Nixon's Secret (2 page)

Nixon himself defined his career as the ultimate political warrior with a quote from a speech that Theodore Roosevelt gave on April 23, 1910, at the Sorbonne in Paris:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”
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Like the great politicians of his day, John and Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon had both a dark side and a light side. He achieved great things and sometimes used hardball tactics. He was a man of ideas married to an innate political pragmatism, coupled with the instincts of a survivor. He could be magnanimous as well as venal. This book seeks to illuminate both the light and dark sides of our thirty-seventh president.

As a veteran of eight national presidential campaigns, who cut his teeth with Nixon before going to work for perhaps the greatest president in my lifetime, Ronald Reagan, I have been the recipient of an enormous amount of political intelligence. I know how the game is played. This book will tell you what I think happened in Richard Nixon’s ultimate downfall and the method in which he got a pardon for crimes he may have committed in the scandal known as Watergate. I will make a compelling case that it was not White House Counsel John Dean who brought Nixon to ruin. Dean acts in his self-interest, and he is but the weasel of our narrative. Although Dean would significantly weaken Nixon, it was General Alexander M. Haig who greased the skids for Nixon through a series of purposeful blunders in Nixon’s handling of the legal, public, and political problem triggered by the Watergate break-in.

Before we can understand the rise and fall of Richard Nixon, we must first examine this complex and sometimes confusing man.

Few have had the opportunity to work for and befriend their boyhood hero as I have. I was drawn to Richard Nixon not because of his philosophy; he had none. It was his resilience and his indestructibility that attracted me. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” he would say.
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Nixon’s Lazarus-like rise from the political dead is a story of determination, perseverance, political cunning, timing, skill, and above all, discipline. This combined with a commitment to the drudgery and hard work of retail politics. Nixon’s physical and intellectual energy is often underestimated.

I am uniquely qualified to tell this tale. I am an admitted Nixon friend. He fascinates me still. He was the most durable public figure in the twentieth century. The idea of anyone having almost a fifty-year run in American politics is incredible. Nixon, like LBJ, JFK, and Eisenhower, was a giant. At Nixon’s funeral, Bob Dole would correctly call the 1950s to the 1980s “the era of Nixon.”

While I myself had many policy disagreements with Nixon, it was his sheer resilience and persistence and his will to compete and win that I admired. No matter how many electoral or political setbacks he suffered Nixon persevered in his drive for the presidency. I myself had a tattoo of Richard Nixon inked on my back. It is the image of a floating head about the size of a grapefruit equidistant between my shoulder blades. I wear it as a reminder that no matter what life’s setbacks and disappointments are, one must always get up from the mat and fight again.

I was the Connecticut Chairman of Youth for Nixon during his 1968 campaign. I parlayed this august post into becoming a gofer for Nixon’s law partner, and later attorney general, John Mitchell, at the Miami Beach convention. I later worked in Nixon’s White House press shop as a volunteer cutting clippings for Mort Alin, an assistant to Nixon’s aide Patrick J. Buchanan. At age nineteen, other than those who worked in Young Voters for the President, I was the youngest staffer at the
Committee to Reelect the President
(CRP). I reported to Herbert L. “Bart” Porter, who would later serve thirty days in jail for lying to the grand jury in the Watergate scandal. Porter, in turn, reported to CRP Campaign Director Jeb Stuart Magruder. I myself was called before the grand jury in the Watergate matter.

I had a friendly disagreement with Nixon in 1977 when he attempted to convince me to work in the presidential campaign of former Democrat and Texas Governor John Connally. Connally’s camp had put forward an offer, transmitted by Connally Press Secretary Jim Brady and approved by Connally’s right-hand man Julian Read. It was a lot of money. Nixon overestimated the strength and potential of Connally and greatly underestimated Reagan. Nixon thought Ron was too old. I made the case for Reagan over dinner at Nixon’s manse in Saddle River, New Jersey. “After his near loss in ‘76, it’s clear Reagan is better positioned for the race than anyone else,” I told Nixon. Connally would famously spend $11 million and win one delegate.

