The Wars of Watergate (19 page)

The tale of the Huston Plan offers a variety of insights into Nixon’s desire for personal control of matters he considered sensitive, the Administration’s plans for the bureaucracy, and the latter’s counterattacks. Perhaps most important of all, the story offers a revealing indication of the Administration’s contempt for constitutional limitations.

The Huston Plan bore the name of Tom Charles Huston, a second-echelon White House aide. Huston, a former national leader in Young Americans for Freedom, was a deeply committed right-wing ideologue who sometimes signed his memos “Cato the Younger.” He proposed to gather all domestic intelligence activities under his direction in the White House. According to fellow aide John Dean, Huston believed the government would surely fall if it did not deal harshly with the revolutionaries who were determined to destroy it.
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Reflected in the plan was a combination of White House frustration
at the alleged inefficiency of the intelligence community with a desire to have that community focus on activities that affected the Administration’s political concerns.

Tom Huston wrote the details, but the CIA Director had no illusions about their ultimate source: the plan, Richard Helms said, was “basically Richard Nixon’s doing, and he called it the Huston Plan.” The idea logically followed from Nixon’s law-and-order campaign theme in 1968. For some, providing order meant putting an end to protest, demonstrations, and dissent—whatever the constitutional legitimacy of those political activities. That conviction was rooted in a longstanding American belief, first heard in response to political protests in the late 1790s and continuing through the Cold War, that dissent was necessarily something nourished abroad to foment subversion and hence destruction at home. James Madison once lamented that “the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against dangers, real or pretended, from abroad.”

Nixon himself, of course, was not unfamiliar with such notions. Throughout the years of antiwar activism, a theme of the response from the Right was that the protests were inspired and fueled in Moscow, Hanoi, or Peking. J. Edgar Hoover, in his forty-fifth year as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation when Nixon assumed office, already had in place
COINTELPRO
, an elaborate program of infiltration and disinformation against the so-called New Left. Still the protests mounted, eventually provoking the President to demand greater efforts to discredit the dissidents.

As a Nixon aide throughout the protests of the 1960s, Tom Huston shared the President’s concerns. In February 1970, he first proposed fundamental changes in the procedures for handling internal-security matters. He suggested separating the collection and evaluation of intelligence from the formulation of policy based on that intelligence. In short, Huston recognized that as a result of the commingling of those functions, “responsibility is divorced from authority and … roadblocks are institutionalized.” Vested bureaucratic interests had their own agendas, often quite different from those of the President. Huston frankly thought that “the bureaucracy must be treated as the enemy;… in the pursuit of facts one must be prepared to harass, brow-beat, do whatever is necessary to get the desired information. On the other [hand], in the formulation of policy, the bureaucracy must be courted and treated gently.”

Huston pushed hard for an interagency working group, “chaired by the White House,” to coordinate intelligence in the internal-security area. Huston told Egil Krogh, another young lawyer concerned with law-and-order issues, that the “President’s interest” in discrediting Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, and other activist groups simply was not being served by the Department of Justice—which meant the FBI. Krogh agreed, telling Haldeman that Justice was “almost blind to opportunities
which could help us.” Krogh thought that Huston should be sent as a “special assistant” to Mitchell to review internal-security matters and recommend political courses of action to the Attorney General. Perhaps then, Krogh added, the Department of Justice might “work for the President.”

Huston devised his interagency scheme, to be directed by a White House staff man, with a “clear and unequivocal Presidential mandate” for “decisive leadership” in order to provide the President “with the best and most timely intelligence possible.” It was a self-directed job description. Properly, he protected the President, suggesting that Nixon merely brief the heads of intelligence agencies orally, thus eliminating “whatever risk might attach to putting on paper the President’s concern in this area.”
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On June 5, 1970, Nixon met with the directors of various intelligence agencies: the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. He criticized their overlapping activities and jurisdictions, and he demanded that they reorganize to provide him with one informed body of opinion on domestic political intelligence. He named Hoover as Chairman of the group—first among equals, so to speak—and installed Tom Huston as “staff director.” Perhaps the President was aware of Huston’s experience in Army Intelligence; more likely, he had been impressed with Huston’s earlier performance in prodding the Internal Revenue Service to audit Administration enemies. He had known Huston for five years and undoubtedly trusted him to carry out his intentions. Another participant in the June 5 meeting found the President clear: “We must develop a plan which will enable us to curtail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.”

