Nixon's Secret (40 page)

As a veteran of eight national Republican presidential campaigns, starting with Nixon and ending with George W. Bush’s recount effort in Florida, with service in Ronald Reagan’s three presidential campaigns, I have seen political operators come and go. When it comes to manipulating the government, the media, and the people around him, I have seen few equal John Wesley Dean. Dean has successfully woven a narrative of Watergate that is largely untrue, at the same time skillfully distancing himself from his own egregious crimes and manipulations. As we shall see, his finessing of facts, coupled with outright fabrications, is extraordinary.

Just the speed in which Dean rose in the Nixon entourage is extraordinary. Because he worked at the Justice Department prior to becoming a White House counsel, which previous White House counsel John Ehrlichman viewed as a largely ministerial job, the Haldeman-Ehrlichman axis assumed that “Dean was a Mitchell man.” Dean skillfully played the Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell camps around Nixon against each other to enhance his own power and access. Indeed, it was Dean who relentlessly pushed the political intelligence plan that included the Watergate break-in. When he seized on intelligence gathering as his ticket to the inner circle, Dean went from a small-time bureaucrat to a key White House insider with fast access to the president and his highest aides.

Incredibly, Dean admitted this in a draft of his bestseller
Blind Ambition
. “Haldeman’s interested in campaign intelligence for 1972,” Dean wrote. “I reflect on how I might take advantage of Haldeman’s preoccupation. I was still building my law firm seeking new business and I knew the campaign would be a stepping stone to those who distinguished themselves. But as I looked ahead, I saw the Counsels’ own office performing rather menial campaign tasks. [They did] legal chores hardly important enough to be admitted to the inner circle. If the Counsels’ office could play the same role at the Republican Convention we played on May Day, special White House tie lines, half hourly reports, I knew we’d be in the thicket . . . We had a jump on other White Houses offices in demonstration intelligence. Why not expand our role to all intelligence? That would be of interest to the President and the campaign.”
30

The ascendancy of John Wesley Dean in Nixon’s entourage was deadly. Dean was an ambitious and ruthless operator. He roomed with Barry Goldwater Jr. at Staunton Military Academy in Virginia and was close to Senator Goldwater and his family. Dean later married the stepdaughter of Senator Thomas C. Hennings, whom he later divorced. Senator Hennings secured Dean’s employment at Washington law firm Welch and Morgan in 1965.

Dean’s employment at the firm ended when it was learned that, while on assignment to prepare a television license for the Continental Summit Television Corporation, he secretly filed “a rival application for himself and some friends,” according to veteran Washington reporter Jack Anderson.
31
The application was for the Greater St. Louis Television Corporation, and it was discovered that Dean was a secretary for the company and a shareholder. When Dean was confronted with his double-dealing, he responded, “You don’t have the right to ask me about that!”
32

“One attorney described his exit as a ‘Forced departure,’” wrote Anderson. “Another reported more explicitly that Dean wasn’t even allowed to pick up his belongings, which were returned to him by mail.”
33

Following his disgraceful exodus at Welch and Morgan in February 1966, Dean was employed as the chief minority counsel to the Republican members of the United States House Committee on the Judiciary Committee from 1966–1967. Dean got the job only because Senator Goldwater himself called the minority staff director and the ranking minority committee member in the House. Dean then spent two years as associate director of the National Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws.

On July 9, 1970, after Ehrlichman left the position to become Nixon’s chief domestic adviser, Dean was made counsel to President Richard Nixon. John Mitchell had attempted to discourage Dean from the post.

“I hate to see you go to the White House, because that’s an awful place,” Dean was told by Mitchell. “[Y]ou’re going to go on up in the Department of Justice—you’ll have a better job there.”
34

Dean accepted the counsel job and his modus operandi to work himself into a key position in the White House was intelligence gathering. Dean was later determined to be the “master manipulator of the cover-up” by the FBI.
35

Reappearing in Nixon’s orbit was E. Howard Hunt. Hunt was a member of Operation 40, a secret Vice President Nixon—directed CIA operation to topple Fidel Castro and reappeared in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Interestingly, Nixon was aware of Hunt’s work on clandestine operations with the White House prior to him becoming a formal consultant with his White House. When ruminating with Colson about how to break into the Brookings Institute, Nixon can be heard on the tape to say “Get Hunt
.”
He would say it three months before Hunt joined the White House staff as a consultant.

