Nixon's Secret (56 page)

Nixon seriously considered appointing Connally his chief of staff after the firing of Bob Haldeman. Connally had no connection to Watergate. Connally was a strong proponent of burning the White House tapes. It is worth considering what would have happened if Nixon had selected Connally rather than Haig to helm his team for the Watergate fight for survival. Nixon might have survived, if it weren’t for the coarse revelations on the tapes.

For all Nixon’s accomplishments during his first term in office, they were marred by four secrets that would pave the way to Watergate. The first was the formation of an extra-legal Secret Invesigative Unit under the direction of John Ehrlichman and David Young, dubbed “the Plumbers,” because their aim was to plug leaks from the Nixon foreign policy apparatus. They broke into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsburg, self-admitted leaker of the Pentagon papers. The second was the 1969–1971 wiretaps placed on NSC staffers, White House aides, and selected reporters. The third was a military spy ring operating inside the White House that was purloining and copying sensitive NSC documents and spiriting them off to the Pentagon, and the last was the Huston Plan named for White House aide Tom Charles Huston, which sought to bypass the FBI and CIA in a new effort to surveil anti-war protestors and leaders in violation of their civil rights. Attorney General John Mitchell called these all “the White House horrors.” Of these we shall hear more.

NOTES

1
.     Peter Carlson. “When Elvis Met Nixon,”
Smithsonian Magazine,
Dec. 2010.

2
.     Letter from Elvis Presley to Richard Nixon, Dec. 1970.

3
.     Ibid.

4.     Tom Leonard, “Day Elvis begged Nixon to let him be a secret FBI agent,”
MailOnline
, Aug. 14, 2013.

5
.     December 21, 1970. Nixon Meets Elvis,
History.com
.

6
.     Tom Leonard, “Day Elvis begged Nixon to let him be a secret FBI agent,”
MailOnline
, Aug. 14, 2013.

7
.     “1968 Year in Review,” UPI, retrieved June 17, 2010.

8
.     Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
, p. 316. Semple, “Nixon Preparing to Court 7 or 8 Industrial States,” p. A20.

9
.     Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
, p. 316.

10
.   Reg Murphy and Hal Gulliver,
The Southern Strategy
, p. 2.

11
.   Richard Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
, p. 443.

12
.   John Ehrlichman,
Witness to Power: The Nixon Years
, p. 198.

13
.   Emmett Rensin, “Richard Nixon, Hero of the American Left,”
Salon
, May 5, 2013.

14
.   Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress Proposing the Emergency School Aid Act of 1970,” May 21, 1970,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2509
.

15
.   Patrick J. Buchanan, “The Neocons and the Southern Strategy,” December 30, 2002.
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-the-neocons-and-nixons-southern-strategy-512
.

16
.   Robert Brown, “President Nixon Strong on Civil Rights,” The Richard Nixon Foundation,
http://nixonfoundation.org/2013/02/robert-brown-president-nixon-strong-on-civil-rights/
.

17
.   “American President: A Reference Resource,” Miller Center at the University of Virginia: Richard Milhous Nixon,
http://millercenter.org/president/nixon/essays/biography/4
.

18
.   Peter Ubel, “Another Early Obamacare Supporter: Richard Nixon,”
Forbes
, Feb. 2, 2014.

19
.   Ibid.

20
.   Emmett Rensin, “Richard Nixon, Hero of the American Left,”
Salon
, May 5, 2013.

21
.   Linda Greenhouse, “Warren E. Burger is Dead at 87; Was Chief Justice for 17 Years,”
The New York Times
, June 26, 1995.

22
.   Arlen Specter and Charles Robbins,
Passion for Truth
, pp. 231–233.

23
.   Tanya Ballard, “Supreme Court Nominees Who Were Not Confirmed,”
The Washington Post
, Oct. 27, 2005.

24
.   Ibid.

25
.   “Callins v. Collins,” Justice Blackmun, dissenting, No. 93-7054, February 22, 1994. Stating, “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored—indeed, I have struggled—along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.”

26
.   “Justice Lillie Remembered for Hard Work, Long Years of Service,” Metropolitan News Service, Oct. 31, 2002.

27
.   Ibid.

28
.   Congressional Record, Senate #46197, Dec. 10, 1971,
http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/450_1971.pdf
.

29
.   Richard M. Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam,” Provided Courtesy of the Nixon Library. November 3, 1969.
http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/forkids/speechesforkids/silentmajority/silentmajority_transcript.pdf
.

30
.   James C. Humes,
Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation
, p. 107.

31
.   James C. Humes,
Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation
, p. 108.

32
.   James C. Humes,
Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation
, p. 112.

33
.   F. Gregory Gause,
The International Relations of the Persian Gulf
, p. 22.

34
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 89.

35
.   Ibid.

36
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 90.

37
.   Ibid.

38
.   Richard M. Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam,”
Foreign Affairs
, Oct. 1967.

39
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 92.

40
.   Ibid.

41
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 93.

42
.   James C. Humes,
Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation
, p. 60.

43
.   James C. Humes,
Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation
, p. 61.

44
.   Ibid.

45
.   James C. Humes,
Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation
, p. 62.

46
.   Ibid.

47
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 91.

48
.   James C. Humes,
Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation
, p. 63.

49
.   Ibid.

50
.   Ibid., p. 64.

51
.   Ibid., p. 37.

52
.   Ibid., p. 38.

53
.   Ibid.