The selection of Hoover was a paradox, for the Huston Plan in some measure had its origins in White House dissatisfaction with the Director’s performance; indeed, some believed that he was at best an anachronism. Helms thought that Hoover’s lack of aggressiveness in recent years had prompted the President to have the White House assume operational control of domestic intelligence activities.
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Perhaps Nixon and his aides thought that by naming Hoover chairman they could coopt him.

Nixon and Hoover had been both tacit and overt political allies for more than two decades and were social friends as well. Following his election, Nixon told Hoover that he was to have “direct access” to the Oval Office, and that Attorney General-designate John Mitchell—supposedly Hoover’s superior—had been so informed. A few weeks later, LBJ told Nixon that he must depend on “Edgar” to “maintain security.” Put your “complete trust” in him, Johnson advised. Nixon needed little prompting, for he had forged a close bond with Hoover since his service on the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s. Hoover had kept up the contact, providing Nixon with information throughout the latter’s “wilderness years.”
Shortly after he took office, Nixon asked Hoover to investigate his own longtime political mentor, Murray Chotiner.
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By 1969, however, Hoover struck some Nixon staffers as an outmoded relic, a bureaucrat stubbornly clinging to his place, afraid to move in new directions. Ehrlichman, for example, complained of the poor quality of FBI investigations and even had the audacity—he claimed—to return FBI reports to Hoover when he considered them inadequate. Hoover, for his part, registered shock at White House requests that he considered unwise and even dangerous. Much of the difficulty probably was due to Hoover’s declining energies; he preferred to consolidate his empire and not open it to further assaults. Hoover no longer could be counted on to meet CIA or White House demands for actions that, if carried out and subsequently revealed, might have irreparably harmed his beloved Bureau. Consequently, he refused requests for mail openings, break-ins, wiretaps, and campus infiltrations.

Hoover’s finely attuned political antennae remained intact; indeed, they operated far better than those of the White House. Given the heightened judicial and public consciousness of the importance of maintaining rigorous constitutional standards, Hoover recognized that the operations favored by the White House threatened problems for the President—and not least of all, for “his” Bureau and for himself. Techniques that infringe on traditional rights, he told Helms, “must therefore be scrutinized most carefully.”

Huston’s implicit instruction was to bypass the recalcitrant Hoover and provide an intelligence-gathering apparatus that would serve the President’s will more effectively. Huston was aided by the ambitious William Sullivan, third in the FBI’s hierarchy and a possible successor to the Director. When the various intelligence directors met to consider the President’s request for a reorganized domestic intelligence effort, Hoover said that he believed the President wanted “a historical study” of intelligence operations and present security problems. Huston smelled a Hoover ploy of delay and obfuscation. “We’re not talking about the dead past,” the President’s aide said, “we’re talking about the living present.” Huston got his plan (with Sullivan’s help), including the creation of a permanent interagency committee to develop new intelligence policies, and including a range of surveillance activities such as mail openings, burglaries, and infiltration. “The President loves this stuff,” Mitchell told John Dean, adding, however, that it really was unnecessary, presumably because such activities already were in place.
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The new domestic intelligence committee needed an aide who would serve as the President’s liaison, much in the fashion of Henry Kissinger at the National Security Council. Tom Huston was the obvious choice, but he had made a dangerous enemy for himself. He was not the first man whose ambitions outstripped J. Edgar Hoover’s vision of what must be.

When the Huston Plan went to the President in July, Hoover managed to
insert numerous footnotes disassociating the FBI from the plan’s proposals. The fact that he challenged the report on civil liberties grounds must have stunned White House officials. Hoover noted that mail openings were illegal, that the FBI opposed “surreptitious entry,” and that military agents were prohibited from engaging in domestic intelligence operations. Hoover feared that “jackels” [
sic
] of the press and the American Civil Liberties Union would discover the operations and embarrass the Administration. He flatly opposed allowing a presidential aide to coordinate domestic intelligence activities “in the same manner as Dr. Henry Kissinger.”

