Nixon's Secret (38 page)

Sadly, Nixon not only acquiesced in this isolation, he required it. He was an introvert in an extrovert’s business, lacking in physical grace or the ability to make small talk, he was socially awkward, non-dexterous, and reserved. “I’m just not a back-slapping kind of guy,” Nixon would say. “I just can’t let my hair down around people.” Extraordinarily effective as a speaker in stadiums filled with thousands, a charismatic speaker in large groups and small, Nixon was terrible in one-on-one interaction. His smiled was forced and his jokes threadbare. He didn’t seem to know where to place his hands and was utterly lacking in physical grace. Nixon liked to be alone—to think, to brood, to read books and classified cables translated from Russian and Chinese. Many said this explained Nixon’s strange friendship with Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo. “Nixon likes to be alone,” Chotiner would tell me, “and when he’s with Bebe he is.” The two of them were known to sit for hours without saying a word, while Rebozo sunned himself in the Miami sunshine, and Nixon, who never felt comfortable in a sportshirt, brooded and made notes on a long, yellow pad.

At the same time, presidential aide John Ehrlichman described a surreal scene where he and Nixon on vacation in Miami were up to their necks in azure, blue water and perfect Florida sunshine, when Nixon launched a conversation on arcane domestic policy issue.

Nixon was a loner who didn’t see the damage his isolation caused. Besides being socially awkward, he was mechanically inept and incredibly reserved, attributes that reinforced his loner tendencies. Unlike LBJ, he enjoyed none of the camaraderie and backslapping that characterized every level of politics in the 1960s. Even his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman said Nixon was “stiff and artificial.”
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Above all, it is important to understand that Nixon hated confrontation. “This would be a great job if you didn’t have to deal with people” he said as president. As he rose in power his tendency for total isolation would grow. He would send orders to his cabinet through subordinates. He rarely saw members of the White House staff. Haldeman and Ehrlichman would say later it was Nixon, not they, who blocked access to Nixon’s door—but neither did they argue they he should see anybody.

Under the “New Germans” rule, Mitchell was forced to get along with the new Haldeman, Ehrlichman combine. “You handle the body, I’ll handle the politics,” the pipe-puffing, campaign manager would say.

“Mitchell usually acted in the campaign in alliance with Haldeman and Ehrlichman,” said Len Garment. “It was not that the three men were fond of one another; instead, they were in competition with each other to see who the toughest, most effective manager was.”
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Mitchell systematically eliminated Ellsworth and Sears. Sears knew the fix was in when the super-efficient and meticulous Haldeman left his name off the printed White House staff list. Haldeman’s supercilious assistant Larry Higby told Sears it was an oversight. Sears was gone soon after.

Mitchell’s purge of Sears was a fork in Nixon’s road; the chosen path led him to Watergate. Sears’ sources in the White House remained impeccable after his departure from the Old Executive Office building. Sears remained close to ex-cop Jack Caulfield, who was working for White House counsel John Dean, who was a prime mover pushing the approval of the Watergate break-in plan. Sears also remained close to Rose Mary Woods, who the super-efficient Haldeman had tried to get moved from her office outside the Oval Office to the Old Executive Office building. Haldeman sent Woods a dozen long-stem roses the morning he asked her to move her office. “Fuck you,” was the churchgoing Woods’s reply. Starting with Nixon as a stenographer in his congressional office, Woods remained in a position to see and hear and would later famously take the rap when she claimed she had inadvertently caused the 18 ½-minute gap in his White House tapes.

The elimination of professional politicians and elevation of technocratic ad men around Nixon was a huge factor in the evolution of Watergate. Practical politicians were locked out as White House staffers jockeying for power climbed the ladder by showing how ruthless and dedicated to Nixon they could be.

Nixon’s lack of a true ideology, his aversion to risk taking on the Vietnam War issue, and the rise of the ad men around him, combined with his increased isolation, would alienate speechwriter Richard J. Whalen. “I was ashamed of what I was doing,” Whalen later wrote. “I was ashamed of being in the company of mediocre merchandisers behind a façade of concealing a sad mixture of cynicism, apprehension, suspicion, and fear—especially fear. Fear of the next man higher up, fear of being found out by the encircling press. Ambition kept worried and discouraged staff members in line.”
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Whalen resigned from the Nixon entourage after the Miami Beach convention.

