One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (23 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Night and Fog”

N
INETEEN SEVENTY-TWO
should have been the greatest year of Richard Nixon’s life. His visit to China was set for the end of February, and a summit meeting in Moscow would follow in the spring. The trips would appear as adventurous as the Apollo missions to the moon; no American president had ever set foot on the Great Wall or inside the Kremlin.

But Nixon, with his uncanny political instinct, foresaw trouble ahead. He wrote in his diary on his fifty-ninth birthday, January 9, 1972, that he faced “immense opportunities and, of course, equally great dangers.” He knew the summitry was in some part symbolism and showmanship, acting out diplomatic games with his enemies, playing politics with the American people. His true goal was, as ever, trying to find a way out of the war.

“It isn’t about China and it isn’t about Russia,” he told members of his Cabinet on February 2. “It’s about South Vietnam.”

He had resumed the bombing of North Vietnam in the hope of ending the seven-year nightmare. “Crack ’em, crack ’em, crack ’em,” he ordered Admiral Moorer that same day. He wanted the rules of engagement “interpreted very, very broadly.” They were. The U.S. Air Force continually bombed North Vietnam under the guise of “protective reaction strikes”—retaliation to enemy firing. The American attacks in fact had been planned far in advance, not in retaliation but as aggression, and the records were accordingly falsified. An air force general was eventually reprimanded. But he was acting on the highest authority.

The bombing began again because Vietnamization was not working, and Nixon knew it. American intelligence predicted a major enemy offensive at Easter; the South Vietnamese Army was in no shape to withstand it. The American death toll was past fifty thousand and rising. Some twenty thousand had died on Nixon’s watch, a slaughter that might have ended at the start of his first term.

“Let’s not have any illusions,” he told Kissinger and Haldeman. “We talk about patriotism, loyalty, principle, and the rest, and we say we hope to God there’s enough of that in the country … enough to support the bombing of the North.”

“It’s the hope thing,” he said. “The China thing was important from one standpoint only: hope.” His fellow citizens loved the Ping-Pong diplomacy and the pandas: “Getting to know you—all that bullshit.”

“The American people are suckers,” Nixon said. “Gray Middle America—they’re suckers.”

But he needed their support to win reelection—and to end the war without a retreat or a disguised defeat. The “suckers” Nixon sneered at were his core constituency: dedicated patriots who despised the pacifists and peaceniks in the Democratic Party. Nixon’s potential opponents in the presidential election already were forming a circular firing squad as their first primaries approached. His political strategists already were working to ensure that the weakest candidate would be the last man standing against the president.

But for Nixon, the worst problems lay within his administration. He was barely on speaking terms with Secretary of Defense Mel Laird and Secretary of State Bill Rogers; he was sure that Laird had had a hand in the Joint Chiefs’ spy ring, and he was unsure that Rogers had a shred of diplomatic judgment. He had no faith left in Gen. Creighton Abrams, his top commander in Saigon. All this made a strategy for exiting Vietnam difficult at best.

Nixon sensed that the man who would replace John Mitchell as attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, was lacking in political wisdom. Right again: Kleindienst lied at his confirmation hearings. He did not disclose Nixon’s blunt order to withdraw a Justice Department brief in an antitrust case against International Telephone and Telegraph, one of the world’s biggest conglomerates and a major contributor to the Republican National Committee.

Kleindienst did not know, of course, that the order was on tape.

“That brief has to be filed tomorrow,” Kleindienst had told the president. “Your order is not to file?”

“My order is to drop the Goddamned thing, you son of a bitch! Don’t you understand the English language?” the president shouted. “Is that clear?”

“Yeah,” Kleindienst said with a nervous laugh, “I understand that.”

He eventually was confirmed as attorney general. For his testimony, he became the first Cabinet officer since 1929 to be convicted of breaking the law. He would not be the last.

*   *   *

The miscreants gathering under John Mitchell as he prepared to take command of CREEP should have given pause to all concerned. They were putting together plots that would lead to far greater personal and political disasters.

The prelude was “Operation Sandwedge,” a twelve-page plan written at Haldeman’s command and under John Dean’s supervision. Its author was Jack Caulfield, the former New York City police detective who served officially as a White House liaison to law enforcement, but unofficially as undercover gumshoe for Ehrlichman and Dean.

