IV
The Gathering Impact of Watergate
THE moment when all hopes for a period of healing dissolved can be precisely charted. It was on a weekend in the middle of April 1973
On the evening of Friday, the thirteenth of April, the Federal City Club of Washington — its membership predominately Democratic — in a gesture of goodwill, bestowed its public service award on me, a senior representative of the Nixon Administration, and on Senator John Sherman Cooper, a senior Republican Senator. The Federal City Club of Washington was founded in the early 1960s as a protest against the admissions policies of the dominant, prestigious, and staid Metropolitan Club. Leading figures of the Kennedy Administration and sympathetic journalists had resigned from the latter and founded a new club a few blocks away in the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel. Unfortunately, its finances did not equal the idealism of its founders; it consisted essentially of one large dining room, a bar, and a small terrace wedged between high and undistinguished office buildings.
The Nixon Administration did not have much use for either club. Its key members mistrusted the Federal City as too liberal and the Metropolitan as too Establishment. Nothing could better signify their isolation from the permanent community of the nation’s capital and political life — an isolation that contributed to their undoing.
That evening a distinguished group had assembled; nearly everybody of importance in Washington was there to honor two leading Republicans — except for other senior members of the Nixon Administration only recently reelected with the second largest margin in American history. Senator Cooper and I brought to the occasion an appeal for national unity. My theme was the hope that, with Vietnam behind us, the nation’s foreign policy could combine the exuberant idealism of the Kennedy Administration (which I had served briefly and inconspicuously) with the unsentimental emphasis on national interest of the Nixon Administration:
As a nation, we have been shaken by the realization of our fallibility, and it has been painful to grasp that we are no longer pristine, if we ever were. Later than any nation, we have come to the recognition of our limits. In coming to a recognition of our limits, we have achieved one of the definitions of maturity, but the danger is that we will learn that lesson too well; that instead of a recognition that we cannot do everything, we will fall into the illusion that we cannot do anything.
Nothing is more urgent right now than a serious and compassionate debate of where we are going, because if we lose the capacity for great conception, we can be administered but not governed. I first saw government at a high level over a decade ago, at a time which is now occasionally debunked as overly brash, excessively optimistic, even somewhat arrogant. Some of these criticisms are justified, but a spirit prevailed then which was quintessentially American: that problems are a challenge, not an alibi; that men are measured not only by their success, but also by their striving; that it is better to aim grandly than to wallow in mediocre comfort. Above all, the Administration then in office, and its opponents, thought of themselves engaged in a common enterprise, not in a permanent, irreconcilable contest.
At a time which history will surely mark as one of the great revolutions, the world continues to need our idealism and our purpose, and in this respect the spirit of the early 60s was more nearly right than some of the present attitudes.
In the 1920s, we were isolationists because we thought we were too good for this world. We are now in danger of withdrawing from the world because we believe we are not good enough for it. The result is the same, and the consequences would be similar. So it is time to end our own civil war.
To be sure, we should leaven our optimism with a sense of tragedy, and temper our idealism with humility and realism. But we have had enough of the liturgies of debate, and what we need most is the unity of which Senator Cooper spoke, which is the prerequisite for mastering the future and overcoming the past.
My remarks were received warmly. There was in the room a glow of goodwill, conciliation, and budding optimism.
My awakening the next day, Saturday, April 14, was rude. I was still buoyed by the evening’s mood of reconciliation and the geniality of the audience when Leonard Garment called at my office at the White House. What he told me shattered everything.
Len Garment was one of that small group of liberal Republicans whom Nixon had added to his entourage partly for protective coloration, partly because they genuinely appealed to his gentler and more sensitive side. Like their conservative counterparts — the speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, for example — some of the “liberals” imagined that they alone represented the “true” Nixon, although Garment was too perceptive for such a sentimental misjudgment. The fact was that there was no true Nixon; several warring personalities struggled for preeminence in the same individual. One was idealistic, thoughtful, generous; another was vindictive, petty, emotional. There was a reflective, philosophical, stoical Nixon; and there was an impetuous, impulsive, and erratic one. Sometimes one set of traits prevailed; sometimes another; occasionally they were in uneasy balance. One could never be certain which Nixon was dominant from meeting to meeting. Nor was it wise to act upon an impulsive instruction without making sure that the reflective Nixon had had a crack at it. Indeed, it was the failure of some more literal-minded White House advisers to understand the requirements of his complex personality that gave such momentum to Watergate. Strangely enough, the thoughtful analytical side of Nixon was most in evidence during crises, while periods of calm seemed to unleash the darker passions of his nature.
Garment had met Nixon when they were partners in a New York law firm. Len was a man of many talents. He was at ease in the world of the arts as in that of the law — he was himself an enthusiastic clarinet player — and credit for the Nixon Administration’s enormously expanded federal support for the humanities is due to him as to no other single person. If his decency reduced his effectiveness in the more brutal sparring of high-level government, it also gave depth to his role as a conscience for the President and as confidant to his friends. His title, Special Consultant to the President, was grand enough, but without a specific area of responsibility; he had no regular access to the President or a day-to-day schedule.
As a general rule, influence in the White House must not be judged by job descriptions. Many unwary neophytes are enticed into service by promises of constant contact with the President. But influence on Presidential decisions depends more on the substantive mandate than on theoretical access to the Oval Office. Whatever the President’s intentions, he is usually overscheduled. Inevitably, he faces problems requiring more decisions than he can comfortably handle. Conversation not related to his agenda, no matter how stimulating or instructive, soon becomes a burden. If the adviser agrees with the bureaucracy, he is a waste of time. If he disagrees and even if he should convince the President, he raises the problem of how to marshal bureaucratic support so as to implement the suggested course. I can think of no exception to the rule that advisers without a clear-cut area of responsibility eventually are pushed to the periphery by day-to-day operators. The other White House aides resent interference in their spheres. The schedulers become increasingly hesitant in finding time on the President’s calendar.
Garment had reduced these inherent disabilities to the maximum degree possible through unselfish conduct and the high regard others had for him. Still, his emergence into prominence was usually a good signal that Nixon was in some distress and required a steadying hand. It was also noticeable that in recent days he had spent an increasing amount of time with Nixon, though it was not clear what matters were discussed. To explain why was the purpose of Garment’s visit to my office on April 14.
In his deceptively casual manner he slumped into the blue-covered couch against the wall that faced the ceiling-to-floor windows overlooking the White House front lawn and Pennsylvania Avenue. I sat in an easy chair at right angles to the sofa, next to my desk. Never one to beat around the bush, Garment opened the conversation by raising a question unlikely to receive an objective answer: “Have you lost your mind?”
Without waiting for a reply, Garment somewhat wearily unfolded an astonishing and shattering tale: Within a matter of days my evocation of national reconciliation would look like a plea for mercy and be submerged in a crisis that would make the turmoil over Vietnam seem trivial. Nixon’s lifelong enemies were about to be handed the weapon that they had been seeking. In the tornado of suspicion about to overwhelm us, my appeal to idealism tempered by a stern perception of national purpose would sound vacuous if not cynical. The outcome of the recent election might well be reversed; there was likely to be a battle to the death.
“Watergate” was about to blow up; its ramifications went far beyond the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Apartment complex. There had been other break-ins sanctioned from the White House for several different purposes, some as yet unclear. Also, a plan had existed to kidnap presumptive leaders of potential demonstrations against the Republican National Convention and to fly them to Central America. Prostitutes were to be used to compromise and to blackmail delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Garment said the “sordid mess” had many dimensions, only part of which he knew himself. It could not have developed without the cooperation of the highest levels of the Administration. Garment thought that Special Counsel to the President Charles W. Colson had probably been the “evil genius” behind it. Yet the scale of the wrongdoing really made it impossible to imagine that Assistants to the President H. R. (Bob) Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, whom the press had nicknamed “the Germans,” had been unaware. There was a puzzle here, for Haldeman’s and Ehrlichman’s dislike of Colson was proverbial. And if Haldeman and Ehrlichman were involved, it was nearly inconceivable that the President had been completely ignorant.