Interestingly, Dr. Henry Kissinger, who later emerged as Nixon’s chief foreign policy operative, as national security advisor, and later secretary of state, was Rockefeller’s highly paid national security advisor in ‘68 and was secretly sending memos to Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey suggesting how to deflate Nixon on foreign policy issues. Dr. Kissinger liked us to believe he figured out how to play the Chinese and the Russians against each other to put the Cold War on the path to oblivion, making the fall of the Iron Curtain inevitable. It would take President Ronald Reagan to finish the job. Kissinger was a courtier and an extraordinary brown-noser and flatterer. His ass kissing reflected in the White House tapes is enough to make you puke. In his dealings with anyone other than Nixon, he was power mad, conniving, mercurial, temperamental, and given to fits of rage that led to threats of resignation whenever he didn’t get his way.

Kissinger was an unlikely man to helm the Nixon foreign policy initiatives. Kissinger was a vitriolic critic of Nixon while working for Rockefeller. More importantly, Kissinger was a protégé of rabid anti-Communist and foreign policy hard-liner Dr. Fritz Kraemer. Early in Nixon’s term, when the president suggested that he might visit China, Kissinger told him “fat chance.” However, in his pursuit of both power and international prominence, Kissinger abandoned the hard-line teachings of Kraemer and his backers at the JCS and Pentagon to embrace Nixon’s policy of accommodation with the Soviets and Chinese.

Dr. Kissinger is in many ways responsible for what was to become a key act in the Watergate drama. Nixon and those around him feared little from the government study that analyzed Americans stepping in shit in Vietnam. A shocked LBJ discovered that the left wing of the Democratic Party, for whom he had delivered
sweeping
civil rights and social welfare legislation, had turned on him with a vengeance. Nixon figured the so-called Pentagon Papers would only make LBJ and JFK look bad. A seething Henry Kissinger convinced him otherwise.

“He is a sexual deviant,” the rotund professor from Harvard bellowed. “The man’s a pervert! This action undermines our capability to conduct foreign policy in a confidential manner. It is essential that this man [Ellsburg] be discredited.” Kissinger’s rage of course fueled the break-in of “the Plumbers” at the Los Angeles office of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, Ellsburg’s psychiatrist. The actual break-in was directed by Ehrlichman and was among the counts that sent the haughty White House domestic policy advisor to prison. Dr. Kissinger walked away from this seamy low point in the Watergate history.

Kissinger, an egomaniac and courtier of Nixon, was as paranoid as his boss; he just hid it better. He would demand wiretaps on perceived enemies such as NSA staffers and reporters long before the Watergate break-in. Kissinger would also drive the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist supervised by White House counsel John Ehrlichman long before Watergate. The imbalance in Kissinger’s temperament is largely ignored because of his longevity. Deeply paranoid, obsessively secret, extraordinarily prideful, and incredibly duplicitous, Kissinger was working as a “consultant” for the State Department under Lyndon Johnson and was involved in the plans for the surprise bombing halt that Johnson would call in the days before the 1968 election. Kissinger would tip Nixon, thus guaranteeing himself a place in Nixon’s foreign policy machinery as the new president chose his team. Because Kissinger was unsure of Nixon’s receptivity based on Kissinger’s long antagonism of the former vice president, the Harvard doctor passed the information through mutual friend William F. Buckley Jr. Kissinger’s temper was volcanic and his abuse of subordinates legendary. Nixon once told me he lost count of how many times Henry threatened to resign. It was Kissinger’s reaction to the leak of the Pentagon Papers that drove the Nixon administration to wiretap both White House and NSC personnel as well as several newspaper reporters and columnists. Note the backlash that occurred in 2014 when the Obama administration was revealed to be monitoring the telephones of reporters. The wiretaps Kissinger demanded were administered by his then Deputy General Alexander Haig and FBI Deputy Director William Sullivan. These wiretaps, conducted between 1969 and 1971, became one of the deepest secrets of the Nixon administration, and both Kissinger and Haig acted repeatedly to conceal their existence from the public.

