The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (3 page)

Second, and perhaps more importantly, Nixon never saw the Hiss case as just a
mano a mano
contest. Years later, as the Watergate scandal unfolded, even his closest aides would misunderstand Nixon’s constant references to Hiss—there were dozens of them in the White House tapes. Nixon was not referring to the man himself but was voicing his twin convictions that the truth eventually will emerge and that the real damage from the Hiss scandal was not to Hiss, but to the Truman presidency itself.

Nixon came to national prominence as a result of this investigation, and Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950. The liberal Eastern establishment, particularly its many Harvard-educated members, never forgave Nixon for his leadership in bringing down one of their own.

The next step in Nixon’s rise to political prominence was his 1950 run for the Senate. His eventual opponent was Helen Gahagan Douglas, a graduate of Barnard College and a Broadway star in the 1920s. Barnard is the sister college to Columbia University in New York City and one of the Seven Sisters (the female counterpart to the Ivy League). Douglas had also starred in a successful movie,
She
, before running for Congress in 1944. Once there, she had a rather public affair with Congressman Lyndon Johnson of Texas. Douglas was the first congresswoman from California and had served three terms representing the San Francisco Bay area before deciding that her real place was in the Senate. To get there, she had to challenge California’s three-term Democratic incumbent, Sheridan Downey.

Downey withdrew from the primary in the face of Douglas’s aggressive challenge, so it technically became an open seat. Regardless, her contest against Nixon was by all accounts a vicious campaign. Douglas was liberal, moneyed, and a movie star. Nixon was unglamorous but doggedly competent. When the smoke cleared, Nixon won by almost 20 percentage points, handing a devastating loss to the liberal establishment. Two epithets that came to prominence during their contest were “the Pink Lady” (first used by another of Douglas’s Democratic primary opponents) and “Tricky Dick.”

Oscar Wilde observed “You can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies.” By that standard, Dick Nixon was quite a success, since
he had incurred the life-long hatred of the entire liberal establishment, whether they lived in the Northeast, the San Francisco Bay area, or in Hollywood.

Nixon’s star continued its ascendency. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower chose him as his running mate. His six-year rise from novice and unknown congressman to vice president of the United States was as spectacular as any in American political history. And Nixon had done it all by himself—without family money or connections and without being someone’s protégé. He had also earned a reputation for hardball campaigning, which he maintained in his new position. Eisenhower, a military hero who could have run on either ticket, did not have to stoop to partisan politics; he had a vice president ready and willing to undertake those difficult tasks for him.

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

When Nixon finally won the presidency in 1968, he was perhaps the best prepared victor in modern times: Not only was he a former congressman, senator, and vice president, but he had lost an exceptionally close race in 1960 and had had eight years to think about what he would do if he ever got to the Oval Office.

Those eight wilderness years had seen some bitter moments, too. The loss to Kennedy must have galled him to no end, for JFK (like Alger Hiss and Helen Douglas) was everything that Nixon wasn’t. He was movie-star handsome, with an equally beautiful wife. He was the son of one of the richest men in America and had been raised in the lap of luxury. And he was Eastern establishment and Harvard through and through. Nixon said that writing his first memoir,
Six Crises
, was the hardest thing he had ever attempted. Kennedy’s
Profiles in Courage
, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, was ghost-written by Ted Sorensen. When the PT boat Kennedy commanded was run over by a Japanese destroyer in World War II (an unthinkable blunder to any navy veteran, including Lt. Commander Nixon), he was decorated for valor instead of being court martialed. Dubbed the playboy senator, he had no important legislation to his name, but the media adored him. Courageous and
scrappy but drab, Nixon could not compete with Kennedy’s glamour and lost one of the closest elections in history.

Nixon had come of age at the dawn of television, but that medium was never his friend. Though he saved his place on Eisenhower’s ticket with his famous Checkers speech in 1952, he convincingly lost the first televised presidential debate with Kennedy in 1960, and his campaign never really recovered. In today’s era of Botox and blow-dried hair, of the sound bite and the photo-op, it is not clear that Nixon could ever have been successful. He was small-bore, rural America. In addition, Nixon was, as he freely admitted to his staff, an introvert in an extrovert’s game.