Whoever was the culprit, in Garment’s view, only radical surgery and the fullest admission of error could avert catastrophe. But if the President was involved even indirectly, full disclosure would not be the course selected; hence the Administration might bleed to death amidst a cascade of revelations gleefully exploited by the host of opponents Nixon had managed to acquire over the years. Garment was convinced that the Administration would have to be ripped apart and reconstituted in procedures as well as personnel. Nixon would have to put himself at the head of this movement of reform, brutally eradicate the rot, and rally the American people for a fresh start.
I was stunned. From the White House, somebody had implemented Presidential musings that could only be regarded as juvenile; had adopted the tawdriest practices of the hated antiwar radicals; and had set at risk both our social cohesion and our ability to fulfill our international responsibilities. For four years I had sustained myself through the anguishing turmoil of Vietnam with the vision of a united America turning at last to tasks of construction. And now through acts that made no sense, discord would descend once again on a society already weakened by ten years of upheaval. I felt like a swimmer who had survived dangerous currents only to be plucked from apparent safety by unexpected and even more violent riptides toward uncharted seas.
As I considered what this portended for foreign policy, my heart sank. A nation’s capacity to act is based on an intangible amalgam of strength, reputation, and commitment to principle. To be harnessed, and applied with care and discrimination, these qualities require authority, backed by public confidence. But if Garment was right, political and moral authority inexorably would start draining from the Presidency. The dream of a new era of creativity would in all probability evaporate. Even preserving what we had achieved — the Indochina settlement, for example — would become precarious. There was real peril. Without the impression of American authority, aggressors would be tempted. Delicate balances in regions where American commitments were crucial to peace would be less stable. Our ability to mediate conflicts, or to inspire friends, would erode. We were threatened with stagnation in our foreign policy, and a rearguard struggle to avert a wholesale unraveling.
Exactly what had triggered this avalanche? When the Watergate break-in occurred in June 1972 I had been en route to China. I had paid little heed to the sparse news reports I read. I could not imagine that a President as politically experienced as Nixon would permit the White House to be involved in so pointless an exercise. I thought that at worst some egregious minion had conducted a childish private enterprise.
In the months that followed, Watergate — then specifically associated in the public mind, as in mine, with the June 17 break-in — was never discussed at the White House meetings I attended. The White House assistants are both partners in a joint endeavor and competitors for the President’s attention and favor. The latter consideration often predominates — at least it tended to in the Nixon White House. Each Assistant tenaciously defends his turf, which is best accomplished by maintaining some exclusive jurisdiction.
Thus in the Nixon White House there was an almost total separation between the domestic and the foreign policy sides. The relation of the various Nixon aides to one another was like that of prisoners in adjoining cells. They might hear something about the scale of the activity; proximity did not invite participation or intimate knowledge. To all practical purposes I was excluded from domestic issues and Ehrlichman, who handled domestic policy, from foreign policy discussions. Haldeman, who attended both, invariably confined himself to political and public relations concerns. There were large daily staff meetings, which both foreign and domestic advisers attended, but they were preoccupied with public relations; sensitive matters were never discussed there.
I was aware, of course, of the pervasive sense of beleaguerment that resulted from a combination of the President’s personality and the violent, occasionally extralegal assaults of the antiwar critics. And I had come to know a dark side of Nixon. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1972 I did not believe it possible that the White House was involved in the Watergate affair; I accepted Press Secretary Ronald L. Ziegler’s public position that it was a “third-rate burglary attempt” involving no White House personnel. The morning staff meetings seemed to bear this out. The few references to Watergate were always by junior staff members who complained of the media’s unfairness. The avuncular approval this elicited from Haldeman, who presided, reinforced the sense that nothing serious had occurred.
Once, in the summer of 1972, I asked Haldeman what Watergate was all about. “I wish I knew,” he replied; and changed the subject. On another occasion I mentioned Watergate to John Ehrlichman. In late January 1973 I had run into Joseph Califano, a former Johnson aide and old friend from the other side of politics, and gossiped on the street for a few minutes with him. To my smug remark that I did not see how the Democrats could recover from their electoral debacle, Califano said Watergate would bring a Democratic revival. It was wrong to think of judges as unaffected by the public mood. Enough media attention had been focused on Watergate to make it extremely likely that the forthcoming trial of the Watergate burglars could cause the judge to crack down and force further revelations. I passed this view on to Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman, smarting under the media’s tendency to contrast me favorably with “the Germans,” tended to give me short shrift whenever I ventured within the three-mile limit of domestic jurisdiction. He snorted, “Wishful thinking! If that is what they are counting on, they will be out of office for thirty years.”
There was, hindsight makes plain, something that should have alerted me early in 1973. It was the behavior of Nixon himself. I found it difficult to get Nixon to focus on foreign policy, to a degree that should have disquieted me. In the past, even in calm periods, he had immersed himself in foreign policy to enliven the job of managing the government, which ultimately bored him. Now it was difficult to get him to address memoranda. They came back without the plethora of marginal comments that indicated they had been carefully read. On at least one occasion Nixon checked every box of an options paper, defeating its purpose.
I ascribed this lassitude to his characteristic depression after success. Through my acquaintance with him, absence of tension provoked not elation but lethargy. Nixon’s most capricious actions had occurred in times of quiet, not in reaction to crises. Calm periods seemed to drive him to disequilibrium as if he could find his own balance only in tension.
Throughout this period I remember only one conversation with Nixon that related directly to Watergate. In early April 1973, as Senator Sam Ervin’s Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the Watergate Committee) began its investigations, we were in San Clemente. One afternoon the President called me to his office and asked whether Haldeman should testify. I replied, naively as it proved, that this would be an admission of guilt and that only those with direct knowledge of the break-in should appear. Nixon gave no sign that based on his knowledge I had just put forward a proposition that contradicted itself. Impassively, he told me to repeat my views to Haldeman, a suggestion whose extreme ambiguity did not strike me for several weeks. When I did, Haldeman listened equally impassively and urged me to repeat my views to Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman, in turn, shrugged off the observation with the air of a man whose patience was barely equal — but might not always be — to my invincible ignorance of political matters.
Now that Watergate was about to explode, I pondered Nixon’s options. I had my doubts about Garment’s proposed solution. The vision of Nixon’s putting himself at the head of a reform movement to clean up his own Administration stretched credulity. Nor was it all that certain to work. A massive purge in the fifth year of a Presidency raises profound doubts about the incumbent’s judgment for not having spotted the malfeasance earlier. Moreover, I thought that Garment’s diagnosis precluded his remedy. Anyone familiar with Nixon’s way of conducting affairs would know that he needed a strong chief of staff to carry out any plan, that in the absence of delicate pressure from those he trusted he would procrastinate; his usual coolness under fire always needed reinforcement by trusted aides. In other words, only Haldeman could get Nixon to fire Haldeman, an unlikely proposition. If Haldeman was involved even indirectly, there was no one else to shepherd such a program past our chief’s psychological defenses. On Garment’s diagnosis the Administration seemed headed for prolonged turmoil without a foreseeable outcome.
If this was true, my duty as I perceived it was to rally those unaffected by the catastrophe for the ordeal ahead. I asked Garment’s permission to inform a few in the White House whose probity and integrity would help us preserve public confidence — George Shultz and Arthur Burns in particular. Garment agreed; I immediately set up a meeting for Sunday evening, the first time they were both available.
