Watergate, page 7
“I need it,” Nixon told Haldeman on Thursday evening as they met in the Oval Office with Kissinger, Ehrlichman, and Ron Ziegler.
“Huston swears to god there’s a file on it and it’s at Brookings,” his chief of staff replied.
“Bob, now do you remember Huston’s plan?” Nixon asked. “Implement it.”
Kissinger chimed in with agreement: “Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”
“I want it implemented,” Nixon repeated. “Goddamnit, get in and get those files—blow the safe and get it.”
Everyone in the room would have grasped immediately the significance of Nixon’s mid-rant reference to “Huston’s plan”—a mention not of the aide’s research into the bombing halt but his other secret career-defining work at the White House, an attempt to jump-start the nation’s domestic security apparatus and tackle the societal chaos and radical extremists who threatened the nation’s tranquillity generally and the presidency of Richard Nixon specifically.
I. As he began his first congressional race, against incumbent representative Jerry Voorhis, Nixon had scribbled down on one of his always ubiquitous yellow pads his to-do list: “Set up budget… office furniture… need for paid workers… call on newspapers, former candidates, leaders… arrange church and lodge and veterans meetings,” and so forth. Then he added: “Set up… spies in V. camp.”
II. Due to his proximity to power, the Nixon camp thought they’d scored a big win with Kissinger’s new back channel (“He’s a hard-nosed son-of-a-bitch,” campaign foreign policy aide Richard Allen remarked), but he was really playing all sides: The former Rockefeller advisor was simultaneously bad-mouthing Nixon to his friends and volunteering to turn over to Humphrey’s campaign the opposition research Rockefeller had accumulated, what Kissinger called the “shit files.” (As Kissinger told Zbigniew Brzezinski, Humphrey’s foreign policy advisor, “Look, I’ve hated Nixon for years.”)
III. Nearly everything about the meetings remains incredibly hazy; a few snatches of sentences and some scribbled notes in Chennault’s datebook are the only signs they existed at all.
IV. The FBI, though, declined a presidential order to place a wiretap on Chennault’s phone; since she was so involved in Republican politics, the bureau worried about what it might overhear; as FBI deputy Deke DeLoach wrote Clyde Tolson on October 28, “If it became known that the FBI was surveilling her, this would put us in a most untenable and embarrassing position.”
V. Chennault was hard to miss around town as she drove in a chauffeured maroon Lincoln Continental.
VI. There’s no evidence that Agnew or anyone in his entourage was actually involved; a more plausible explanation, put forth by Chennault late in her life to her biographer Catherine Forslund, is that the FBI technicians misheard her say “New Hampshire,” which was where John Mitchell was that particular day. The explanation that Chennault’s orders were coming from Mitchell in New Hampshire is backed up by handwritten notes from Richard Allen, uncovered in the Hoover Institution Archives by journalist Shane O’Sullivan.
VII. In the 1980s, her friend Tommy Corcoran would tell the Washington Post, “People have used Anna scandalously—Nixon in particular. I know exactly what Nixon said to her and then he repudiated her.”
VIII. Chennault ran into the Mitchells one afternoon in the elevator. “If I had only known what a beautiful woman my husband’s been working with, I would have been so jealous,” Martha joked.
IX. In preparing his report, Huston managed to get unusually thorough cooperation from FBI Assistant Director Sullivan because LBJ’s surveillance and wiretapping operation in the Chennault Affair was the work of Deke DeLoach, Sullivan’s competitor internally to succeed Hoover. The work had left Huston convinced Nixon worked to sabotage the peace talks. “Clearly Mitchell was directly involved,” he said in a 2008 oral history. “It’s inconceivable to me that John Mitchell would be running around, you know, passing messages to the South Vietnamese government, et cetera, on his own initiative.”