Hunt would know, and indeed, be a big part of, Nixon’s deepest secrets.

NOTES

1
.     Richard Whalen, Catch the Falling Flag, p. 272.

2
.     James Rosen, The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Kindle Locations 802-803).

3
.     Leonard Garment, In Search of Deep Throat, pp. 34–35.

4
.     “Martha Mitchell Speaks Out,”
Ellensburg Daily Record
, Sept. 13, 1972.

5
.     
http://nixonfoundation.org/2013/07/len-garment-longtime-nixon-aide-and-advisor-dies-at-89/
.

6
.     John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years, p. 22.

7
.     John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years, p. 35.

8
.     Richard Whalen, Catch the Falling Flag, p. 256.

9
.     Richard Kleindienst, Justice, p. 50.

10
.   Ibid, p. 51.

11
.   Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup, p. 95.

12
.   James Rosen, The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Kindle Location 947).

13
.   Robert D. Novak, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, p. 180.

14
.   Robert D. Novak, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, p. 180

15
.   Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, The Nixon Presidency: An Oral History of the Era, p. 55.

16
.   Richard Whalen, Catch the Falling Flag, p. 216.

17
.   Ibid. p. 196.

18
.   Ibid.

19
.   Edmund Kallina, Kennedy v. Nixon, p. 39.

20
.   Leonard Garment, In Search of Deep Throat, pp. 39–40.

21
.   Richard Whalen, Catch the Falling Flag, p. 210.

22
.   Leonard Garment, In Search of Deep Throat, p. 257.

23
.   Ibid.

24
.   Ibid.

25
.   Robert D. Novak, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (Kindle Locations 3937-3938).

26
.   Don Fulsom, Nixon’s Darkest Secrets, p. 24.

27
.   John Caulfield, Shield #9-11-NYPD, p. 98.

28
.   Vivienne Sanders, Access to History, p. IV.

29
.   Jeb Magruder, An American Life, p. 191.

30
.   Colodny interview with John Dean, Jan. 5, 1989.

31
.   Jack Anderson, “John Dean Once Fired For ‘Unethical Conduct,’”
The Tuscaloosa News
, April 5, 1973.

32
.   Richard Kleindienst, Justice, p. 143.

33
.   Jack Anderson, “John Dean Once Fired For ‘Unethical Conduct,’”
The Tuscaloosa News
, April 5, 1973.

34
.   Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup, p. 97.

35
.   FBI Watergate Investigation, OPE Analysis.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE COMEBACK

“This time vote like your whole world depended on it—This time Nixon.”

—slogan

O
n a typically warm spring morning in Atlanta, Richard Nixon would be sweating through his suit. April 9, 1968, would be no exception. The world was watching Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral, and the former vice president was in town to pay his respects.

After King’s assassination, Nixon’s close aide John Mitchell opposed his attendance. Nixon, who had enjoyed a good relationship with King, decided he would go to the service but not join the King family on their three-and-a-half-mile march from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the reverend had preached to Morehouse College.

The conservative South was important to his presidential campaign, and Nixon knew he must attend. Still, he had to keep a low profile to appease his white Southern supporters. His advisors feared some far-right Southerners might bolt to George Wallace, who was running on a segregationist line.

Travel aide Nick Ruwe accompanied Nixon to King’s funeral. Ruwe told me the former vice president decided he would arrive late and take a back-row seat in the church’s VIP section. To keep it short and sweet, he also would not march behind King’s caisson to Morehouse with Bobby, Ethel, and Jackie Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Hosea Williams, Dr. Ralph Abernathy, Daddy King, and the others. Instead, Nixon told Ruwe to pick him up at a side door of the church as the dignitaries queued up to march.