I saw Nixon up close. He was brilliant, devious, insightful, obtuse, determined, and sometimes less than truthful. Above all, he was disciplined. It was his persistence that inspired me. He never gave up fighting, first for the presidency and then for the legacy of that presidency. This book will, however, also examine the underbelly of Nixon’s politics, his tactics, subterfuges, his diversions, and financial ties to organized crime that he shared with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. We will focus on his long-term relationship with the CIA and the fateful events that brought him to Dallas on November 22, 1963, the very day Nixon’s moribund political career had been renewed.

Nixon’s Secrets
is not a sanitized version of his political life, nor is it an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation. Don’t expect a whitewash of Nixon’s sins because “no man is a hero to his valet.” On balance, I conclude that Nixon’s greatness and his vision for a global political realignment to achieve world peace must be viewed as well as his numerous mistakes.

Rather I will show that Nixon engaged in politics the way politics were in the 1950s and 1960s. Johnson, Nixon, and Kennedy all had relations with organized crime. All three took campaign contributions that were illegal. All three engaged in break-ins to secure political intelligence. All three ordered the bugging of their opponents prior to election. Kennedy would make an unholy alliance with the Mob. Johnson would order the murder of as many as seventeen men to cover up his trail of corruption. He stole votes and participated in electoral fraud.

Nixon’s Secrets
may prove that he was not the man you think he was. He was an excellent poker player, ringing up enough winnings while running a “friendly game” in the navy to bankroll his initial congressional campaign. He liked a drink or two, as we shall see. As the procurement officer for his naval battalion, his greatest talent was in acquiring alcohol at a makeshift hamburger stand, where he gave both hooch and grub away. He was immensely popular with his men.

Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson would all stray from the marital bed, although the sexual appetites of JFK and his running mate were more voracious than Nixon’s. In fact, Nixon had a long-term discreet liaison with a courtesan in Hong Kong. She would move to Whittier, California, his hometown, after his election as president and visit him in the White House on at least three occasions. Nixon had sent her a bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume and a note inviting her to visit him in the United States after their first encounter in Asia. The liaison was not Nixon’s only sexual indiscretion. Jackie Kennedy would tell playwright Tennessee Williams that Nixon made a pass at her in Washington one weekend when Nixon and Kennedy were both in the House and JFK was away campaigning.

Nixon’s advance man John Ehrlichman would remember an inebriated Nixon making clumsy passes at girls in his suite when Nixon invited friends to celebrate his successful 1964 introduction of the nominee Barry Goldwater to the Republican ticket.
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I seek to put Nixon in the context of his times. It’s a warts-and-all story of a bare-knuckled brand of politics that Nixon and every other contender in 1960 played. David Pietrusza’s book
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon
gives a great account of Nixon and his contemporaries Kennedy and Johnson at that time. Crucial to Nixon’s comeback were the tumultuous events of the 1960s, which created the vacuum he would fill. As Oliver Stone so pointedly said in his movie
Nixon,
the death of John and Robert Kennedy, the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, the raging war in Vietnam, and the unrest on US campuses and in America’s urban centers, a white backlash, and the lack of “law and order” created a dynamic that made the return of Richard Nixon to power possible.

Although I worked on the campaign in 1968, I only shook Nixon’s hand once that year at a “Party Unity” luncheon at the National Republican Women’s Club in New York City. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had little use for Nixon, attended and embraced Nixon for the wire photographers. I would not shake Nixon’s hand again until 1972 when he toured the Committee to Reelect the President headquarters in Washington where I worked.