Nixon was accustomed to the rough and tumble of politics, both local and national, but he was often on the receiving end. For example, Nixon believed he had been bugged in each of his three previous campaigns. As the Watergate scandal grew in intensity, the Republican National Committee released sworn affidavits showing that the hotel suite in which Nixon prepared for the opening debate with John Kennedy in 1960 had been bugged. His opponent’s ability to anticipate every point he made in their first encounter, Nixon believed, had cost him the debate, and losing that first debate had cost him the presidency.

Nixon’s grand jury testimony from July 1975, which was released in 2010, revealed his barely controlled anger at having been bugged again in 1962 during his California gubernatorial campaign against Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. No one in authority had cared or done anything about it. He also pointed out, with equal bitterness, that his tax returns had somehow been leaked from the IRS in that same race.

Finally, J. Edgar Hoover himself told Nixon that he had been ordered by President Johnson to bug Nixon’s plane during the final two weeks of the 1968 campaign, to monitor Nixon’s possible response to Johnson’s announced bombing halt, and telephone numbers dialed during the campaign by Nixon’s running mate, Spiro Agnew, were reconstructed. Scholars disagree about the nature of the surveillance that was actually carried out, but Nixon was nevertheless personally assured by the head of the FBI that President Johnson had ordered such bugging. Nor was the harassment of Nixon by his enemies limited to spying. The IRS had
audited his income tax returns every year of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

THE 1968 CAMPAIGN

Nixon’s election in 1968 was seen by many, especially Democrats and the liberal media, as an electoral fluke—one which would be corrected four years hence. Johnson’s unpopular war, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and the chaos of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago had combined into the perfect storm to allow the hated Nixon to slip undeservedly into the Oval Office. What they failed to appreciate was that Nixon had been elected precisely in response to those same events.

People who did not live through it have difficulty understanding the political unrest of the 1960s. It began with the civil rights marches, grew to include the massive and violent opposition to the Vietnam War, and culminated, many think, in Nixon’s resignation in 1974. By 1968, as the nation swirled toward anarchy, the Kennedy brother and King had been assassinated, there had been violent riots in at least nineteen cities, and great universities had been brought to their knees by student sit-ins and protests.

Nixon’s election did not alleviate the anti-war sentiments that had driven Johnson from office—it only served to increase them. Democrats had held their displeasure in check when one of their own occupied the Oval Office, but now they turned with vehemence on Richard Nixon, and they encouraged the protests, which grew in frequency and intensity.

Nixon’s basic campaign promise was twofold: He would end the war and he would restore law and order. It was enough to win the popular vote over Hubert Humphrey by a single percentage point (43.42 percent to Humphrey’s 42.72 percent, with third-party candidate, George Wallace, siphoning off 13.53 percent).

1968 is now seen as a realigning election, marking the end of the New Deal coalition first assembled by Franklin Roosevelt, but this realignment was not recognized at the time. Nixon’s election was seen as an aberration. He was the first president to take office since Zachary Taylor whose party did not control either house of Congress. The
Goldwater debacle, in which down-ballot Republicans had lost in droves, had taken place only four years earlier, and the Democrats’ congressional majorities approached the two-thirds mark. Further, there was no institutional support in Washington for the incoming thirty-seventh president. Congressional staffs, the city’s law and lobbying firms, its few think tanks, the federal career civil service employees, whose numbers had expanded so rapidly under Johnson’s Great Society initiatives, and the national media themselves all leaned heavily Democratic.

NIXON’S PEOPLE

President Nixon was sufficiently confident of his own views and abilities to surround himself with strong and accomplished advisors, several of whom had not supported his campaign. Among them were Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller’s long-time foreign affairs advisor, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat who had served in the Kennedy administration. Both were professors at Harvard, the cradle of so much opposition to Nixon throughout his political career. Senior advisors also included Arthur Burns, of Columbia University, and George Shultz, of the University of Chicago. But from the time of the ’68 campaign, his three closest aides were the ones who figure so prominently in Watergate: John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman.

