Nixon's Secret (39 page)

Nixon’s entourage contained characters far more odious than the self-aggrandizing Kissinger. Before John Mitchell was scheduled to resign as attorney general and move to the Committee to Reelect the President, H. R. Haldeman recruited thirty-four-year-old Jeb Stuart Magruder to set up the committee as acting chairman until Mitchell arrived. A cosmetics marketing guy from Southern California, Magruder was impossibly handsome and clean cut, resembling a Ken doll.

The old Nixon hands like Nick Ruwe, Charlie McWhorter, and Ron Walker called Jeb Stuart Magruder “Steve Stunning” for his model looks. Everything about Jeb Magruder was too perfect. He had perfect hair, perfect teeth, a perfect wife, perfect kids, a perfect golf swing, a perfect tennis arm, a perfect tan, and perfectly polished shoes. Magruder and his family had all-American good looks, and Magruder also took brown-nosing and social climbing to a whole new level. He could be obsequious if you were on the political and social scale above him and an utter dick if you were on the political or social scale below him.

Late one night during Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, I was leaving the CRP headquarters when the elevator stopped on the floor occupied by the senior staff of the 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue building, and Jeb Stuart Magruder got on. We both said hello but then rode to the basement garage in silence. Magruder and I walked toward our cars. I was driving a red Volkswagen Bug that had a “Reelect the President” bumper sticker as well as one for the reelection of Congressman Joel T. Broyhill of Virginia. “Is this your car?” Magruder asked. I nodded. “What is this?” he asked, pointing to the Broyhill sticker with his highly polished wingtip. “Get it the fuck off of there.” He turned and proceeded to his car without further comment.

Magruder would regret this incident later. My boss at CREEP, scheduling director J. Curtis Herge, conspired with Nixon communication guy Bill Ratigan and concocted a practical joke to persuade Magruder that I was the nephew of quirky Chicago insurance millionaire and Nixon confidant W. Clement Stone. Stone was the largest single donor to Nixon, giving over a million dollars in 1972 campaign money. He gave millions more to the Republican National Committee and had been a secret funder of the “townhouse fund,” a covert 1970 campaign effort that was a precursor to Watergate and more about which we shall cover later.

Herge figured out that to convince Magruder, we had to convince Magruder’s right-hand man, Bart Porter, who was Herge’s boss and indirectly mine. Herge told Porter that John Mitchell, who knew Herge from the Mudge Rose law firm, called him to ask how Clem Stone’s nephew was working out on the campaign. Porter was in Magruder’s office spilling the beans before Herge could hang up the phone. The next day I received a lunch invitation from Magruder, who had not acknowledged me in the elevators since he told me to remove my bumper sticker. We ate at San Souci, which in those days was where the power elite ate lunch. I saw Robert Novak huddled in a corner dining with an admiral. I saw Joseph Califano, LBJ’s Mr. Fix-it, with Katherine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post
. Magruder turned on the charm. He told me he was looking at a political career in his now home state of California after serving a “suitable number of years in a cabinet post.” He’d be looking for a young team of guys down the road, suggesting there might be a job for me, W. Clement Stone’s nephew. He had eyes on Uncle Clem’s wallet. Indeed, Magruder announced a candidacy for secretary of state in California, which, needless to say, collapsed in the tempest of Watergate. “Bart [my boss] says you’re a man who can keep his mouth shut, and that you’re totally loyal to the president. I will need men like you,” Magruder said pompously.

This ruse of me being Clement Stone’s nephew was worth milking for all it was worth until a chilling day in which it was announced that at the request of the president, W. Clement Stone, the largest single donor to the Committee for the Re-election of the President, would visit the office for a briefing by campaign officials. I imagined being fired by a red-faced Magruder when Stone would tell him that he didn’t have a nephew working for the campaign. Porter would be furious, too, and he knew a hundred other guys who would want my job.

Somehow, Ratigan managed to escort Mr. Stone from the White House to the Reelection Committee offices, where he hastily explained the practical joke and the gyrations we had put Magruder through. “Pompous ass,” spat the old man, who gamely agreed to play along. I later learned that Magruder groveled to the insurance executive telling him what good care he had taken of Mr. Stone’s nephew.

