One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (24 page)

Nixon’s commerce secretary, Maurice Stans, left the Cabinet that month to become the reelection campaign’s finance chairman. In his first days as CREEP’s chief fund-raiser, Stans flew to Managua, Nicaragua, where he met with none other than Howard Hughes. Increasingly irrational and drug-addled, Hughes had fled from a hideaway in the Bahamas, finding refuge by renting the entire top floor of Managua’s best hotel. His move to Nicaragua came with help from the notorious American ambassador and Nixon crony Turner B. Shelton—and from Maurice Stans: “The Secretary of Commerce came down and cleared the way for him to be there,” said Bob White, then the number two man in the American embassy. Few plausible reasons brought Stans to Nicaragua; it is implausible that he left with an empty briefcase.

Stans was facing a crucial deadline. A newly enacted law required the public disclosure of campaign contributions to political candidates, effective April 7, 1972; the law’s intent was to keep suitcases crammed with cash out of the American political system. Corporate contributions were forbidden under existing law, but if they were in hand before midnight on April 6, no one would know. So Stans had ten weeks to collect as much cash as possible. He was greatly assisted by his deputy, the president’s lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach. Stans worked the corporations and the executives. Kalmbach played his field of expertise: millionaires seeking ambassadorships. One, W. Clement Stone, pledged $3 million. Unfortunately, Stone wanted London, which already was occupied by Ambassador Walter Annenberg, who gave $254,000 in order to stay on. In all, Kalmbach collected $706,000 from thirteen contributors who were given ambassadorships by Nixon after the 1972 election. Together, the finance chairmen collected about $20 million for CREEP before the deadline. Campaign headquarters, and the White House itself, were awash in cash.

Nixon still worried: Did the Democratic National Committee know who had contributed to CREEP, and how much? Did O’Brien know?

*   *   *

John Mitchell, his campaign deputy Jeb Magruder, John Dean, and Gordon Liddy reconvened at the attorney general’s office a week after their first Gemstone conference, on February 4, 1972. All four eventually went to prison for the events that resulted from this meeting. Here is where Watergate was born. No one can prove its paternity, but its progenitor was Richard Nixon, who at that date was preparing for his momentous visit to China.

Liddy presented Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean with a scaled-down version of Gemstone. The plan still focused on the bugging and wiretapping of President Nixon’s political opponents. Its targets specifically included the offices of Lawrence O’Brien and the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel.

They did not get an immediate decision from Mitchell. He was in a state of misery; his wife, Martha, whom he loved dearly, had been an alcoholic and an emotional basket case for several years. He had reason to fear that she was becoming mentally ill. He was disengaged, drinking, still running the Justice Department, dreading the campaign to come. He didn’t focus on the plan before him. He did not say yes or no.

Enraged, Liddy told his colleague Howard Hunt to arrange a meeting with Nixon’s hard-as-nails aide Chuck Colson. They gathered in Colson’s grandly appointed suite at the Executive Office Building. Liddy wanted action and he knew how to get it. He knew that Magruder, who was running CREEP during Mitchell’s mental absence, was mortally terrified of Colson. He also knew that Colson had been hammering Magruder about the need for better political intelligence on the president’s enemies. So he explained the impasse to Colson, who immediately picked up the telephone, called Magruder, and told him to get a decision on Liddy’s plan.

“This Watergate thing kept coming back—clearly because of the Howard Hughes issue: O’Brien,” Magruder recounted in an oral history recorded years later, after he had done his time in prison and become a Presbyterian pastor. “O’Brien was a consultant to Hughes; they wanted to know if Hughes knew anything that would prove negative.” He finally presented the plan for Mitchell’s approval seven weeks later, during a weekend at the Rebozo retreat in Key Biscayne. “Mitchell signed off on the Watergate break-in in Key Biscayne; I think we all reluctantly signed off. None of us were interested in it at the Committee; we were pushed, first by Colson, then by Haldeman. We were continually told that the president wanted it done.”

All this is confirmed on a White House tape recorded on December 10, 1972, when it still seemed impossible that these plans would ruin Richard Nixon.

“I knew we were bugging the other side,” Haldeman said.