In the meantime, on Saturday evening, April 14, I attended the annual dinner tendered by the White House correspondents. The guest of honor is putatively the President, together with the Cabinet. I say “putatively” because a point is usually reached in an administration — it came rather early in Nixon’s — where the President feels that his daily harassment by the media exhausts his tolerance for their company. Listening to the uneven sarcasm that is the staple of these evenings is not a duty foreseen by the Constitution. Presidential attendance begins to slip. Nixon used his absence to pretend an imperviousness to the journalists assigned to cover him — only reinforcing the reciprocal hostility and sensitivity of the President and the press.
On this occasion, however, Nixon decided to show up. The evening went well enough; at least I remember no untoward incident, though the atmosphere was redolent with resentment. Afterward, several newspapers gave parties in various suites. While attending one of them, I was called to a phone. It was the President and he was highly agitated. It was not unusual for Nixon to call at all hours, nor for him to pose an odd-sounding question and hang up. But this evening the question sounded weird even for a late night call. “Do you agree,” he asked “that we should draw the wagons around the White House?”
We know today from the mountains of Watergate revelations that the day had been one of frenzied meetings between Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and former Attorney General and campaign manager John Mitchell. But I was not aware of them. I would like to be able to report that I said something helpful or constructive to the obviously distraught President. But few advisers possess the fortitude to tell their President that they do not know what he is talking about, or that his query indicates a propensity toward melodrama. Nor did I feel up to it that evening. I mumbled something noncommittal that Nixon, not unreasonably, construed as assent. “All right,” he said, “we will draw the wagons around the White House.” He gave that enigmatic metaphor no further content before hanging up suddenly. Had it not been for my conversation with Garment a few hours earlier, I would not have known what agitated the President so much.
Stung, I mentioned Garment’s worries to John Ehrlichman when he called me about something or other on Sunday, April 15. “Garment,” replied Ehrlichman, equably enough, “is a nuclear overreactor. Pay no attention to him. Our major problem is to get John Mitchell to own up to his responsibility.” Mitchell indeed! Did he have the major responsibility for the Watergate break-in — or was he chosen as the fall guy? I asked myself the question without any idea of the answer. What was clear was that if Mitchell was involved, the scandal would be uncontainable. John Mitchell, that epitome of loyalty, would never have acted without at least believing that he was carrying out Presidential wishes. Indeed, whatever hypothesis one considered — Garment’s, which saw Colson as the chief villain with Haldeman and Ehrlichman in supporting roles; or Ehrlichman’s, which now apparently placed the blame on Mitchell — Watergate was bound to rock the nation. It simply was not credible, least of all to those of us who knew how the White House operated, that Nixon’s paladins had acted totally on their own on a matter with such grave implications for the President.
Thus, unless it could be shown unambiguously that the President was not involved, we would soon face a monumental crisis of institutions. Clearly, the President was severely wounded. Whatever the unimaginable outcome, Nixon would have to alter his system of management. He would no longer be able to dominate the government through White House assistants, harassing or bypassing the regular bureaucracy. The trusted political aides who, as part of the post-election shake-up, had been placed into every key department as a means of keeping an eye on the Cabinet member who was titular head, would lose their clout if not their positions. Challenges to White House predominance were increasingly probable. It was imperative to adopt rapidly a mode of government less dependent on solitary decisions at the top. However necessary existing procedures may have appeared to brave the Vietnam period, the moral, psychological, and political basis for them had now disappeared.
My meeting with George Shultz and Arthur Burns was the evening of that same Sunday, April 15, in Shultz’s White House office. Shultz at that time combined the positions of Secretary of the Treasury and Assistant to the President in charge of economic policy. Burns was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board but wielded a wider influence than that title would indicate. The later debacle of the Nixon Administration has obscured the extent to which it included men and women of extraordinary character and intelligence.
Shultz had entered the Cabinet as Secretary of Labor, had been moved to the Office of Management and Budget when it was given policymaking functions, and had succeeded John Connally as Secretary of the Treasury in the summer of 1972. I met no one in public life for whom I developed greater respect and affection. Highly analytical, calm and unselfish, Shultz made up in integrity and judgment for his lack of the flamboyance by which some of his more insecure colleagues attempted to make their mark. He never sought personal advancement. By not threatening anyone’s prerogatives, and, above all, by his outstanding performance, he became the dominant member of every committee he joined. He usually wound up being asked to sum up a meeting — a role that gave him influence without his aiming for it. If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz.
It was easy to underestimate Arthur Burns. As he puffed on his pipe while considering a proposition, he seemed to be a fuzzy-minded, slightly abstracted academic, and indeed he had been a professor at Columbia University for three decades. His deliberate manner of speaking might be occasionally taken by the unwary as a reflection of the pace of his mind. But Burns had an unusual ability to get swiftly to the heart of any problem. He was both brilliant and incredibly persistent; and he proved to be one of the canniest bureaucratic infighters in Washington. He had not been filling his pipe reflectively throughout the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations without studying and learning what made government tick. He worked patiently at lining up support for his position; he lost few battles while I observed him in action. Yet this did not diminish the admiration for his integrity, dedication, and subtle intelligence held by those of us whom he usually outmaneuvered.
When I confided Garment’s news to my two colleagues they were at first unbelieving. But we all shared a sense of impotence. We did not know the dimensions of the looming scandal. We agreed to keep each other informed of whatever we learned; we would tell each other of conversations with the President relevant to our concerns so that we would, if possible, offer unified advice. We would try jointly to develop policies and initiatives to maintain the confidence of the American people in their government even in the midst of a political crisis. The Administration had, after all, nearly four years to run; presumptuous as it may seem, we thought a duty had fallen on us to preserve as much moral substance for the national government as could be salvaged.
BEFORE continuing the tale of the unfolding of Watergate, I must stop to explain its context. Most of the voluminous literature of Watergate — a cottage industry — treats it as a personal aberration of Richard Nixon as if there had been no surrounding circumstances. And in truth Watergate is unthinkable apart from Nixon’s driven personality. But there was also a deeper background. Historians will misunderstand Watergate who neglect the destructive impact on American politics, spirit, and unity of the war in Vietnam.
The United States had entered Vietnam during the Kennedy Administration, with sixteen thousand advisers, idealism, and a sense of mission producing an extraordinary activism. Communist aggression in Indochina was thought to reflect the cutting edge of a homogeneous ideology directed by a monolithic Sino-Soviet bloc. The Johnson Administration had escalated the commitment, sending more than 500,000 American troops to the inhospitable jungles of Southeast Asia to combat what it considered a test case of a theory of revolutionary warfare centrally directed from Moscow and Peking. That assessment proved to be mistaken. Hanoi was essentially acting on its own account though it could not have done so without the help of the two giant Communist powers, especially the Soviet Union.
The frustrations of the Johnson Administration in Indochina made it an easy target for later abuse, aggravated when many of the policymakers who had involved us in Indochina became so demoralized that they in effect joined the critics who had destroyed them and their President. But their original perception was not so mistaken as their own loss of confidence in themselves made it appear. The rulers of Hanoi were anything but the benign nationalists so often portrayed by gullible sympathizers; they were cold, brutal revolutionaries determined to dominate all of Indochina. The impact of a North Vietnamese victory on the prospects of freedom and national independence in Southeast Asia was certain to be grave, especially on governments much less firmly established than was the case a decade later; the much-maligned domino theory — shared by all the non-Communist governments in the area — turned out to be correct.
Whether the strategic stakes justified such a massive American involvement in Vietnam must be doubted in retrospect. But once American forces are committed, there is no logical or valid goal except to prevail. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations trapped themselves between their convictions and their inhibitions, making a commitment large enough to hazard our global position but then executing it with so much hesitation as to defeat their purpose. They engaged us in Indochina for the objective of defeating a global conspiracy and then failed to press a military solution for fear of sparking a global conflict — a fear that was probably as exaggerated as the original assessment. There are no awards for losing with moderation; neither domestic nor foreign critics are placated by failure.