Chapter 4 The Huston Plan
Beyond the White House fences, America’s streets convulsed with social change, as Vietnam’s poison coursed through the nation’s political veins and changing rhythms and expectations spilled over into peaceful protests and violent riots. The antiwar demonstrations that had dominated TV news in 1968 showed no signs of abating as Nixon’s presidency began. In fact, they were intensifying at a rapid clip. The movement the press had taken to calling the “New Left,” “a fomentation of hippies, student protesters, political agitators, and revolutionaries,” as historian Melissa Graves explained, was battling the government for the nation’s soul, equipped with a long list of demands. They wanted civil rights, as the promises of Brown v. Board of Education and LBJ’s Civil Rights Act remained out of reach in cities from Birmingham to Boston, and women’s rights and abortion rights, as the platonic ideal of the 1950s stay-at-home, aproned housewife went up in a giant bonfire of bras and burst of sexual liberation. On June 28, 1969, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, provoking a week of violent riots in support of gay rights. As Graves explained, “A sliver of young people stood ready to spark a revolution through civil disobedience and, if necessary, violence.” Or, as Steve Bull, one of Nixon’s Oval Office aides, said, “If you didn’t experience it back then, you would have no idea how close we were to revolution. It was a very violent time.”
As the head of the government the new era sought to disrupt, Nixon found himself the direct target. “It is becoming more obvious with every passing day that the men and the movement that broke Lyndon B. Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard M. Nixon in 1969,” David Broder wrote in the Washington Post in Nixon’s first year. Nixon had run on a platform of “law and order,” to restore peace not just overseas but at home as well. (“In the ’68 campaign, ‘law and order’ became one word,” recalled one campaign aide.)
The start of 1970 coincided with a worrisome rise of violence, both foreign and domestic. “The evolutionary circle of violent dissent spawned an ugly offshoot: the urban underground of political terrorists urging murder and bombing,” Nixon recalled in his own memoirs. Airline hijackings swelled, terror groups formed, New Left radicals launched bombing campaigns, and American cities were overcome with bomb threats—New York City saw more than four hundred of them in one twenty-four-hour period during Nixon’s first year. Dozens of police officers, nearly forty in all, were being targeted and shot down in the streets by snipers. Street crime too had soared; crime statistics are notoriously fuzzy, but murders—a crime usually well documented—rose more than 60 percent in the 1960s, and the FBI calculated that overall violent crime skyrocketed 130 percent.
White House aide Jeb Stuart Magruder recalled that the building in the early years of the Nixon administration seemed in “a state of permanent crisis,” everything both urgent and important.I “The result was a highly-charged atmosphere, one that encouraged a siege mentality,” Magruder said. That atmosphere permeating Richard Nixon’s administration wasn’t just metaphorical; amid the political turmoil, protests, and riots that marked so much of the late sixties and early seventies, there were days the White House became a literal bunker. One Saturday staffers were startled to find three hundred soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division bivouacked in the basement cafeteria of the Executive Office Building, the out-of-sight last line of defense in case the war protesters outside broke through the ring of D.C. municipal buses that had been parked nose-to-nose outside.
If Nixon was under literal and metaphoric siege, then the general marshaling his response was John Mitchell. Mitchell, bitingly humorous, with mischievous eyes, had made his career and fortune in municipal bonds—a uniquely hard, Byzantine, and yet critical grease for local government that, as journalist Teddy White summarized, “though lucrative scarcely teaches a man high respect for public officials.” He had a habit of not returning phone calls, a basic skill and grace, that baffled those who understood how much his inattention rankled politicians. A local D.C. TV host once asked him what his personal philosophy and guiding principles were: “Pragmatism,” he said, simply. He maintained a certain Sphinx-like quality even to his closest aides.
The two men had forged a unique partnership in 1966 when Mitchell convinced Nixon during his time in the political wilderness to merge their respective law firms, creating a 120-lawyer powerhouse. Nixon had entered New York law during the darkest period of his life, following his defeat for the California governor’s office in 1962, and Mitchell had been one of the only New Yorkers to welcome him. The two men had a strange relationship—sometimes warm, sometimes chilly—but Nixon generally had great admiration for Mitchell. (The respect was not always mutual; Mitchell sometimes referred to Nixon behind his back as “Milhous,” the middle name he loathed.)