Also appealing to Nixon’s dark side was gung ho marine Charles “Chuck” Colson. Colson was one of the few who could evade Haldeman’s careful system and get Nixon’s approval or direction for politically risky hardball tactics that often yielded little. Haldeman ordered Colson to check with him, even on direct orders the president issued. Colson came from Capitol Hill, where he was an aide to US Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts. He was gung ho for Nixon’s new majority coalition and maneuvered to bring Catholics and union members into the fold using the Vietnam War as a wedge issue whose opponents enraged the “silent majority.”

Colson, for example, seriously entertained firebombing the Brookings Institute to obtain a copy of an FBI report that allegedly would have proved that LBJ used the FBI to wiretap Nixon’s hotel rooms and campaign plane during the 1968 campaign when Nixon was having back-channel talks with the South Vietnamese to kill LBJ’s October Surprise. Colson actually planned to send in burglars disguised as firemen to rifle Brookings files for the document Nixon wanted. Vice presidential aide David Keene told me Colson’s greatest talent was in writing memos, taking credit for planted news stories and manufacturing telegrams and messages to the White House backing Nixon on major speeches and his Vietnam policy. “Colson was essentially full of shit,” Keene told me. Colson would feed Nixon’s dark side and contribute to the mania for “intelligence” and “dirty tricks.”

  He was effective in his outreach to unions that would become an important part of Nixon’s second term blowout in 1972. While it is generally thought that it was Colson who arranged for Nixon to issue a pardon to convicted Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, in fact the codicle that barred Hoffa from union activities or serving in the union office was drafted and inserted by White House Counsel John Dean. Attorney General John Mitchell wanted no part of the pardon deal knowing that Colson and Nixon wanted a quid pro quo in both cash and endorsements to spring the imprisoned union leader. While Colson transmitted interim Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmon’s desire for a prohibition of Hoffa’s future involvement in union politics to the president, the Mob boys would go to the back door; Murray Chotiner told me he and “Dean got it done.”

Journalist Don Folsum covered the deal in
Nixon’s Darkest Secrets:

Breaking from clemency custom, Nixon did not consult the judge who had sentenced Hoffa. Nor did he pay any mind to the US Parole Board, which had unanimously voted three times in two years to reject Hoffa’s appeals for release. The board had been warned by the Justice Department that Hoffa was Mob-connected. Long-time Nixon operative Chotiner eventually admitted interceding to get Hoffa paroled. “I did it,” he told columnist Jack Anderson in 1973. “I make no apologies for it. And frankly I’m proud of it.”

Hoffa evidently bought his way out funneling as much as $800,000 to Nixon. Teamsters expert William Bastone said in 1966 that James P. (“Junior”) Hoffa and racketeer Allen Dorfman “delivered $300,000 in a black valise” to a Washington hotel to help secure the release of Hoffa “Senior” from the prison. The name of the bagman on the receiving end of the transaction is redacted from legal documents filed in a court case. Bastone said the claim is based on “FBI reports reflecting contacts with (former Teamster boss Jackie) Presser in 1971.” In a recently released FBI memo confirming this, an informant details a $300,000 Mob payoff to the Nixon White House “to guarantee the release of Jimmy Hoffa from the Federal penitentiary.”
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But there was more: a $500,000 contribution to the Nixon campaign by New Jersey Teamster leader Anthony Provenzano “Tony Pro.” the head of the notorious Provenzano family, which, a House panel found in 1999, had for years dominated Teamsters New Jersey Local 560. The Provenzanos, were linked to the Genovese crime family and controlled Local 560. They were deeply involved in criminal activities, including murder, extortion, loan sharking, kickbacks, hijacking, and gambling. The contribution was delivered and President Nixon played golf with “Tony Pro.”

Lyn Nofziger, the bombastic press secretary and later White House political assistant for Governor and President Ronald Reagan, was one of the toughest pols I knew. He had a sweet, sentimental side, a great sense of humor, and tremendous loyalty to those who had toiled in the vineyards of Ronald Reagan. Nofziger was no slouch when it came to tactics and was deeply respected among reporters as a straight shooter. According to White House gumshoe John Caulfield, who performed intelligence investigations for White House counsels John Ehrlichman and John Dean, Nofziger went to White House Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman to tell him that “Colson will get the president into trouble some day.” Nofziger’s warning was met with a steely response. “He gets the job done.”
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Mitchell sent his deputy Robert Mardian to keep an eye on Haldeman’s man Magruder, a climber who ass-kissed those above him and treated everyone under him like shit. Magruder pushed the intelligence plan that included the Watergate break-in put together by former FBI agent and New York Assistant District Attorney G. Gordon Liddy.