Sears’s access to Nixon, cocksure manner, and sarcastic wit drove campaign manager John Mitchell crazy. Sears’s broad network of Republican relationships built up during his campaign travels with Nixon in 1966 were superior to Mitchell’s own—largely bond lawyers or investment bankers. Nixon had promised Sears he would control GOP patronage after the election; Mitchell had cronies of his own to hire. Sears
threatened
John Mitchell.

First, Mitchell relocated Sears from New York to the DC headquarters, where nothing happened. He then put him on the road to help the hapless Spiro Agnew, who was having trouble getting his sea legs as a national candidate. After Sears became deputy counsel to the president, Kissinger, Mitchell, and Haldeman wiretapped him.

Len Garment recalled the Sears purge by the Haldeman-Ehrlichman-Mitchell combine:

That Nixon was not, needless to say, the Nixon that Sears encountered via the persons of John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman. Sears was no less a political calculator than they. Anyone who could conceive of pairing Ronald Reagan with Richard Schweiker, as Sears did in 1976, has earned a permanent place in the political calculators’ Hall of Fame. Sears was a skilled political operator who also stirred something in Nixon’s larger, more poetic nature. This was precisely the part of Nixon’s nature that Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman took to be their job, to emotionally suppress, encouraging instead Nixon’s implacable toughness. They succeeded.
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Sears’s downfall at the White House came by way of a phone tap on journalist Henry Brandon. Brandon, in one phone conversation, quoted an unnamed White House official as having said, “The president is weak. He has difficulty saying no. He wants to please all and he dislikes having to make a choice . . . With a man like this, Henry Kissinger, of course, has great influence.”
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Haldeman made sure the quote got back to Nixon. Soon after, Sears was gone.

“Perhaps because it was so trenchant, Nixon suspected Sears,” said Garment. “Perhaps because he had felt such affection for Sears, Nixon turned on him with fury. Mitchell ordered the FBI to undertake the round-the-clock surveillance of Sears. He said it was at the express direction of the president.”
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Columnist Robert Novak would remember the departure of Sears and what it revealed of Nixon. The men on Nixon’s dark side were about to run out of the government one of the president’s most able supporters after only a few months in 1969:

John Sears stayed on at the White House six months longer than Ellsworth, but was not so fortunate. Mitchell was determined to be done with his brilliant young former law partner, complaining that Sears drank too much and talked too much to the press. What I think really bothered him was that Sears was not afraid of John Mitchell.

By the early summer of 1969, Sears later informed me, “I felt I didn’t have any effectiveness. I had outlived my usefulness.” He was never fired but in October left voluntarily—not dreaming at age twenty-nine that a man of his intelligence, charm, and ambition never again would be on a government payroll. I asked whether he saw the president before he left. “No, he was embarrassed. I did ask to see him once when I had decided to go. I was refused the opportunity. I am sure he was embarrassed.”

Could Richard Nixon not bear to face a valuable young lieutenant who had resigned? Sears later sat in the small conference room in our expanded little suite of offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, eating a sandwich lunch with me, and talking about Nixon:

He can be a very tough guy as long as he doesn’t have to see the other guy. In personal relationships, he has a good bit of cowardice because he can’t do things they can do. He can’t make small talk. He can’t talk and derive a result that’s satisfactory. He doesn’t want to get involved in confrontations with people.

He’s supposed to be [a] hard, tough politician, and he can’t take what another politician is saying about him. He’ll sit there and act really strong, hard, tough. He’s not. He’s saying all those things to convince himself, also to convince the people [in the room], because that’s part of convincing himself. That’s part of the reason he doesn’t like to see a whole lot of people.

These words, never published until now, are a corrective to the White House tapes and the Haldeman diaries, pored over by historians who conclude that Nixon was a tyrant in embryo. Based on Sears’s assessment, Nixon was a fraud—a make-believe tough guy.
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Sears was a more determined and formidable foe than Mitchell and Haldeman imagined, but even he was driven out. While Garment’s contention that Sears was Deep Throat was wrong, Sears himself has admitted to being a source for Carl Bernstein. I believe Sears also orchestrated the public exposure of the clandestine Nixon “Townhouse Operation” in 1970 in which favored US Senate candidates were showered in secret corporate cash.