As his campaign manager in ’68, Mitchell embraced the “Southern Strategy,” stirring division and peeling off the right wing of the Democratic Party, setting a model that would guide the GOP until the present day by embracing a vision for a new race-based politics that united white Americans under an “emerging Republican majority.” That idea, later outlined in a 1969 book by that title, authored by onetime Mitchell aide Kevin Phillips, explained in Phillips’s words how “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.” It was ugly and poisonous to American politics, but—like the Red Scare—remarkably effective.
Preternaturally cool and self-assured, confident in himself to the point of extreme arrogance, Mitchell stood at ease in powerful circles in a way that Nixon himself never was. “Of all the public officials I ever met in my life, he cared less about what people thought about him than anybody,” William Ruckelshaus said. (At the ’68 convention, Senator Howard Baker introduced Mitchell to his wife, who warmly greeted him, saying, “Oh, I’ve heard of you, you are in Mr. Nixon’s law firm.” Mitchell’s reply was as frosty as Mrs. Baker’s was warm: “No, madam, Mr. Nixon has joined my law firm.”) Even after Nixon ascended to the presidency, Mitchell seemed to keep the upper hand. “It was less fraternal and more paternal—with Mitchell, the younger man by a year, often seeming to be the President’s father figure,” journalist J. Anthony Lukas wrote.
After their victory, Nixon desperately wanted him to serve in the administration. Mitchell turned down the offer. His wife, Martha—a lively and troubled soul with a serious alcohol problem—was institutionalized at the time, and Mitchell wanted to tend to her. He would later say that he turned down the job of attorney general twenty-six times before giving in, agreeing to serve only if Richard Kleindienst, who had also worked on the campaign, was named his deputy.
Kleindienst would come to know all too well the unique challenges of working alongside the imperturbable and impenetrable Mitchell. Whereas most people in politics loved to talk, Mitchell preferred silence; in his years as a municipal bond attorney he had developed the ability to drink in others’ desires and needs while sharing few of his own. “He was, and is, an unusually self-contained person,” Kleindienst recalled. “He had a superior intellect and a retentive mind, and was a good listener.” However, a specific management challenge grew from his soft-spoken and understated approach: Mitchell didn’t give directions clearly, and staff sometimes left meetings thinking they had his assent when they didn’t. As deputy attorney general, Kleindienst found it was often his role to follow up with staff after meetings “to interpret in unequivocal language what Mitchell really intended.”
In his new role, Mitchell came to personify the Nixon administration’s get-tough approach on the hippies, yippies, and dope-smoking flower children, “the prime advocate of no-knock laws, wiretapping, stop and frisk, [and] preventive detention,” Lukas wrote. Newsweek featured him on the cover, dubbing him “Mr. Law & Order.”II In November 1969, he watched from his fifth-floor balcony at the Justice Department on Pennsylvania Avenue as one mass protest convulsed the capital. Thousands streamed by his office, some holding a giant papier-mâché effigy of his face. When protesters noticed the looming presence of the attorney general, they went wild. “We screamed ‘Fuck you Mitchell, fuck you Mitchell,’ and threw at him whatever debris we could find,” one protester recalled. “He looked down calmly from the railing, which was far too high for our missiles, holding his pipe, and with great deliberation gave us the finger right back.”
His unfettered disdain for the New Left was an attitude that the president supported and encouraged. To Nixon personally—and his team broadly—the inner-city riots and the antiwar demonstrators who marched on the capital and threw rocks at his limo during the inaugural parade were just as much of a threat as the nation’s drugs and murders. “We’re going to enforce the law against draft evaders, against radical students, against deserters, against civil disorders, and against street crime,” Kleindienst promised. “If we find that any of these radical, revolutionary, anarchistic kids violate the law, we’ll prosecute.”
