Nixon's Secret (77 page)

Haig had also received assurances that Nixon’s tapes and papers, which contained significant evidence of Haig’s role in the Moorer-Radford military spy ring as well as the 1969–71 wiretaps on government officials and reporters, would go with the ex-president to San Clemente post-resignation. Haig would also broker an agreement from Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski that allowed Nixon to take the materials to California with the condition that certain documents and tapes would be made available to the special prosecutors.

Haig knew that Ford’s pardon of Nixon had been coerced with blackmail and that Nixon needed not to seek control of his tapes and records or offer a statement of contrition in order to land the pardon. When Ford lawyer Benton Becker ventured to San Clemente to discuss both the tapes, records, and pardon issue, he was intercepted by acting Chief of Staff Ron Ziegler, who told him Nixon would not budge on a statement of guilt or give up control of his presidential records. It was clear to Benton that Haig had tipped Ziegler and Nixon that neither would be required in the deal with Ford.
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Nixon’s knowledge of the dark deeds of Dallas in late 1963 would afford him the leverage to pressure Ford for a full, free, and unconditional pardon. Nixon would begin immediately a protracted legal fight to control his tapes and records, a fight he would ultimately lose. It is important to note that prior to Nixon, all federal rulings held that a president’s presidential records were his personal property. It was only for Nixon that the courts said this was untrue.

Haig would briefly remain as President Ford’s chief of staff, essentially using the position to spirit some of Nixon’s papers and records out to California.

Ford was able to grant the Nixon pardon because Spiro Agnew had been shunted out of the way.

Although Agnew had little impact on the policies of the Nixon administration, he did enjoy the perks of office. The handsome vice president was a ladies man whose dowdy Baltimore wife, Judy, was oblivious to Agnew’s short- and long-term affairs. After Agnew publicly befriended and embraced singer Frank Sinatra, a lifelong Democrat who had been instrumental in the Mob’s support of Kennedy in 1960, and had campaigned for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Agnew would spend weeks partying with the slender Hoboken crooner while Sinatra retainer Peter Malatesta supplied an endless stream of high-end call girls for Agnew in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills. Agnew would pull Old Blue Eyes into the GOP camp with Sinatra’s endorsement of Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1970. Shunned by the Democrats, Sinatra backed Nixon in 1972 and delivered Sammy Davis Jr., who backed Nixon in an awkward moment at the Miami Beach Convention when Sammy referred to Nixon as “one groovy cat,” which he clearly wasn’t.

In 1973 Attorney General Elliot Richardson informed Nixon that Agnew was under investigation for corruption and had been accused of taking bribes. The Justice Department would make a case against Agnew, and Deputy Attorney General Henry Peterson reviewed the case. A group of Baltimore developers claimed they had made cash payments to Agnew while he was county executive, governor, and vice president. The government made a tax evasion case as well, but the cash itself was hard to trace, if it existed at all. Agnew had not been bribed by check.

Nixon, ever wary of confrontation, would dispatch Haig to tell Agnew he must resign. Agnew said Haig told him to “[g]o quietly or else.” Agnew would write that Haig’s clear message was that his life was being threatened and that the CIA would kill him if he resisted. Agnew knew Nixon was slipping and that Haig was the “de facto President.” The first reports of the CIA secret efforts to kill Castro had just broken, and Agnew feared he would be killed in a staged car accident or faked suicide. Agnew recorded the moment in his own book
Go Quietly, or Else
:

“Since the revelations have come out about the C.I.A.’s failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders I realize even more that before that I might have been in great danger. Haig’s words to Dunn that after indictment ‘anything may be in the offing’ could only be construed as an open-ended threat. I did not know what might happen to me. But I don’t mind admitting I was frightened. This directive was aimed at me like a gun at my head.