“Perfectly legitimate,” the president said.

“Obviously what happened,” Haldeman said on this difficult-to-discern tape, “Mitchell set this apparatus up.… Then we started pushing … Mitchell was pushing on using them. There was this—”

“—paper,” Nixon said.

“Secret papers,” Haldeman said. “And financial data that O’Brien had.”

That was the reason for the Watergate break-in: a pure product of Nixon’s obsession. “If this obsession … seems irrational,” John Dean wrote in 2014, “there was little about Watergate that was otherwise.”

But Nixon tried his best to explain it in one of his last televised interviews, not long before he died. “1972, as you know, was a very big year,” he said. “We went to China. We went to Russia.… And here was a small thing, and we fouled it up beyond belief.”

“I would advise all that follow me in the position as President: do the big things as well as you can, but when a small thing is there, deal with it, and deal with it fast; get it out of the way,” Nixon said. “If you don’t, it’s going to become big, and then it may destroy you.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“From one extreme to another”

S
O
N
IXON
went to China. And only Nixon, cold warrior playing peacemaker, could have gone to China in that era. The trip was seen at the time as the greatest achievement of his presidency.

Nixon made sure the world saw it. Live broadcasts, via American military channels, went to the major networks. Millions sipping coffee at breakfast watched Nixon toasting his hosts with mao-tai, the potent Chinese liquor, while the Red Army orchestra played “America the Beautiful” at a sumptuous banquet.

“It had a tremendous impact back here in the United States,” said Winston Lord, Kissinger’s Chinese-speaking aide, who attended and transcribed all the president’s meetings with the Communist leaders. “In fact, this coverage led to almost instant romance and euphoria. That was overstated. After all, horrible things were still going on in China. We swung from one extreme to another, from picturing China as an implacable enemy to a new friend.”

Kissinger warned Nixon at the outset that “the intangibles of your China visit will prove more important than the tangible results.” He was right. Very few knew how close the summit came to being a diplomatic debacle. And only in retrospect did future American ambassadors to China, such as Winston Lord, see that romancing the world’s biggest Communist dictatorship would create new tensions and turmoil, after the euphoria was over.

*   *   *

Nixon and his entourage of nearly two hundred Americans spent two days flying across America and the Pacific, stopping in Hawaii and Guam. In a sign of what was to come, Nixon and Kissinger put Secretary of State Rogers and his Asia hands in the rear of Air Force One.

They landed in Beijing on February 21, 1972. The president was driven through eerily empty streets; the Chinese had barricaded the route. He engaged in informal chitchat with Prime Minister Zhou En-lai and then went to the government’s guest compound, a calm oasis within the cold, gray capital. About ninety minutes later, unannounced and unexpected, Zhou arrived and asked if Nixon would like to see Chairman Mao right now—an utter surprise. The president took off with Kissinger and Lord.

“We had no idea when they’d be back, or what would happen,” Haldeman wrote.

Nixon entered the leaders’ compound in the Forbidden City, the immense complex of red-and-gold palaces facing Tiananmen Square, where Chinese emperors had ruled for nearly five hundred years. He walked down a dark, long hallway and into a modestly appointed study. There, attended by two nurses, sat the last of the twentieth century’s great dictators, a frail old man of seventy-eight, but still projecting power.

The United States knew less about Mao’s China than Mao knew about the United States. Many years would pass before Western eyes saw reliable accounts of the horrors under Mao, the many millions of deaths by starvation caused by his mad schemes to modernize China, the murderous brutality of his political purges, the merciless repression of his rule.

Mao, like Nixon, was a farmer’s son, born nearly twenty years before the president, in 1893. He became one of the founders of the Communist Party of China in 1921, inspired by Lenin’s Russian Revolution. In 1927, a new Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, began killing and jailing Communists. Mao led a guerrilla army of peasants into the mountains, far south of Beijing. Seven years later, Chiang tried to destroy them. Mao led a strategic retreat, the Long March, to the north. Perhaps two-thirds of the original one hundred thousand Maoists survived the grim trek over mountains and through swamps. While Mao was leading the Long March, Nixon was entering law school.