But it must also be said that the task was so novel, the undertaking so unfamiliar, that these failures deserve compassion rather than scorn. The men who involved us in Vietnam were neither frivolous nor callous. They ventured American prestige beyond the strategic merits of the local issue and risked infinitely more than they intended. Yet their purposes were far from ignoble; later events confirmed the validity of the view that American impotence in the face of aggression could have wider, and catastrophic, consequences. The global turmoil that followed the final collapse of the non-Communist governments in Indochina owed not a little to loss of confidence in the stabilizing role of America; Soviet adventurism accelerated with American weakness; for a time, military force seemed to become the arbiter of all political conflicts. And the horrible fate of the peoples of Indochina since 1975 — the mass murders, the concentration camps, the political repression, the boat people — is now rendering a final verdict on whether it was our resistance to totalitarianism, or our abandonment of our friends, that was the true immorality of the Indochina conflict.
When the Nixon Administration came into office in January 1969, the wisdom of the commitment of over 500,000 Americans and nearly 100,000 allied soldiers had become moot. The troops were there. Thirty-five thousand Americans had already been killed. We did not question the desirability of American disengagement. Even before assuming office, we decided to withdraw American forces as rapidly as possible.I The Nixon Administration perceived also that far from coordinating their policies, Peking and Moscow were engaged in an intense geopolitical and ideological struggle. The difficulty was how to implement these judgments while maintaining our international responsibilities and our national honor.
Our definition of honor was not extravagant: We would withdraw, but we would not overthrow an allied government. We were prepared to accept the outcome of a truly free political process in South Vietnam even if it meant the replacement of the personalities and institutions that we favored. What we were not willing to do was to accept the unconditional surrender Hanoi was in effect demanding, to mock our people’s sacrifices by collaborating in the imposition of Communist rule, betraying those who had believed the assurances of our predecessors and thereby putting at risk global confidence in the United States.
But a free political process was precisely what Hanoi was determined to prevent. Its dour and fanatical leaders had not fought and suffered for all their adult lives to entrust the outcome to an electoral procedure that they had never practiced in their own country. They were dedicated revolutionaries whose profession was guerrilla war and whose method was the exhaustion of their adversaries. Their faith was in the balance of forces — military, psychological, and political, in that order of priority. Within Indochina they worked tenaciously, indeed heroically, to frustrate our military strategy, to demoralize our troops, and to defeat our South Vietnamese allies. In negotiations they did not budge from their central demands: that America had to withdraw from Indochina unconditionally, that on the way out we must overthrow the governments allied to us. And they did not alter these terms until they were militarily exhausted.
By then America’s national unity had been strained almost to the breaking point. Given the self-limiting strategies adopted by two Presidents — Johnson out of fear of expanding the conflict, Nixon to gain maneuvering room for an honorable extrication — the war was bound to be protracted and the outcome ambiguous. The process of an honorable withdrawal was inevitably confusing to a public that was still being asked to sacrifice in the name of an abstract, unprovable goal of maintaining America’s global credibility. Many of the young, on whom the burden of conscription fell, found a messy war in a faraway country incompatible with their ideals. For the first time in history, the average person could see the ugliness of war every evening on his television screen. Thousands of decent and patriotic Americans from every walk of life were moved to protest against an enterprise that exacted such a human toll. At the same time, poll after poll showed the overwhelming majority of the American public unprepared to accept an outright, humiliating American defeat. The result was an intractable and increasingly bitter domestic stalemate.
In this impasse the attitude of two groups proved pivotal: the American foreign policy Establishment, and the tiny indigenous radical movement.
The leadership group in America that had won the battle against isolationism in the 1940s and sustained a responsible American involvement in the world throughout the postwar period was profoundly demoralized by the Vietnam war. They, indeed, had launched their country in the 1960s into this war of inconclusive ends and ambiguous means. When it ran aground, they lost heart. The clarity of purpose that had given impetus to the great foreign policy initiatives of the late 1940s was unattainable in Indochina. The Marshall Plan, the Greek-Turkish aid program, the Atlantic Alliance, the reconstruction of Japan, had been of a piece with our domestic experience. Those economic programs had seemed to vindicate the premise of the New Deal: that political stability could be restored by closing the gap between expectation and economic reality. And the alliances had harked back to the lessons of the Nazi period: The threat of war was perceived to come from large armies attacking across an internationally recognized line of demarcation. Such policies had worked brilliantly in postwar Europe and Japan. There, political institutions had a long tradition. Overcoming the economic dislocations of World War II had the immediate effect of restoring the vitality of political life. And since military danger could come only from overt aggression, security could be defined in terms of clear-cut force levels.
None of these conditions was fulfilled in Indochina. There was no massive attack by regular units across a well-defined boundary but the seeping in of hostile forces across trackless jungles. By some sort of weird bow to legality, the one frontier in Indochina relatively unviolated by Hanoi was the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel established by the Geneva Accords of 1954. To compensate for this uncharacteristic deference to a legal obligation, the North Vietnamese proceeded to bypass the Demilitarized Zone by establishing their supply lines in neutral countries that wanted only to be left alone. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through Laos; sanctuaries were established in Cambodia. By an even weirder turn of events, this logic was accepted by many domestic critics of the war. Whenever we reacted to these gross violations of international law and threats to the security of our forces, by seeking to intercept the totally illegal supply lines that sustained an aggressive and expansionist activity, it was we who were accused of violating the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos. This was the issue in several of the bitterest domestic controversies of the war.
The political situation in Vietnam was equally at variance with our preconceptions. The war concerned not the support of a particular government but the legitimacy of any non-Communist structure. Many Americans tended to judge the government we were defending by our own constitutional practices, which were only marginally relevant to a civil war in a developing country with a totally different historical experience. In the West the nation existed before the state, and indeed gave birth to it. In many developing countries the opposite is true; a state is trying to crystallize a sense of nationhood. In such circumstances government is often the only expression of national identity; political contests become a struggle for total power; there is no historical experience with the concept of loyal opposition, without which democracy cannot flourish. Conversely the attempt to force-feed constitutional government can hazard what little cohesion exists.
So it was in Indochina. South Vietnam, emerging out of a reluctant partition of the country in 1954, struggled for nationhood while a guerrilla assault, organized and run from Hanoi — there is no longer any doubt about this — rent the tenuous fabric of society. The South Vietnamese leadership, essentially brought into office by an American-backed coup in 1963, hung on precariously in the face of an escalating invasion of outside forces; its best officials were systematically assassinated by Communist guerrillas; its economy was ravaged. And while dealing with these challenges, almost unmanageable in their collective impact, the Saigon administration faced relentless pressure for reform from its distant ally, America. Almost miraculously, South Vietnam endured these multiple pressures and even gained in strength — a tribute to the tenacity of its people and a measure of the price they were prepared to pay to avoid being ruled by the brutal totalitarians of Hanoi.
But, inevitably, the process bore no resemblance to the expectations of the liberal American leadership groups that had conceived the initial intervention. Wedded to an inconclusive strategy — or perhaps engaged in an inherently unwinnable conflict — they lost their self-assurance and sense of direction. They first abandoned victory, then faith even in the possibility of serious negotiation toward a reasonable compromise; finally they concluded that the postwar American role of global leadership was itself deeply flawed.
This moral collapse was not a minor matter for our country or for nations around the world that depended upon us. That those who had involved America in Indochina should come to argue for the necessity of settling the war was a tribute to their sense of reality. But their refusal — more of a sense of guilt — to admit that a negotiated settlement required national unity behind a minimum negotiating program turned the extrication from Vietnam into a nightmare. No negotiator, least of all the hard-boiled revolutionaries from Hanoi, will settle so long as he knows that his opposite number will be prevented from sticking to a position by constantly escalating domestic pressures. The myth that the obstacle to a settlement was the short-sightedness, if not worse, of our government and not the implacability of the aggressor was in the end endorsed by the very people who had heretofore sustained our foreign policy. The old foreign policy Establishment thus abandoned its preeminent task, which is to contribute balanced judgment, long-term perspective, and thoughtful analysis to the public discussion of our international responsibility.