As Rev. Abernathy finished his sermon, calling King’s assassination “one of the darkest hours of mankind,” Nixon turned to slip out. He stopped short with a huge hand on his shoulder.

“Mr. Nixon, you gonna march?” It was Los Angeles Laker Wilt Chamberlain, whom Nixon had met at a previous event.

All eyes were surely on the seven-foot-one black Los Angeles Laker’s center as he towered over the five-foot-eleven Republican candidate for president. Nixon wisely obliged. Ruwe was confused to see his boss lining up behind the funeral procession, led by two local mules pulling a simple wooden wagon bearing the murdered Martin Luther King Jr.’s coffin.

Ruwe waved frantically to Nixon as he maneuvered the car down an adjacent street at the same slow speed of the procession. “Nixon seemed to look right through me,” he later told me.

Three blocks into the march, Nixon told Chamberlin he had to get to the airport. The NBA star was in a hurry too, and asked for a lift. Wilt “The Stilt” would go to work as a paid Nixon surrogate thereafter, and the 1968 presidential campaign unfolded.

* * *

Nixon began plotting his second presidential run the moment he was defeated in his first. He used the years 1960 through 1968 to analyze every aspect of his narrow loss, determined to apply all the lessons learned to his 1968 run for the White House.

In 1960, he was frustrated carrying the baggage of the Eisenhower administration, in power for eight long years. Kennedy was relentless in his criticism of what he viewed as the stand-patism of the Republicans without directly accusing the popular Eisenhower. Nixon, in many cases, was forced to defend policies with which he disagreed. Kennedy’s admonition that America “had to get moving again” was easily more compelling than Nixon’s theme of “experience.”

Nixon’s greatest single advantage in 1968 was that his party was “out.” It is always easier in politics to be the “out” party; you can attack without having to defend. Nixon also benefited mightily from a deep split in the Democratic Party. High inflation and the Vietnam War made Lyndon Johnson vulnerable, and Nixon thought he could beat him. In fact, a July 1967 Harris poll proved LBJ only five points ahead of Nixon, 46-41.

Another important dynamic of the 1968 race was the independent candidacy of Alabama Governor George Wallace. The segregationist managed to get on the ballot in all fifty states through a hodge-podge of small independent parties coupled with his own American Independent Party. Nixon realized Wallace’s appeal went beyond Southern conservative voters, who were likely to vote for Nixon if Wallace was not in the race; he also appealed to Northern and Midwestern blue-collar union voters who were Democrats and would have difficulty ever pulling the Republican lever.

Nixon clearly understood that, unlike the 1960 race where he needed to get 50 percent plus one, the new dynamic could allow him to become president with the Republican base and a healthy swath of conservative Democrats and suburban moderates concerned about inflation, the war, and rising crime. He knew he would likely become president with less than 50 percent of the vote—but only after skillful management of the Wallace issue.

In 1960, Nixon’s pace had been frantic and the campaign had been focused on the working print press. He paced himself more carefully in the 1968 effort, with a campaign geared to the dynamics of television.

In 1968, Nixon also had the advantage of a resurgent GOP with Republican governors seizing or holding governorships in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and California. Republicans had also added forty-seven House members and three Senators in the 1966 election. The party had been decimated in 1958, leaving a weak base for Vice President Nixon’s attempt to win. The 1968 Republican Party was much stronger and hungrier for victory after the 1964 Goldwater blowout.

Nixon also had the advantage of a united Republican Party. His vanquished primary challengers—Michigan Governor George Romney, California Governor Ronald Reagan, and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller—all offered unambiguous support.

In Rockefeller’s case, although Nixon did not carry New York State, there was no evidence of the governor dragging his feet like he did in 1960. This was where Nixon’s status as “the most broadly accepted man” paid off. While the liberal and conservative factions of the party could not live with leadership by each other, “Nixon was acceptable to both sides.” While he may not be their first choice, he was the most broadly accepted second choice. His record as an anti-Communist and the man who “nailed” Alger Hiss combined with his slashing attacks on the Democratic left satisfied the Sunbelt conservative while his civil rights record and stout internationalism pleased Eastern liberals.