“I feared for my life. If a decision had been made to eliminate me—through an automobile accident, a fake suicide, or whatever—the order would not have been traced back to the White House any more than the ‘get Castro’ orders were ever traced to their source. Perhaps I overreacted, but my mental state after months of constant pressure was hardly conducive to calm and dispassionate evaluation. The American people should know that in the last hectic year or more of his residence in the White House, Richard Nixon did not actually administer all the powers of the presidency. As I have stated earlier it was General Haig who was the de facto President. Haig had the power of the bureaucracy at his command, and the Washington insiders knew he was standing there behind Nixon, pulling the strings. Haig had direct connections with the CIA and the FBI and every other agency. For four years, he had been Henry Kissinger’s chief deputy with clear access to all the government; his power extended into any agency he chose. The very survival of the Nixon presidency was threatened.”
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Nixon dispatched Haig to tell Vice President Agnew that he must resign. Agnew said that Haig threatened him and said they could “play it nice or play it dirty.” Agnew, who with millions of Americans had just learned about the CIA’s involvement in political assassinations through the Church Committee in the US Senate probing CIA abuses, said in his own book that he believed his life was threatened by Haig.

Agnew himself told me that the case against him in which he ultimately plead nolo contenedre (no contest) was fabricated by the Justice Department under pressure from the CIA anxious to remove him from the line of presidential succession when they saw Nixon teetering. I met Agnew at a seafood restaurant on the Eastern shore in a lunch arranged by former National Chairman of Young Americans for Freedom David A. Keene, who was later an Agnew aide. Keene joined us.

Agnew monopolized the conversation, insisting he was innocent and that the Justice Department had “put pressure on a bunch of Jews” to lie about cash payments allegedly made to him while he was vice president. “I was railroaded,” Agnew told me. At the time, both Keene and I saw Agnew comments as self-serving and essentially disregarded them. Agnew would become deeply anti-Semitic, which would aid him in some post-vice-presidential business deals in the Middle East. He was, after all, still a former vice president of the United States. In light of the CIA’s now exposed role and the desire to move Nixon out of power and install the more pliable and stable Ford, Agnew’s claims need to be reviewed anew.

Agnew ultimately concluded Nixon wanted him gone. “I regret that I never confronted Mr. Nixon about the threatening message from Haig. I guess it was partly out of fear and partly knowing from experience he wouldn’t give me a straight answer that I never asked Nixon if he personally authorized the threat to drive me from office. I suppose he would have denied it. At the time, I could not bring myself to believe that the President was not reluctantly being forced into this position by his advisers. I did not have the advantage of hindsight, of knowing for sure how I was being railroaded, until long after I was out.”
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Agnew ultimately pleaded not guilty to tax evasion charges. As Agnew put it “[T]hese gifts were not taxable income and I had no obligation to report them. My actual net worth was less than two hundred thousand dollars. I had what was left of my small inheritance from my father, the cash value of my life insurance—bought many years before, and the comparatively small equity in my mortgaged home. Part of the threat to me was the reminder that my wife could be implicated in the tax charge; they could prosecute her too because we filed joint returns.

“The prosecutors insisted I had to plead guilty to some felony charge. I told my lawyers, as I had told them before, ‘I’m not going to plead guilty to bribery or extortion. If I’ve got to do something to settle this, I’ll plead nolo contendere to a tax charge.’ They asked, ‘What tax charge?’ I said, ‘Well, say that in late 1967 I collected some contributions for the 1968 campaign, and maybe held the money past the end of the year and didn’t use it until the next year so that it was technically “income” for me.’ It was simply a rationalization so that I could tell the judge I had received the money technically as unreported ‘income.’ The tax collectors at the I.R.S. later took every bit of testimony of my accusers as being true and billed me for taxes on my fictitious income. When I protested, the IRS official said, ‘You want to contest it? Take us into court.’ That would have meant trying the same issues in a civil hearing and a further circus for the news media as well as heavy legal fees and a tremendous sacrifice of my precious time needed to start making a living again. Moreover, I wanted to try my hand at international business because I knew it would be impossible for any US company to hire me without being pestered to death by my enemies. The I.R.S. said they would have to have my passport lifted as I might become an ‘absconding debtor.’ That would have made it impossible for me to do business overseas. They billed me for $150,000 in back federal income taxes, including interest and penalties. The irony is that I never got that money; I had to borrow money to pay the taxes on income I never received. As a condition of the settlement, I had to say in court the tax evasion charge was true. In effect, I had to twist the truth to make it possible for the judge to accept the settlement.”
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Agnew would say the same thing in his book that he told me at lunch over crab cakes.
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The fall of Agnew would provide Nixon with an opportunity. In his selection of Ford to replace Agnew, Nixon passed over longtime intraparty rival and former Kissinger boss Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon had feared Rockefeller early in his career, but by the time he was president, he was no longer wary of Rocky. In the White House tapes, Nixon can be heard inquiring of Haldeman if any cabinet member or dignitaries have called the White House praising one of his televised speeches to the nation. “Rockefeller called,” Haldeman said. “Yeah, well screw him,” Nixon replied.