Liddy was the very crew-cutted model of a former FBI agent. At the time of his arrest he had sprouted a mustache and would jauntily be smoking a cigar when approached by reporters outside the courthouse. Liddy was open in his views about his love of German martial music and his gene pool. He was a tough law-and-order prosecutor and gun enthusiast. After the final break-in Liddy would famously offer to stand on a street corner where those higher up in the conspiracy could have him shot. “I don’t think that is necessary,” mumbled a stunned Jeb Magruder. Nixon himself would call Liddy “an asshole.”
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Ironically, Liddy, who would play a pivotal role in Watergate, came to Washington and began his climb in the administration through the good graces of Congressman Gerald Ford, who would ironically later benefit from Liddy’s botched break-in by replacing Nixon as president.

In 1968, Liddy ran in the Republican primary for Congress against mid-Hudson Valley Republican scion Hamilton Fish Jr., whose father held the congressional seat and whose great-grandfather was US secretary of state to Ulysses S. Grant. While Liddy would lose the Republican primary, he retained the nomination of the New York Conservative Party, and it was feared that he would drain enough votes from the moderate Republican Fish to let Democrat John S. Dyson win the seat. Liddy would first meet Ford when he chauffeured him around Dutchess County when the minority leader visited the district for a Republican Party event. Republican County Chairman George Reid would promise Liddy a job in Washington if he would back off in his Conservative Party bid for Congress (it was too late to have Liddy’s name on the ballot). Harvey Dann, a prominent local insurance man, recruited Liddy to run the Nixon/Agnew campaign, burnishing his résumé for a Washington appointment. Fish, through his father, former Congressman Hamilton Fish Sr., appealed to Ford, who arranged for Liddy to be hired at the Treasury Department in return for a pledge that he would drop his congressional candidacy on the Conservative line and focus on the Nixon campaign in his home county of Dutchess.

“They interviewed Gordon at Treasury,” John Barry, administrative assistant to Congressman Hamilton Fish told me. “The White House was pushing it, but this Greek [Rossides] had met Gordon and was resisting. Hammy had to put the arm lock on Ford to make it happen. Ford made it happen.” This one act by Ford would bring down Nixon and made Ford president. So you can blame Ham Fish,” said Barry. Indeed, Liddy’s brief tenure at the Treasury Department would be turmultuous: he made a pro gun speech to the NRA, criticizing his own department. Shortly thereafter John Dean would recruit Liddy to be legal counsel to the reelection campaign on the recommendation of Egil “Bud” Krough.

I first met Liddy when he served as counsel to the Finance Committee to Reelect the President. Early one morning when arriving for work, I felt him eyeing me on the elevator. He said nothing. By the time I had poured a cup of coffee and gotten to my desk, my secretary handed me a message that Mr. Liddy wanted to see me in his office. I took the elevator to a different floor where the Finance Committee was housed. Sally Harmony, Liddy’s secretary, a pleasant and efficient woman, motioned me to go right in. Liddy was reading a stack of papers. “Close the door,” he said, without looking up. He looked up from his work to stare at me with intensity. “Get a fucking haircut; you represent the president of the United States. Now get the fuck out of here.”

Although he was eccentric and colorful, Liddy emerged from the Watergate drama as the only man with any sense of honor. When caught, Liddy admitted his guilt and took his punishment. He refused to rat out those above him and was rewarded with maximum time. He would ultimately prevail in a litigation inspired by John Dean and filed by Dean’s lawyer for Ida “Maxie” Wells, who disputed Liddy’s truth telling about the break-ins, as we shall see. Liddy did what he did for ideological reasons and in my view was used by both John Dean, Jeb Magruder, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Liddy was not experienced intelligence operative, and he was mislead by both McCord and Hunt about who both of their real loyalty was to—the agency. Liddy was a true believer, and he saw the campus radicals and groups like the Black Panther’s as lawless and dangerous subversives.

The explosive Liddy would become frustrated when Mitchell rejected his proposed broad intelligence-gathering program codenamed “Gemstone.” When Magruder put his hand on Liddy’s shoulder to console him and told him to come back with a scaled-down plan, Liddy famously shouted, “Get your hand off me or I’ll kill you!”
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