It was not until 1977 that I got to know our thirty-seventh president on more intimate terms. When I was elected National Chairman of the Young Republican National Federation, the former president asked me to come west. He invited me to visit him in exile in San Clemente. Although scheduled for a thirty-minute meeting, we ended up talking presidential politics for four and half hours. It was the first time that I sharply and outwardly disagreed with his assertion that former Texas Governor John Connally, who had served in the Nixon cabinet as treasury secretary, would be a strong candidate for president. I made an effective case for Reagan as the 1980 nominee. Nixon was amused.

Before long I was talking to the former president by telephone every Saturday morning. His hunger for political gossip was insatiable. He would begin every conversation by saying, “So, what is the state of play?” I began doing odd political chores such as passing messages or memos to members of Congress, evaluating speaking invitations and checking out Republican prospects in various states and districts.

Charles McWhorter, who had first worked in Nixon’s vice presidential office, had an encyclopedic knowledge of Republican politics and a network of relationships across the GOP. After Nixon became president, McWhorter, who favored large and garish turquoise jewelry with his business suits, would become a “lobbyist” with AT&T while on permanent loan for Nixon. “You know Charlie McWhorter?” Nixon asked me. “Charlie’s retiring, and I need someone to review invitations, check out certain political situations, and convey messages to party leaders and others. John Taylor [Nixon’s chief of staff] is a good man, but he’s not political,” Nixon said. “Would you lend us a hand?” “Of course,” I said. “I’d be delighted.”

Throughout the 1960s, considering himself ready to be president, Nixon had little interest in the ideas of others. He worked a room like the political pro he was, memorizing names and details of the families of those he needed support from so he could make polite inquiries and mask his acute discomfort with small talk. Voracious in his appetite for gossip, he collected information on the sexual misconduct of his political allies and enemies alike, and his private conversation was laced with ethnic slurs and profanity. Nixon was perpetually in the process of self-examination.

By the 1970s Nixon was interested in meeting a new generation of journalists who had not covered Watergate. I arranged a series of private off-the-record dinners that included the
New York Times
’s Howell Raines and Gerry Boyd, the
Chicago Tribune
’s Steve Neal, David Hoffman of
The Washington Post
, Susan Page of
Newsday
, Paul West of the
Dallas Times Herald
, Michael Kramer of
New York Magazine,
and Sidney Blumenthal, then of the
New Republic,
and others. Nixon would mesmerize the young reporters with his vast knowledge of international geopolitics. The dinners focused on international issues and foreign policy, and no questions from the reporters were barred. The old man would raid his wine cellar for the best vintages for his guests from the fifth estate. There was no discussion of Watergate at these intimate dinners; instead Nixon held forth on the state of Sino-Soviet and American relations and entertained questions.

Richard Nixon was proud of his martini-making skills. He called them “silver bullets.” After two martinis Nixon would be drunk. He had a low tolerance for alcohol. A drunken Nixon was a loquacious Nixon.

Here is Nixon’s recipe, which he told me was given to him by Winston Churchill:

Obtain a bottle of large-sized olives.

Drain the juice.

Fill the olive bottle with Vermouth.

Refrigerate the bottle until cold.

Put three fingers of gin or vodka over ice in a silver martini shaker.

Shake vigorously until shards of ice permeate the alcohol.

Pour in a chilled martini glass. Drop in one olive from the jar.

Nixon was a loner with a tendency to “retreat deeper into a mystic shell.” Although his low tolerance for alcohol has been noted, Nixon would drink heavily, which seemed to lighten his lost moods. A Nixon aide said that the vice president let down his cold guard of “grimness and glacial determination” when he was drinking with friends. “We order extra dry Gibson’s with Nixon darkly muttering; ‘it was a great mistake.’ Then a second round. Then RN, having relaxed enthusiastically, briskly demanded a third. His inhibitions and fears apparently gone. Then a sound California Inglenook white pinot, oysters and baked Pompano.” “Venturing out in Nixon’s vice presidential limousine, the vice president would cruise to a tavern called Martins in Georgetown where he would first coif great drafts of beer followed by scotch. Nixon would put down two scotches fast followed by corned beef and cabbage.”
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