Then Japan attacked China in 1937. Chiang made a desperate strategic alliance with Mao. Together, throughout World War II, they fought the Japanese. When Japan was defeated in 1945, Mao and Chiang turned on each other again, and China fell into a brutal civil war. Four years later, in October 1949, Mao triumphed and proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. In December 1950, seven weeks after Nixon was elected as a senator, Mao sent an enormous regiment into the Korean War, where his troops slaughtered thousands of American soldiers and altered the tide of battle.

Chiang fled to the island of Taiwan after Mao’s revolution and established the anticommunist Republic of China; he remained its leader, at the age of eighty-four, when Nixon arrived in Beijing. American support for Taiwan had been absolute for two decades, a political imperative for Republicans. Nixon had been Chiang’s staunch supporter, like every American president since Harry Truman—until now.

*   *   *

Seated in plush leather armchairs in the book-lined study, Nixon and Mao began to exchange pleasantries.

“I have read the Chairman’s poems and speeches, and I knew he was a professional philosopher,” Nixon said. The Chinese laughed. The two sides bantered. Nixon flattered Mao: “The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world.”

“I haven’t been able to change it,” Mao said flatly. Switching subjects, he turned to Taiwan. “Our common old friend, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek … calls us Communist bandits,” the chairman said. Nixon responded, “What does the Chairman call Chiang Kai-shek?” Zhou replied, “A bandit.… We abuse each other.” Mao said, “Actually, the history of our friendship with him is much longer than the history of your friendship with him.”

Nixon said, “Yes, I know.”

Mao abruptly changed topics again. “We two must not monopolize the whole show,” he told Nixon. “It won’t do if we don’t let Dr. Kissinger have a say. You have been famous about your trips to China.”

“It was the President who set the direction and worked out the plan,” Kissinger said with false modesty.

“He is a very wise assistant to say it that way,” Nixon responded, drawing laughter from Mao. “He doesn’t look like a secret agent. He is the only man in captivity who could go to Paris twelve times and Beijing once and no one knew it, except possibly a couple of pretty girls.” Now Zhou laughed as Nixon made fun of Kissinger’s reputation as a swinger: “Anyone who uses pretty girls as a cover must be the greatest diplomat of all time.”

Chairman Mao, who had had many concubines as a younger man, said, “So your girls are very often made use of?”

President Nixon replied, “It would get me into great trouble if I used girls as a cover.”

“Especially during elections,” Zhou said, still laughing.

Nixon tried to return to the hard issues between them: the two Chinas, Vietnam, U.S.-Soviet relations—“the immediate and urgent problems.” But Mao said, “All those troublesome problems, I don’t want to get into very much.” In the remaining half hour, Nixon did most of the talking. Mao’s replies were disjointed. Nixon saw the chairman starting to fade.

The president concluded: “The chairman’s life is well-known to all of us. He came from a very poor family to the top of the most populous nation in the world, a great nation.… I also came from a very poor family, and to the top of a very great nation. History has brought us together. The question is whether we, with different philosophies, but both with feet on the ground, and having come from the people, can make a breakthrough that will serve not just China and America, but the whole world in the years ahead. And that is why we are here.”

Mao responded, “It is all right to talk well and also all right if there are no agreements”—an odd note to end on. The two leaders rose, and Mao walked the Americans to the door, moving in a slow shuffle. He told the president that he was not well. Nixon said he looked good. “Appearances are deceiving,” the chairman said. Mao’s last public appearance had taken place on May Day 1971. He would remain an invisible emperor until he died in September 1976.

*   *   *

The question persisted: how would the two sides agree on a joint statement, a communiqu
é
set to be issued at the end of the summit, in Shanghai? Zhou had suggested in his 1971 meetings with Kissinger “a different kind of communiqu
é
, which was unprecedented in diplomatic practice, in which each side would state its own position,” Winston Lord said. “We had been separated, we had been hostile to each other, and we had these continuing differences. So when we get to agreements, people will believe us because they have seen our candor beforehand.”

“Frankly, this was a brilliant idea,” Lord said. But nothing else had been agreed to; each word would have to be negotiated that week.