54
.   “6 October 1973: The Yom Kippur War Begins,”
The New Nixon
,
http://blog.nixonfoundation.org/2011/10/6-october-1973-the-yom-kippur-war-begins/
.

55
.   Matthew T. Penney, “Intelligence and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War,”
CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence
, p. 7,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/historical-collection-publications/arab-israeli-war/nixon-arab-isaeli-war.pdf
.

56
.   “How Richard Nixon Saved Israel.”
The New Nixon
,
http://blog.nixonfoundation.org/2010/10/how-richard-nixon-saved-israel/
.

57
.   Ibid.

58
.   George Lardner Jr. and Michael Dobbs, “New Tapes Reveal Depth of Nixon’s Anti-Semitism,”
Washington Post
, Oct. 6, 1999,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/oct99/nixon6.htm
.

59
.   Ibid.

60
.   “Newly uncovered Nixon tapes reveal anti-Semitic stance,”
The Jerusalem Post
, Aug. 22, 2013,
http://www.jpost.com/International/Newly-uncovered-Nixon-tapes-reveal-anti-Semitic-stance-323953
.

61
.   Ibid.

62
.   “Richard Milhous Nixon,”
University of Virginia: Miller Center
.
http://millercenter.org/president/nixon/essays/biography/5
.

63
.   James C. Humes,
Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation
, p. 153.

64
.   Ibid.

65
.   “How Richard Nixon Saved Israel,”
The New Nixon
,
http://blog.nixonfoundation.org/2010/10/how-richard-nixon-saved-israel/
.

66
.   James C. Humes,
Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation
, p. 153.

67
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 172.

68
.   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 171.

69
   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 173.

70
   H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
, p. 168.

71
.   Ibid.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE BREAK-INS

“It is in the political agent’s interest to betray all the parties who use him and to work for them all at the same time, so that he may move freely and penetrate everywhere.”

—E. Howard Hunt
1

T
he June 1972 weekend of the Watergate break-in, I had just settled in with a takeout pizza and a six-pack of beer when the phone rang.

“Porter residence,” I said. I was house-sitting for my boss at the Committee to Re-elect the President, Herbert L. “Bart” Porter. Porter was a plucky ex-marine USC graduate recruited for the White House staff Chief Robert Haldeman. He was on the West Coast attending the senior staff meetings.

“Is Bart there?” said a gruff voice I recognized as James McCord. I had seen McCord around the CRP office at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue. Stout and balding, with the fading remains of what must have been a military-style haircut, McCord had dark circles under his eyes and a tendency to mumble.

“No, he and Mrs. Porter are out of town,” I said. “I’m just house-sitting. This is Roger Stone. I work at the committee.” I was a surrogate scheduler, handling the campaign schedules of the Nixon daughters and cabinet members, as well as members of Congress campaigning for Nixon’s reelection.

“OK, tell him Jim McCord called. Tell him I’m in the lockup, and tell him the jig is up.”
2
He hung up, and I remember thinking,
this doesn’t sound good at all.

The Nixon men were security obsessed. I carried an official ID, which I had to show a security guard in order to get to my office, but not before using a passcard to go through two electronically sealed doors. Our wastebaskets were collected and shredded each evening, even if they only contained innocuous trash. Leaving the office and your desk and cabinets unlocked would get you fired. The place had the corporate hush of a Fortune 500 company headquarters, with burnt-orange carpets. The phone had bell tones rather than rings. On the walls were blowups of official photos of the president and Mrs. Nixon in their travels. There was no bunting, banners, posters, or campaign paraphernalia. It felt more like IBM than a presidential campaign headquarters, and security was tight. They needed a man like McCord, who became the security director for CRP.

Less than a year after that phone call, three days before the Watergate burglars were to be sentenced, McCord handed a letter to Chief Judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia John Sirica. The explosive document would bring the whole house of cards collapsing on the Nixon White House. It would also bring down a president.

* * *

While history has preferred the narrative spun by the
Washington Post
and government agencies charged with investigating or prosecuting the Watergate crimes, the scholarship and persistence of authors Leonard Colodny and Robert Getlin, as well as author James Hougan and journalists Russ Baker and Phil Stanford, has called for a reassessment of what Watergate was really about and who the real villains were.

As we shall see, forces in the national security apparatus who opposed Nixon’s détente policy worked with senior officials in the CIA who feared Nixon’s efforts to obtain the full records of the CIA’s involvement in the Bay of Pigs and the JFK assassination. Big Texas oil interests, furious with Nixon’s lack of reliability on the oil depletion allowance (the sweetheart tax breaks for the oilmen), also undermined Nixon, making him vulnerable to his howling critics on the left who controlled both houses of Congress. Their allies were a hostile national press. These forces drove President Nixon from office and into political exile. He escaped prison for Watergate crimes only through skillful use of the remaining cards he held.

As with the JFK assassination and the Warren Commission, the official version of Watergate—as supplied by the mass media, the Watergate special prosecutor, and the Senate Watergate Committee—is far from the complete story.

Watergate is far more than a “second-rate burglary.” While our analysis generally will focus on two entries into the DNC on May 28 and June 17, 1972, Watergate has come to represent a broader series of abuses that, when uncovered, drove Nixon from office. Instead of using the FBI or the CIA to do their sleuthing, as both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson did, the Nixon White House utilized private investigators and freelance burglars in illegal intelligence gathering long before the Watergate break-ins. You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand that law enforcement officers have criminal immunity while private gumshoes are operating without such shield.