And yet as Nixon’s team girded for battle, they found themselves, unexpectedly, fighting alone.
J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful and longtime head of the FBI, had made it very clear he wanted nothing to do with fighting Nixon’s enemies. Hoover had been the head of the FBI for nearly a half century, growing an underpowered and outgunned corner of the Justice Department into the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency and exercising its power against all manner of political enemies, from Nazis and Communists to civil rights leaders and antiwar protesters. “Edgar,” as he was known to many presidents, was, columnist Jack Anderson explained, “10 percent lawman and 90 percent bureaucrat.” Little information came out about the bureau beyond what Hoover and his legions of public relations specialists and ghostwriters allowed; his regular appearances on Capitol Hill always conveyed ferocity and thoroughness, and his force of suit-wearing, white-shirted, white male G-men (the only Black agents were Hoover’s driver and steward) seemed the embodiment of postwar America.
Over decades in Washington, Hoover had become an American institution unto himself, outmaneuvering and ingratiating himself with every occupant of the Oval Office through his personal toxic stew of political intelligence, blackmail, and sycophancy. Nominally, he reported to the attorney general, but few had tried to seriously challenge him. The lack of supervision and boundaries had reared its head in recent years as the sixties protest culture intensified; the once progressive Hoover had steadily grown more reactionary, suspecting evil in all manner of political opponents, particularly Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he’d spied upon and, in one of the FBI’s darkest moments, encouraged to commit suicide.
Hoover had been careful to strike up a friendship with Nixon early in his political career, in part because the director knew the bureau had rejected the future president’s special agent application in 1937, just after he graduated law school.III They shared common cause in the 1950s fighting Communists like Alger Hiss—driving that case forward had required a long, delicate dance between the young congressman and the even then veteran FBI director—and they became regular dining partners in Washington. Unlike many others in D.C., Hoover had kept in touch during Nixon’s eight years out of power, hedging his bets in case the failed candidate wasn’t done, and when he’d arrived again in D.C. victorious after the ’68 election, Nixon had every belief the two men shared a personal warmth and understanding of the nation’s true enemies. LBJ had even assured the incoming Nixon in a private conversation during the transition, “Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men. You will rely on him time and time again to maintain security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”
Nixon was in for a rude surprise. By 1969 Hoover had lost the energy and enthusiasm for the dirty work he’d done for (and to) a half-dozen presidents. He was now past the federal mandatory retirement age—his continued service came through annual presidential waivers—and he increasingly feared that any embarrassment or scandal would be used to ease him out of office and into obscurity. As his health declined, so too did the quality of the bureau’s operations. When FBI reports arrived at the White House, they rarely seemed thorough or well executed enough to inspire confidence. “In general, the FBI investigative work I saw was of poor quality. The Bureau dealt excessively in rumor, gossip, and conjecture,” Ehrlichman observed, and he told colleagues that he sometimes even sent back reports that seemed too sloppy. By the spring of ’69, he’d grown so frustrated with Hoover that he’d hired his own private investigator, a former NYPD detective named Jack Caulfield, onto the White House staff.
Even more troubling to Nixon’s White House was that the FBI seemed reluctant to deliver the intelligence he felt his due as president—and which Hoover had happily delivered to his predecessors. Whereas the CIA’s authority was carefully delineated at its creation by the National Security Act of 1947, the FBI had been created in 1908 with a one-paragraph order from the attorney general, and its precise jurisdiction remained amorphous, guided by a hodgepodge of executive orders, presidential whims, and Hoover’s preferences; this ambiguity particularly existed when it came to the bureau’s work on matters of “national security” rather than criminal law enforcement. (Asked at one point about the origin of its authority to monitor political dissidents and combat espionage in the U.S., the bureau pointed to a Civil War–era court decision and a three-paragraph letter from FDR and the secretary of state during World War II.)