“Nixon thought Ford was his insurance policy,” John Sears told me. “He thought Jerry was so dumb that they’d never impeach Nixon.” Nixon by-passed Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater and chose Gerry Ford for vice president because Ford, well-liked on Capitol Hill, was no political or intellectual heavy-weight and was a man on whom Nixon had
leverage.

“The shock following the Nixon pardon caused members of Congress and the press to reflect back on the Nixon-Ford relationship throughout the entire Watergate affair in search for further clues to why Ford felt compelled to take such an extreme political risk for his political mentor,” wrote former Nixon aide Clark Mollenhoff. “It had not put Watergate behind the nation but had brought it back into the full spotlight. It seemed unlikely that President Ford’s compassion for Nixon was the only factor involved.”
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Ford had already assisted the Watergate cover-up. The US House of Representatives Banking and Currency Committee, chaired by Texas Democrat Wright Patman, had begun a vigorous investigation of the money trail that financed the break-in, large amounts of which were found as cash on the burglars at the time of their arrest. Patman was the first to confirm that the largest amount going into Miami bank account of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, a CIA operative since the Bay of Pigs invasion, was the $100,000 sent in by Texas CRP chairman William Liedtke, longtime business partner of George Bush. The money was sent from Houston to Mexico, where it was “laundered” to eliminate its accounting trail. It then was sent to Barker’s account as four checks totaling $89,000 and $11,000 in cash.

Patman was prepared to relentlessly pursue the true sources of this money as the best route to the truth about who ran the break-in and why. This meant Watergate would have unraveled before the 1972 elections. House Republican leader Gerald Ford led the attack on Patman from within the Congress. On October 3, 1972, the House Banking and Currency Committee voted 20–15 against continuing chairman Wright Patman’s investigation. The vote prevented the issuance of twenty-three subpoenas for Nixon reelection officials to testify before the committee. Ford, New York Governor Nelson Ford, and Rockefeller were targeted committee members. Six Democratic members of the committee voted with the Republicans against chairman Patman.

Lyndon Johnson had also realized Ford’s utility when he appointed Congressman Gerald Ford to his highly sensitive position on the Warren Commission investigating, and obscuring the truth of, John Kennedy’s murder.

Ford’s cooperation may have been motivated by other factors. Bobby Baker, secretary of the US senator, wrote that Washington lobbyist Fred Black, a crony and secret business partner of Baker and LBJ, had a suite at Washington’s Sheraton Carlton Hotel. There, he often arranged for call girls to entertain congressmen and senators. The FBI surreptitiously filmed the action. According to Baker, Ford was a frequent visitor. In other words, much like Nixon, Lyndon Johnson had the goods on Jerry Ford.
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“Jerry Ford was always up Lyndon’s ass,” Nixon told me.

Haig would stay on as Ford’s chief of staff essentially to button up the details of Nixon’s pardons and to spirit away numerous of Nixon’s documents and records to the exiled president in his compound in San Clemente, California. Ford, forced into a pardon he didn’t want to issue, would tell confidants, “I know I will go to hell because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”
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Ford had retained Nixon’s cabinet and most of his staff, including Haig. At the same time Ford brought Robert Hartmann, Benton Becker, Phillip Buchen, Melvin Laird, and ultimately Donald Rumsfeld into his circle. They were no match for skilled bureaucratic infighter Al Haig. All opposed a pardon for Nixon, recognizing the political cost to Ford. None of them would understand the special leverage Haig had on Ford and why, from the beginning, Ford was headed toward issuing the pardon even when he was saying publicly and privately that he “hadn’t made up his mind.” The Ford men demanded a statement of guilt and contrition from Nixon. Haig also knew Nixon would stand in the dock rather than issue such a proclamation. “Nixon had Ford totally under his thumb,” said Alexander Butterfield. “He was a tool of the Nixon administration—like a puppy dog. They used him when they had to wind him up and he’d go
‘Arf, Arf.’
”
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Ford
was
Nixon’s insurance policy.