enjoy these discussions, which were an opportunity fo
r him to be actively involved in mentoring younger members of his administration.
In fact, the President frequently considered staff shake-ups, possibly to make sure he always had fresh eyes looking at important issues—and also, I suspect, to keep people on their toes. It was something of a hobby for him—like a general war gaming moves on a map.
To this end, shortly after the 1970 midterm elections, the President called a small group to Key Biscayne for a day-long meeting.10 He was now looking ahead to his 1972 reelection campaign and told us he wanted to make some personnel changes in the administration. He mused aloud about all sorts of possibilities. As the meeting went on, I stepped out to the men’s room. When I returned, the President looked at me.
“Don, we’re going to make Rogers Morton Secretary of the Interior and make you Secretary of Housing and Urban Development,” Nixon said matter-of-factly. He was going to fire the current secretary of HUD, former Michigan governor George Romney. Another former governor in his cabinet, Walter Hickel, Secretary of the Interior, was going to be fired as well.
I looked around the room. The idea of my going to HUD apparently was fine by everyone else. I wondered what had happened in my absence to lead to this strange idea. I said I’d have to think about it, knowing that as a congressman I had voted against making Housing and Urban Development a cabinet-level post.11
A day or so later, I talked to Attorney General John Mitchell and told him my views. I said I thought it was unwise for the President to replace two former governors in his cabinet at the same time. I pointed out that Romney, for one, came from the key state of Michigan. As it turned out, Nixon had a bumpy time in the press when he announced his planned dismissal of Hickel at Interior. Fortunately, knowing he would get still more flak if he fired Romney, the Hickel bumps reinforced my arguments and ended the President’s idea of my going to HUD.
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