As a result of this abdication, the so-called peace movement came to be driven by a relatively tiny group of radicals, whose public support in the country was close to nil. To that most vocal hard core of dissenters, the issue in Vietnam was not the wisdom of a particular American commitment but the validity of American foreign policy in general and indeed of American society. They saw the war as a symptom of an evil, corrupt, militaristic capitalist system. They treated the Viet Cong as a progressive movement, North Vietnam as a put-upon, heroic revolutionary country, and Communism as the wave of the future in Indochina, if not in the entire developing world. They were outraged by our incursion into Cambodia less because of the alleged extension of the war into sanctuaries (from which North Vietnamese had, after all, killed thousands of South Vietnamese and Americans for five years) than because they feared it might lead to success. Concern for the future of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian populations under Communism was contemptuously dismissed as a transparent subterfuge for continuing a war conducted for much more sinister purposes. By the same token, our fear of the decline of American global credibility and its impact on international security was interpreted in radical circles as using the peoples of Indochina as pawns in some overall American strategic design. Indeed, in these terms the decline in America’s world position was welcomed as a contribution to world peace.
To this small but increasingly strident group a victory for Hanoi was not regrettable but morally desirable. It was not to be mitigated by negotiation but made brutally evident by, in effect, surrender. America’s humiliation in that distant enterprise was seen as an object lesson in the immorality of America’s postwar world leadership and as a convenient tool to demoralize the entire American Establishment — business, labor, academia, the media, Congress — which was perceived as an obstacle to the forward march of history. Thus the arrogant tone of moral superiority, and the flaunting of profanity that implied that its objects were beneath contempt.
Throughout the last year of the Johnson Presidency, the style, methods, and rhetoric of opponents of the Vietnam war descended to a level of nastiness from which our public life has yet to recover fully. During the 1968 Presidential campaign, the relentless harassment of so warm and generous a personality as Hubert Humphrey reached a bitterness that he could recall only with tears later on.
All these tendencies were tragically accelerated by the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon was probably the only leader who could disengage from Vietnam without a conservative revolt. Yet his history of partisanship had made him anathema to most of the responsible Democrats. Radical opposition to the war thus fed on and merged with hatred of Richard Nixon on the part of many who had no sympathy for radicalism in general. The virulence of dissent escalated and was not moderated by those who, presumably, stood for values of civilized discourse and civic responsibility. The latter’s yearning to expiate a guilt that was in retrospect vastly exaggerated or nonexistent prolonged the war. It also shattered forever the existing foreign policy Establishment, whose members were ground up between a national policy they dared not support and a radical opposition that would not embrace them — indeed, which was determined to punish them for their past, however hard they might try to disavow it.
This process destroyed any compassion for the complexity of the task the Nixon Administration had inherited. To withdraw fast enough to ease public concerns but slowly enough to give Hanoi an incentive to negotiate, to show flexibility at the conference table while conveying a determination that there was a point beyond which our national honor would not permit us to go, required a firm strategy sustained by an understanding public. The persistent domestic pressures — however different the motives — turned this task into an ordeal. By the end of Nixon’s first term, rational discourse on Vietnam had all but stopped; the issue was fought out by recrimination and vilification in the Congress and the media and by demonstrations and riots on the campuses and periodically in the streets.
The ugliness of the domestic battles was a national tragedy. The issue was posed as to who was “for” or “against” the war — a phony question. Nixon was determined to end our involvement and in fact did so. What he refused to do was to doom millions who had relied upon us to a bloody Communist tyranny. He believed that abject failure would vindicate the neo-isolationist trends at home, demoralize the American people, and make them fearful of foreign responsibilities. He was convinced that an America so weakened would dishearten allies who depended on us and embolden adversaries to undertake new adventures. And he was proved right. The collapse in 1975 not only led to genocidal horrors in Indochina; from Angola to Ethiopia to Iran to Afghanistan, it ushered in a period of American humiliation, an unprecedented Soviet geopolitical offensive all over the globe, and pervasive insecurity, instability, and crisis.
I will not rehearse here once again all the various arguments made in the debate over the war amid the emotion of the time. I am clearly a party to them; their intellectual and moral merit will have to be sorted out by others in the fullness of time. Whatever the conflicting positions, it was a national disaster that the discussion deteriorated by 1972 into an attack on motives, poisoning the public discourse that is the lifeblood of a democratic society. Critics claimed a monopoly on the desire for peace, ridiculing and condemning all other concerns as subterfuges for psychotic commitment to killing for its own sake. The systematic undermining of trust deflected us from what should have been our principal national debate.
In the early 1970s America needed above all a complex understanding of new realities; instead it was offered simple categories of black and white. It had to improve its sense of history; instead it was told by its critics that all frustrations in the world reflected the evil intent of America’s own leaders. The Vietnam debate short-circuited a process of maturing. It represented a flight into nostalgia; it fostered the illusion that what ailed America was a loss of its moral purity and that our difficulties could be set right by a return to simple principles. Whatever our mistakes, our destiny was not that facile. A self-indulgent America opened the floodgates of chaos and exacerbated its internal divisions.
All this bitterness was compounded by Nixon’s response. Nixon became convinced that he was faced with a hostile conspiracy. He was following a bolder policy of American withdrawal than any serious critic had dared offer before he came into office.2 Nixon was incensed by what he saw as the cynicism of prominent Democrats who had taken America into the war and now assuaged their guilt (or sought to preserve their careers) by insistent attacks on a President who was trying to get us out. He was amazed that a callous unconcern for the fate of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian populations under Communist rule paraded under the banner of superior morality. And he was most outraged — and justifiably — at the radicals’ resort to methods of pressure and sabotage at or beyond the borderline of legality: the terrorism of the Weather Underground, firebombings of research facilities at universities, massive theft of classified government documents, unauthorized leaks of sensitive military operations and negotiating positions, incitement of draft resistance and desertion, to name the worst.
There is no excuse for the extralegal methods that went under the name of Watergate. A President cannot justify his own misdeeds by the excesses of his opponents. It is his obligation to raise sights, to set moral standards, to build bridges to his opponents. Nixon did not rise to this act of grace. But no understanding of the period is possible if one overlooks the viciousness, self-righteousness, and occasional brutality of some of Nixon’s enemies.
In truth, the animosities of the President and his opposition fed on each other. And if one lesson of Watergate is the abuse of Presidential power, another is that if a democracy is to function, opposition must be restrained by its own sense of civility and limits, by the abiding values of the nation, and by the knowledge that a blanket assault on institutions and motives can paralyze the nation’s capacity to govern itself.
TWO days after the dramatic weekend that first brought home to me the nature of Watergate, on Tuesday, April 17, Nixon hosted a State dinner at the White House for Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti of Italy, at which Frank Sinatra performed. One of the guests at my table told me that the President had stepped into the press room a few hours before the dinner (it had, in fact, been at 4:42 P.M.) and disclosed that a month earlier he had ordered a new investigation of the Watergate break-in; it had produced “real progress . . . in finding the truth.” Contrary to his previous orders, White House personnel would now be permitted to appear before the Senate Watergate Committee; however, no wrongdoer on the White House staff would be granted immunity from prosecution. Nixon and his political aides clearly had thought that the announcement would have such a minimal impact on foreign policy that they had not informed me of it either before or after. The bearer of the tidings, a devout Nixon supporter, was certain that Nixon’s statement ended Watergate. The culprits had obviously been discovered; the matter could now be left to judicial processes.