John Mitchell was a preeminent municipal bond lawyer and Nixon’s law partner at Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, and Mitchell. Born the same year as the president, he had that aura of self-confidence that comes from being a senior partner in a big city law firm. Because municipal bond work is frequently entwined with local politics, Mitchell had excellent and long-standing contacts in cities and counties throughout the country. While hardly an accomplished politician, he was treated as an equal by the president, which was why he was an excellent choice to head Nixon’s 1968 campaign. He then did an outstanding job as Nixon’s attorney general, ruling with a soft touch but an iron hand. Career officials in the Department of Justice, who had chafed under his predecessor, the nebbish Ramsey Clark, welcomed Mitchell with open arms. I worked with dozens of DOJ officials during my Domestic Council years, and, to a man, they were in awe of John Mitchell, believing him
to be an eminently fair and impartial enforcer of the law. One assistant attorney general observed to me that he was struck by Mitchell’s self-control—never saying a single word more than he felt necessary.

The criticism you hear of Mitchell’s tenure as AG reflects the partisan bitterness of the opposition party. His later problems, and they were considerable, stemmed not from his work at Justice but from his role as head of the Committee to Re-Elect the President and from his wife, Martha, whose alcohol-fueled late-night phone calls with eager reporters brought an end to his time in Washington.

Harold Robbins (“Bob”) Haldeman, a California native like Nixon, graduated from UCLA and joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Thirteen years Nixon’s junior, he took time off to work in Nixon’s campaigns. He was an advance man in 1956 and 1960, and ran Nixon’s 1962 gubernatorial campaign. Crew-cut, intensely loyal, and unafraid of personal confrontations, he was Nixon’s chief of staff for the first four years. He is known for his observation that every president needs an SOB and he was Nixon’s. Haldeman ran a tight ship and tolerated no fooling around or lackadaisical staff attitudes.

I freely admit that I was scared to death of him, convinced that nothing good could result from coming to his attention. I worked for Ehrlichman, and the only way I might be noticed by Haldeman would be as a result of a screw-up. On my first trip on Air Force One, having put together a presidential visit to Laredo to showcase drug interdiction programs, I noticed Haldeman chatting with Ehrlichman, while looking my way. Uh-oh, I thought, he’s asking just who let this kid on the plane—when John brought him over and introduced me as the one who staffed the president on narcotics interdiction initiatives. To my surprise and great relief, Haldeman was complimentary and as nice as he could be.

I later came to realize, when spending hundreds of hours transcribing the White House tapes, that Haldeman—in the privacy of the Oval Office—was the president’s most candid critic. Far from being a “yes man,” Haldeman was the voice of reason and restraint. In a very real sense, he was an ideal chief of staff, possessing absolute power over whom and what Nixon would see, but entirely without a political agenda
of his own. His only goal was to be sure the president heard all points of view before making a decision.

Haldeman’s associate in this effort was his UCLA roommate, John Ehrlichman, who had graduated from Stanford Law School and then practiced law in Seattle. Initially counsel to the president, Ehrlichman became assistant to the president for domestic affairs and head of the Domestic Council staff in July 1970—essentially Kissinger’s counterpart on the domestic side. Ehrlichman was popular with virtually everyone on the staff, even taking flowers to the White House operators, whose ability to locate recipients of White House phone calls was renowned.

Ehrlichman is largely responsible for President Nixon’s innovative record on domestic policy initiatives, and he was not the least bit hesitant about sharing credit for good ideas. He encouraged his Domestic Council staff, including me, to be sure that the president received all points of view on policy issues. We counted ourselves the most fortunate members of the White House staff, responsible for addressing policy and governance issues of national importance in an atmosphere that encouraged the full and free exchange of ideas.