Caulfield proposed setting up a private company based in New York City to create a “covert intelligence-gathering capability” against Democratic candidates for president that would serve as a “critical contribution to the re-election of Richard Nixon.” This cover organization, to be called Corporate Security Consultants International, would be financed, to the tune of four hundred thousand dollars, entirely by “lucrative consulting contracts” with “trustworthy Republican corporate giants,” disguising any connection with the Nixon administration or the campaign.

Caulfield’s plan specifically called for “black-bag jobs”—though he insisted later that this meant carrying covert campaign cash, not carrying out break-ins, burglaries, and bugging, as the term was used by the FBI. His spy network would set up “surveillance of Democratic primaries, conventions and meetings,” to supply the Nixon campaign with “derogatory information” on the Democrats. And it would take care of security (including electronic countermeasures against bugs and taps) at CREEP headquarters. Caulfield had just the man for the job, recommended by Al Wong, the Secret Service agent who oversaw the White House taping system. The man was James McCord, a wiretapping specialist just retired after twenty-one years at the CIA.

Sandwedge aimed above all at the “penetration of nominees’ entourage and headquarters with undercover personnel.” Its primary target was a skilled politico, Lawrence O’Brien, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a Kennedy man to the soles of his patent-leather shoes. This was catnip for Nixon. He hated O’Brien with a passion—the man had run JFK’s campaign headquarters in the 1960 election—and he would be happy to destroy him by any means necessary. The Sandwedge proposal suggested exploiting O’Brien’s financial ties to the billionaire Howard Hughes, the inventor, film producer, Las Vegas hotel-and-casino magnate, and increasingly notorious lunatic. An IRS investigation of the reclusive Hughes, its existence known to very few people, had revealed that he had a secret $180,000-a-year contract with O’Brien as a lobbyist.
*

Sandwedge looked promising at first. Haldeman had sent his twenty-eight-year-old aide Gordon Strachan to supervise work on the program with Mitchell, who was, awkwardly, still the attorney general and starting work as the chief of CREEP. Strachan had sent Haldeman talking points for a meeting on Sandwedge with Mitchell: “From the campaign funds I need $800,000—300 for surveillance, 300 for polls and 200 for miscellaneous.” Sandwedge, and the $300,000 for surveillance, were templates for Watergate.

But when Dean took Caulfield to see John Mitchell on November 24, 1971, the White House cop got a brush-off and a vague offer of something better later on. (He became assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at the Treasury Department.) Caulfield left the attorney general’s office alone, and as he walked out he saw none other than G. Gordon Liddy waiting to go in. Caulfield did not know it, but Liddy was about to hijack Sandwedge.

Caulfield took on another politically sensitive job the following week: wiretapping the president’s ne’er-do-well brother Donald Nixon and monitoring his son Don Junior. Watching over Donald the elder was one of Caulfield’s long-standing assignments at the White House; Donald was a miscreant, a magnet for con artists and “wheeler-dealers,” as Caulfield wrote to Dean. Fifteen years before, Howard Hughes had loaned Donald Nixon Sr. $205,000 to underwrite a restaurant in Nixon’s hometown, Whittier, California. The loan was a skeleton that kept peeking out of Richard Nixon’s closet.

Now Donald was dealing with a far shadier financier, a world-class swindler named Robert Vesco, who had given $200,000 to Nixon’s campaign coffers. Vesco and Donald Senior were trying to buy a failed and fraudulent bank in Beirut, Lebanon, whose major creditor was the U.S. government, using Don Junior as a front man.

“Donald Nixon’s son—the President’s nephew—came to Beirut with an entourage which included an American wheeler-dealer,” namely Vesco, in December 1971, recalled Robert Oakley, then a State Department officer in Lebanon, later U.S. ambassador to Pakistan under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “They wanted to buy the bank,” but “we didn’t like the smell of it. We knew that the bank had been corrupt and that the man accompanying Nixon’s nephew also did not have a savory reputation.”

In short order, the American ambassador to Lebanon, William Buffum, received a message from Attorney General Mitchell requesting “favorable consideration to the Nixon offer. There was also a call from Haldeman’s office in the White House, making the same request,” Oakley recalled. The embassy declined, and its refusal “hit a sore spot,” he said. “We heard a lot of squawking and noise; we understood that the Attorney General’s office denied that Mitchell had ever been involved,” he said. “We had created a huge flap in Washington”—the first among many in 1972.