In the light of what Len Garment had told me, I doubted that it would prove quite so simple. In reality, the primary significance of the White House statement was to begin Nixon’s mortal struggle with White House Counsel John Dean, the associate who Nixon feared was about to turn against him. Nixon was now throwing down the gauntlet by denying Dean immunity and thus attempting to deprive him of any hope of making a deal with the prosecutor to save his own skin.
The dinner was festive and relaxed. The White House, indeed, was like the Titanic; one part of the ship was flooding but no one else was aware, or affected to be aware, of the danger. The band played on. It was, as it happened, the last “normal” dinner of Nixon’s term. Later I joined Sinatra at a small party that was also attended by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew.
There I received another phone call from the President. He asked me what I thought of his remarks. Thinking it was one of Nixon’s frequent requests for reassurance, I complimented him on his toast at the State dinner. That was not what was on Nixon’s mind. He wanted my reaction to the Watergate announcement. I said that I could not judge its import since I did not know who was involved or what the purpose of the announcement had been. Nixon replied that the refusal to grant immunity would throw “the fear of God into any little boys” who might attempt to escape their responsibility by dumping on associates. Sensing my hesitation, Nixon asked out of the blue whether he should fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman; he was heartbroken, he said, even to have to ask the question. I was dumbfounded; it was one thing for Garment to speculate along these lines; if Nixon himself held that view, he must be in mortal peril. I replied that I did not know enough to answer. However, adopting a formulation from which I never deviated, I ventured one piece of advice: Whatever would have to be done ultimately should be done immediately, to put an end to the slow hemorrhaging.
Agnew came into the room as I was putting down the telephone and asked me what I thought of Nixon’s Watergate statement. I told him, too, that I could not assess its impact. In a somewhat contemptuous, unfeeling manner, Agnew said that Nixon was kidding himself if he thought he could avoid firing Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He would be lucky if he could save himself.
Agnew’s acid comment dramatized, on one level, the ambivalent relationship that almost inevitably grows up between the only two nationally elected officials of our government. At the outset, Vice Presidents are always hailed as partners of the President; the new Chief Executive proclaims that he will avoid the tendency of all his predecessors to reduce the Vice President to — in Nelson Rockefeller’s phrase — “standby equipment.” He is promised a major role in policy formulation and execution. With rare exceptions these expectations have been disappointed, to the growing frustration of the Vice President, whose increasingly visible chagrin sets up a vicious circle by fueling the natural uneasiness and aloofness of the President. Natural because it takes a superhuman degree of self-abnegation to be at ease with a man whose most exhilarating moment is likely to be one’s death — and men with that capacity for self-abnegation do not reach the Presidency.
There is also a serious bureaucratic obstacle to assigning the Vice President major responsibilities. The Vice President is the only member of the Executive Branch not subject to removal by the President. To give him a regular task is to gamble on his permanent willing subordination; in case of policy disagreement, the President’s capacity to enforce discipline upon a Vice President controlling his own segment of the bureaucracy would be circumscribed. Hence, Vice Presidents usually wind up with odd jobs in widely different fields or with clear terminal dates. This prevents the articulation of a clear-cut, coherent policy position or the creation of a bureaucratic base. (As Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller used to joke that he was an avid reader of the obituary pages to see when he might be sent abroad as head of an American funeral delegation.)
To be sure, the Vice President sits in on National Security Council meetings, where the gravest decisions of national policy are considered. But no one in an advisory position can prosper without staff help or the ability to follow up. The Vice President either supports the existing consensus, in which case he enhances the prevailing prejudice as to his irrelevance, or he challenges it, in which case he usually lacks detailed tactical knowledge and he risks becoming a nuisance. On one or two occasions when Agnew took a position challenging Nixon’s, he was excluded from a subsequent meeting even though the President adopted Agnew’s point of view. Nixon just wanted to make sure that everyone understood who was in charge.
Moreover, Presidents are encouraged in this tendency by their White House entourage. These men and women derive their power exclusively from propinquity to the President. They guard this relationship jealously against all outsiders. Their stock in trade is loyalty, an attitude that easy access to the President fosters and that shared experience with White House stresses tends to institutionalize. The President and his aides are beset by the same critics and journalists; they fight the same importuning bureaucracies; they are subject to harassment by the same pressure groups. A community of interests is inevitable, as is a joint front against all those with autonomous sources of loyalty and, worse still, independent ambitions.
While Cabinet members are not infrequently the target of these attitudes, they at least have the solace of having responsibility for many problems the President does not wish to touch because he lacks the staff to do so or because they are too controversial. And Cabinet officers have large bureaucracies of their own, more or less loyal to them. The Vice President has no such safety nets; he is the natural victim of the White House staff’s zeal; any consistent attempt to assert himself runs the risk of reducing his prospects for his paramount ambition: receiving the President’s endorsement for electoral succession.
The relationship between Nixon and Agnew illustrated these maxims; indeed, the personalities of the two men accentuated all the latent tensions. Nixon was solitary and chronically suspicious. He started out thinking of Agnew as a political bungler; always sensitive to being overshadowed, he may well have picked him for that reason. Later he came to see Agnew’s utility as a hired gun, attacking targets not suitable for Presidential assault or venting emotions that Nixon secretly shared but did not dare to articulate. He never considered Agnew up to succeeding him. He once said, only partly facetiously, that Agnew was his insurance policy against assassination.
Agnew in turn was ferociously proud. He suffered his peripheral roles in dignified silence. He deeply resented not having been briefed in advance on my secret trip to China. I found him highly intelligent and much subtler than his public image. But his frustrations turned him inward. And my impression on that evening was that Agnew was not exactly heartbroken over the prospect that his tormentors on the White House staff would now be taken down a peg. Throughout the initial period of Watergate Agnew remained conspicuously aloof. And when his own purgatory started, the White House, including Nixon, reciprocated by dissociating from him.
On April 17 that denouement would still have appeared fantasy. But Agnew’s icy detachment from his chief’s travail brought a premonition of imminent disaster. A Vice President eager to succeed would hardly be so cutting unless convinced that Nixon would not be decisive in the nominating process of 1976.
Another man I consulted was Bryce Harlow. Harlow had served on President Eisenhower’s staff and had been in charge of Congressional relations in the early years of the Nixon White House, before retiring again into private life at the end of 1970. An Oklahoman with a drawling voice, gentle manner, and wary eyes, Harlow had spent his adult life studying the ways of Washington, alternating between participant and observer. There has never been any doubt in my mind that Watergate could not have happened had Nixon been more confiding in Harlow or others of comparable stature. Harlow was a man not of soaring imagination but of encompassing prudence. He knew what the traffic would bear in Washington, but, more important, he understood what restraints must not be tested if democracy is to thrive. He had a deep sense for the Presidency, its power, its majesty, and the awful responsibility it imposes. His fundamental loyalty to a President was bounded by his personal integrity, his reverence for our institutions, and a sense of duty to the nation. With such a philosophy, Bryce found himself pushed to the sidelines by eager young votaries who were crudely assertive when it was not really necessary and craven when their careers were unexpectedly jeopardized.
I gave Harlow a brief account of what I knew and asked him what he thought had happened. “Some damn fool,” drawled Harlow, “walked into the Oval Office and took literally what he heard there.” Harlow mused that something like this had become inevitable. “If it had not been this, it would have been something worse.” The procedures had been too erratic, the atmosphere too paranoid. A housecleaning now might be good for the nation and make Nixon a great President. Thus, even Harlow did not conceive of a threat to Nixon’s Presidency itself, no doubt in part because the destruction of a President with its collapse of executive authority was too staggering to contemplate. Like Garment, he saw in Watergate a means to purify the Administration by getting rid of unsavory elements.