The plan was dead, despite Huston’s bitter fulminations to Haldeman. Nixon knew Hoover: if the plan proceeded, it would be only a matter of time before the press became aware of the Administration’s expanded operations. The President protected himself in classic fashion; he approved the plan, he said, but insisted that Huston sign the necessary orders. Helms, for one, believed that Nixon fully supported the plan but would never do so openly. The various intelligence chiefs responded to Huston’s name with scorn and ridicule, scoffing at Nixon and Haldeman, who “didn’t have the guts” to sign the directive for the plan themselves. There was no way that intelligence officers would carry out such bold proposals on the basis of Huston’s signature.

Hoover was more direct: he warned Mitchell that he would insist on the President’s signature for any activity that might be illegal. Mitchell saw the danger and informed the President. Two weeks after his initial approval, Nixon ordered the plan scuttled. And in the meantime, Hoover remained free to conduct the “dirty war” against subversion, in a fashion not too different from that proposed by Huston, but on J. Edgar Hoover’s terms.

Hoover’s victory only heightened the White House antagonism toward him. Ehrlichman concluded that Hoover was an “embarrassment” and gave Nixon a report written in the fall of 1971 by G. Gordon Liddy, another aide, concluding that Hoover should resign. Nixon thought the memorandum “brilliantly argued,” and agreed that Hoover must go. The President confronted the Director in a White House meeting in October and obliquely hinted, “as gently and subtly as I could,” that he feared attacks on Hoover from outside critics would increase and force him to leave under pressure. Nixon had a talking paper, proposing that Hoover become “a consultant to the President,” with his own office, car, and driver, after the 1972 elections. Hoover understood the hint and let the President know he would be glad to step aside—any time the President so asked. Nixon appreciated the master stroke: it was the same tactic he had used on Dwight Eisenhower during the fund crisis in the 1952 election. Richard Nixon, the champion of law and order, could hardly ask the Director of Law and Order to resign.

Perhaps the President was not a “good butcher,” as he later remarked about another situation; perhaps, too, he remembered how and why Hoover
refrained from publicizing possibly embarrassing information. Nixon later acknowledged that the meeting was a “strike-out,” for him. Certainly it was not for Hoover, who walked away with his empire and throne more secure than ever. Apparently Nixon had some concern regarding Hoover’s disloyal subordinate William Sullivan, as he suggested to Ehrlichman that they give him “a judgeship or something as [the] price for silence.” Sullivan, however, died from a gunshot wound, apparently self-inflicted, shortly after the Huston Plan was exposed two years later.

There was also a reward for Huston, for a year later the President appointed him to the Census Bureau Advisory Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality.
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The irony was probably unintentional.

Hoover died shortly after the defeat of the Huston Plan, in May 1972. Nixon returned from the funeral, announced that the new FBI building would be named in Hoover’s honor, and ordered the Acting Director, L. Patrick Gray, to bring Hoover’s files to the White House. It developed that they were gone; supposedly, Hoover’s secretary got there first.
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With Nixon, Hoover won his usual battles over his prerogatives and authority, but the nation lost the constitutional war. Although the Huston Plan was officially abandoned, its measures were used in a variety of forms, the most extreme being the creation of the Special Investigative Unit, more familiarly known as the “Plumbers.” Ostensibly established to determine the source of new leaks from inside the Administration, the Plumbers graduated to “black bag jobs” and illegal entries. The linkage between the official scuttling of the Huston Plan and the Plumbers is curiously mixed. Some argued—most notably, William Sullivan—that killing the plan led to the creation of the Plumbers, to mounting similar enterprises, and thus, to Watergate. Ehlrichman said that the inability of the White House to get rid of Hoover necessitated finding “other ways of doing things.” Huston heatedly denied that his plan offered a model for the Plumbers and other Watergate-related enterprises, yet he conceded that if Hoover had gone along with the plan, the Administration would have never had to do its own “black-bag jobs.”
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