*   *   *

The office of the attorney general of the United States is an enormous room exuding the grandeur of the rule of law. On January 27, 1972, the nation’s chief law enforcement office, John Mitchell, convened with another one of Haldeman’s baby-faced aides, Jeb Stuart Magruder, who had cut his teeth running Don Rumsfeld’s campaign for Congress a decade before and now served as Mitchell’s deputy at CREEP. The president’s counsel John Dean sat alongside, representing the White House.

The meeting was run by G. Gordon Liddy. Technically, Liddy’s role was CREEP’s in-house lawyer, but that was a cover for his real job: the White House plumber in chief. Liddy was regarded by many of his colleagues at the time, and thereafter, as a sociopath, a man to be feared.

The former FBI agent had prepared an elaborate plan code-named Gemstone—Sandwedge on steroids—which he now formally presented to Mitchell and Dean, along with seven separate flow charts propped up on easels. Gemstone was a conspiracy to violate federal laws including kidnapping, burglary, and warrantless wiretapping, all in the name of the reelection of the president of the United States.

The first of its components was Diamond. Liddy planned to kidnap anti-Nixon demonstrators at the Republican National Convention, drug them, and take them to Mexico. Had anyone present had the requisite sense of humor, he might have suggested that the hippies who were Liddy’s targets might actually enjoy being drugged and taken to Mexico, but Liddy had set a grimmer tone by entitling this chart “Nacht und Nebel” (“Night and Fog”), a term used by Nazi storm troopers for disappearing people.

Opal was a series of black-bag jobs for planting bugs at key Democratic headquarters. Emerald was electronic eavesdropping on Democrats’ campaign planes. Quartz was listening in on microwave telephone traffic. Topaz was photographing documents at the candidates’ headquarters in Washington and the Miami Beach convention halls and hotels. Ruby would place spies in the field organizations and headquarters of the Democratic candidates for president. Turquoise would employ Hunt’s compadres from the Bay of Pigs to sabotage the air-conditioning at the convention. Then came Sapphire, in which a houseboat docked in Miami Beach would be used by prostitutes who would lure politicos; and Crystal, which would record and photograph their liaisons for blackmail. Finally came a plan to finance the long-shot campaign of Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for president. Its intent was to divert black Democrats from their likely nominee; its code name, Coal, indicated Liddy’s political and racial sensibilities.

Hunt said he could finance the entire operation for under one million dollars.

The attorney general said this was not quite what he had in mind as a campaign intelligence operation. He told Liddy to scale the plan back, come back with a more modest proposal—say, half a million—and, by the way, burn the charts.

*   *   *

Richard Nixon had been contemplating a plan to destroy Lawrence O’Brien for almost two years. Haldeman wrote in his diary on March 4, 1970, that Nixon wanted “to move hard on Larry O’Brien now that he’s back as DNC chairman,” starting by going after his income tax returns. Haldeman was warned by Tom Charles Huston, whose playbook of dirty tricks had just been printed, that “making sensitive political inquiries at the IRS is about as safe a procedure as trusting a whore.” Haldeman quickly sent an “eyes only” order to John Dean to have the IRS back off an inquiry involving none other than Howard Hughes: “As you probably remember there was a Hughes/Don Nixon loan controversy years ago, and the prosecution of this case could reopen that entire issue which could be very damaging politically.” Caulfield had warned Dean from the start that digging into Hughes risked a “counter-scandal.”

But the White House soon discovered, through the IRS, O’Brien’s secret retainer as a lobbyist for Howard Hughes. Someone made that contract disappear. “Concerning Howard Hughes,” Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s deputy assistant, wrote to Chuck Colson on December 12, 1970, “his retainer with Larry O’Brien was cancelled as a result of the latest escapades.”

So Nixon had inside information on O’Brien. But what did O’Brien have on Nixon? Did he know Nixon himself had received secret contributions from Howard Hughes? That Bebe Rebozo was holding one hundred thousand dollars in cash from Hughes for Nixon? Or that Hughes had made another secret campaign contribution to Nixon in February 1972?