“The Germans”: Haldeman and Ehrlichman
THE media tended to portray H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman as Prussian drill masters implementing with their own sadistic frills malevolent orders from the Oval Office. I was generally contrasted favorably with them; it was believed that they “had it in for me,” as the saying goes. I was awarded the white hat, they the black: I returned telephone calls from journalists; I met many leading critics from the Congress, academia, and the media at dinner parties, and some were my friends; I listened to opposing points of view. Whether my interlocutors considered a dialogue a sign of agreement or whether I misled them by ambiguous statements is impossible to reconstruct at this remove — there was probably a combination of both.
The conventional perception of my relationships in the White House vastly oversimplified everybody’s role. For one thing, Haldeman and Ehrlichman was not a single firm; in some respects they were rivals. On the whole, Ehrlichman’s views were on the liberal side of the spectrum; he was truly interested in substance; he sponsored or supported domestic policies that were humane and progressive. In our internal deliberations he spoke in favor of reducing defense expenditures beyond a point I considered prudent so as to free resources for social programs; several times I appealed his interventions to Nixon. Ehrlichman was shaken by the student protest following the Cambodian incursions. He had three teenage children caught up in the campus upheaval and their travail touched him deeply. But no one could survive the White House without Presidential goodwill, and Nixon’s favor depended on the readiness to fall in with the paranoid cult of the tough guy. The conspiracy of the press, the hostility of the Establishment, the flatulence of the Georgetown set, were permanent features of Nixon’s conversation, which one challenged only at the cost of exclusion from the inner circle.
Rough talk and confrontational tactics did not come naturally to Ehrlichman. Every Presidential Assistant is tempted to purchase greater influence by humoring a President’s moods. Ehrlichman overcompensated; he felt compelled to translate some of Nixon’s musings into action, and as the official in charge of Nixon’s domestic programs he was in the front line of bitter tests of strength. To the mounting protest demonstrations, the massive leaks of documents, and the drift of the dissenters into extralegal activity, Ehrlichman responded with a zeal that was sometimes excessive and a boastfulness that later damaged him severely.
Toward me Ehrlichman showed a mixture of comradely goodwill and testy jealousy. He respected my views though not the assurance with which they were presented. But he would have been superhuman had he not resented the contrast drawn between us by the media. He had been associated with Nixon for too long for the President to tolerate on his part social contacts and attitudes that in my case were treated as a congenital, inherited defect. Torn between his prohibited predilections to conciliate and his political survival, Ehrlichman made a virtue of necessity. He adopted a supercilious manner. Outsiders considered it a mark of arrogance; its real fount was ambivalence.
He had some solace scoring points against me by pretending to be more watchful against Nixon’s enemies than recent recruits from the Ivy League on my staff were and by conducting the investigation of some security leaks so as to reflect on my associates. But these were more in the nature of harassments than serious challenges. Despite occasional tensions, Ehrlichman and I were essentially friendly. I respected his goodwill and tough competence; he admired, as he envied, my prominence.
Haldeman was made of sterner stuff. He had been with Nixon for a decade and knew intimately the complexities and foibles of his master. Though by instinct conservative, he was at bottom uninterested in policy. Genuinely admiring of Nixon, he considered it his paramount duty to smooth out the roller coaster of Nixon’s emotions and to project to the outside world the appearance of steady, calm, unflappable leadership.
Convinced that image defined reality, Haldeman went along with, and frequently encouraged, Nixon’s nearly obsessive belief that all his difficulties were caused by inadequate public relations and that public relations was essentially a technical problem. Nixon never could rid himself of the delusion that only the inadequacy of his media staff kept him from receiving the acclaim he associated with John F. Kennedy (forgetting that after the first year his own approval rating in the polls was consistently higher than that of his martyred predecessor in office). Haldeman tended to confuse policy with procedure and substance with presentation. Much of the time between President and chief of staff was devoted to discussing how to manipulate the press — a quest doomed to futility so long as both rejected the most obvious, and indeed only possible, strategy: conducting a serious, honest, and continuing dialogue with the hated, feared, and secretly envied representatives of the media.
This was all the more remarkable because Nixon and Haldeman seemed to grasp very well that personal contact and credibility made a crucial difference. A shower of memoranda rained down on the hapless White House staff from the Oval Office via Haldeman, detailing the “line” to take with the press and meting out punishment to offending journalists, usually the denial of access to officials (which most of us ignored most of the time). This “line” was occasionally some dig at a political rival; more frequently it consisted of a recital of our leader’s sterling qualities. Since I was considered to have special entrée, ascribed to my membership in the Georgetown set (whose members I had never met before coming to Washington), I was the recipient of a disproportionate number of these missives.
I never understood why the other members of Nixon’s entourage did not strive for the same relationship with the Washington media as I had. Diffidence must have played a large part, a failing of which I am rarely accused. Even though I had never held a formal news conference before being appointed security adviser, I did well and as a result was treated in the White House as if I possessed some special advantage in public relations. Perhaps, so my associates reasoned, it was because of my Ivy League background and my tangential relation in the early Sixties with the Kennedy Administration. (The Kennedy White House, it must be recorded, saw no such gifts in me; I was kept miles away from any representative of the media.) At any rate, I was encouraged to cultivate the media and was then resented when my press relations were better than those of my associates.
Later, Haldeman was accused of exercising a baleful influence on Nixon by isolating him. This was unjust. Nixon’s isolation was self-imposed. He dreaded meeting strangers. He was unable to give direct orders to those who disagreed with him. When he did see a new personality, he avoided any risk of tension by seeming to agree with everything his interlocutor said. The vaunted Haldeman procedures were an effort to compensate for these weaknesses. Access to the President was restricted because even a tightly limited schedule of appointments brought forth constant Presidential complaints. A White House staffer sat in on every meeting with an outsider so as to ensure some follow-up on Presidential promises (and to be aware on occasion of the need to disavow them). As much staff business as possible was conducted by memoranda because Nixon was much more likely to express his real views in writing than face to face.
At the same time, those White House aides with whom he felt secure served frequently as lightning rods upon which Nixon released nervous tension. One would sit for hours listening to Nixon’s musings, throwing an occasional log on the fire, praying for some crisis to bring relief, alert to the opportunity to pass the torch to some unwary aide who wandered in more or less by accident. But no one logged even approximately Haldeman’s hours or listened with similar goodwill. And if Haldeman was eventually destroyed because he carried out the President’s wishes too literally, it is also my impression that many instructions given in the heat of emotion never went further than the yellow pads where Haldeman dutifully noted them as if their execution awaited only his exit from the Oval Office.
Haldeman’s lack of interest in policy had its advantages. One could be certain that he would report scrupulously to the President and not skewer one’s views on his own biases. Indeed, not infrequently I used him as a conduit for views that ran counter to Presidential preferences, because Nixon was less likely to brush off the bearer of unwelcome intelligence than the originator and because Haldeman would do his utmost to see to it that Nixon would consider even subjects distasteful to him (provided one succeeded in convincing Haldeman first that to ignore it would cause some damage to the President). Haldeman was free of personal ambition or at least his ambition was fulfilled in the position he occupied. Precisely because there was nothing more to achieve, he had no need to engage in bureaucratic backbiting.
And yet, there resided in this almost inhuman detachment the seeds of the eventual destruction of the Nixon Administration. Haldeman had no deep experience in national politics; his feel for the propriety, scope, and limits of Presidential prerogative was simply not equal to the role he imposed upon himself. His second mistake was in the manner in which he sought to cope with the erratic vacillations of his client, the President. Haldeman’s chilly discipline here was functional; he sought unquestioning obedience from his staff in part to short-circuit apparently wayward Presidential commands. But there are two ways of achieving discipline: by motivating subordinates so that they want to agree with the principal’s objectives; or by establishing a rigid hierarchy, making it inconceivable that an order is ever challenged because no subordinate is granted the privilege of independent judgment. Haldeman chose the latter course. He selected miniature editions of himself — men and women (mostly men) with no political past, whose loyalty was determined by a chain of command and whose devotion was vouchsafed merely by the opportunity to play a part in great events.
But men who lack a past are unreliable guides to the future. They grow euphoric in authority and panicky at the thought of losing it. During Nixon’s ascendancy, too many staffers were overbearing; they sought surcease from Haldeman’s insatiable demands in the browbeating of their own subordinates, including the established Cabinet departments that were not technically subordinates at all. Thus Haldeman’s lack of direction was aggravated by an even more rudderless group of associates.
The upshot was that the White House staff’s attitude to the President resembled that of an advertising agency — whence indeed most came — to an exclusive, temperamental client. They might differ with some directives; they would seek to mitigate excessive demands insofar as they had standards for gauging them; but at the end of the day they would be judged by their efficiency in carrying out difficult assignments. They were expediters, not balance wheels. And once the machine started skidding, they accelerated its descent over the precipice rather than braking it in time.
Haldeman’s relations with me had ingredients for friction. He was a conservative middle-class Californian, with all the sentiments, suspicions, and secret envy of that breed. He had rarely met and had never needed to deal consistently with a man of my background (though he overestimated how close I really was to the despised Establishment). He had stuck with Nixon after the gubernatorial defeat of 1962 when only a congenital outsider would remain with so unpromising a figure. He genuinely believed in Nixon’s mission. It was bound to be irritating to him to see a newcomer, a member of the Rockefeller team, one who had consistently opposed Nixon, garner so much publicity. But he rarely showed jealousy. The key to our relatively quiescent relationship was that he did not feel competitive with me. He affected tolerant amusement about what he took to be my excessive passion for policy and, in fact, he treated any indication of more than routine interest in substance as excessive. We sometimes clashed when he insisted on his prerogative to screen access to the President in a manner that I considered mindless or when the obsession with public relations was pushed to a point where I thought it harmed policy. But such disagreements were in fact much less frequent than might be expected between chief of staff and national security adviser.
Haldeman’s attitude to me was fundamentally a reflection of Nixon’s. When Haldeman harassed me, I could be sure that it was to carry out some design of the President. For despite his pretense of being above the battle, Nixon did not really mind the tug-of-war that developed between Secretary of State Rogers and me. Usually Haldeman was instructed to side with me but also to make sure that no issue was ever settled conclusively. (And, of course, I had no way of knowing what Rogers was told behind my back.) Nixon, moreover, was convinced that my special talents would flourish best under conditions of personal insecurity; as I have noted, he periodically saw to it that I developed some doubts about his purposes or priorities or about my standing with him.3
But any tensions caused by these practices had largely evaporated in early 1973, once I had decided to resign. In the second half of April 1973, therefore, my feelings toward both Haldeman and Ehrlichman were tinged with sadness. Whatever the occasional frictions, we had been colleagues during turbulent years. I remembered their hopes and, yes, their dedication to service. I knew and liked their wives and their children. I had a better sense than almost anyone of the environment out of which — nearly imperceptibly — had grown the cancer of Watergate. The White House is both a goldfish bowl and an isolation ward; the fish swim in a vessel whose walls are opaque one way. They can be observed if not necessarily understood; they themselves see nothing. Cut off from the outside world, the inhabitants of the White House live by the rules of their internal coexistence or by imagining what the outside world is like. This in the Nixon White House became increasingly at variance with reality until suddenly the incommensurability between the two worlds grew intolerable; the bowl burst and its inhabitants found themselves gasping in a hostile atmosphere.
So Haldeman and Ehrlichman thrashed around at the end of April 1973, not able to gauge the implications of what was happening or even the degree of their own responsibility. As the days went by without exoneration I became more and more convinced that they were finished in their accustomed roles even if they survived in their official positions. The authority of a Presidential Assistant is like that of a trainer in a wild-animal act. His mastery depends on never being challenged; even if he survives an initial assault, he has lost the presumption of his dominance. Every command becomes a struggle; attrition is inevitable. Once Watergate broke and they were thought to be involved, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were doomed to an endless struggle as many who considered themselves abused would now test the limits of their power. And the President would soon tire of the constant contention; he would not want continually to reaffirm his orders to fractious Cabinet secretaries. It was, after all, precisely to spare himself that necessity that he had given so much authority to Haldeman and Ehrlichman in the first place.
As April drew to a close, I was given reason to believe Haldeman and Ehrlichman would not survive at all. In almost every conversation, Nixon asked me in his elliptical manner whether his two closest aides should resign. It was a strange query, since Nixon never told me the reasons for which he was considering separating himself from the associates of a decade. Throughout the Watergate crisis, not once did Nixon tell me his version of events. He maintained in private the same posture he had adopted in public, that every revelation was new to him and that he was forced to deal with the scandal as it unfolded since he had no personal knowledge of its constituent elements.
On April 21, from Key Biscayne, Nixon telephoned to tell me that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were at Camp David over the weekend to reflect on their predicament. They were in great distress. Would I be willing to call them to fortify their morale? I was by now familiar enough with Nixon to suspect that in addition to offering psychological succor, I was expected to urge them into the desired course, all the more so as he told me ominously that he was planning something decisive. He simply had to wait, he said, for the right moment.
Over the next few days, I spoke with Haldeman and Ehrlichman several times. I listened to them in their travail with a sympathy incapable of generating true helpfulness. For no more than the President would his closest aides tell me exactly what had happened. They ruminated on their chances of survival but not on the circumstances that had produced their dilemma. And I am not sure that they really fully understood. What later came to be labeled Watergate was the composite of a series of ad hoc decisions, elliptical conversations, and uncoordinated acts by different individuals, many of whom were competing with each other for Presidential favor and therefore jealously guarding the bits of intelligence they had picked up in or near the Oval Office.
Which of these random events would emerge during the investigation — more important, which actions were legally wrongful — seemed obscure to Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They had not thought of their conduct as a “cover-up” but as a means to protect an elected Administration that still had much left to accomplish from opponents working against the national interest as they conceived it. Or else they were more skillful actors than I think possible. They had no difficulty agreeing with my by-now stereotyped recommendation, that anything bound to happen eventually should be carried out immediately. But clearly they did not believe that resigning was ultimately necessary; hence there was no reason to consider it immediately. They seemed to think that they would have to leave office only if they were criminally liable. I was convinced their survival depended on more rigorous standards. But I knew too little to argue the merits of the case. Nor was it my place to do so; that decision could only be made by the President, much as he sought to avoid it.
The Disintegration of the White House
DAY by day, Watergate grew into bewilderment and frustration for those seeking to keep the government operating and into panic for those directly involved. We had all become passengers in a vehicle careening out of control in a fog; but we had different perceptions. Those who might have taken control were inhibited by ignorance and by a frustrated mixture of pity, loyalty, and horror; they had but brief, blurred glimpses of the landscape. Those who knew the size of the looming precipice were incapacitated by the fear that a halt for safety would result in their being flung aside.
It was in this atmosphere that only ten days after my high hopes at the Federal City Club — now appearing so naive — I mounted the rostrum at the Associated Press Annual Luncheon in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York to make my first major public speech after four years of office. Its purpose was to unveil the Nixon Administration’s new initiative toward the industrial democracies: the so-called Year of Europe. My theme was that, a generation after World War II, the Western Alliance had to articulate a new sense of purpose; military defense remained crucial but no longer seemed a sufficient motivating force. The nations that shared democratic values needed to join in a reaffirmation of common ideals and common goals if we were to maintain our cohesion in a new era of East-West diplomacy, economic and energy problems, and a changing military balance (see Chapter V).
The reception to my speech was friendly, but the question period afterward indicated what we were up against. The audience was preoccupied with matters other than our new initiative: problems with the cease-fire in Vietnam, my personal plans, and Watergate.
I will also discuss Vietnam elsewhere (see Chapter VIII). As for my personal plans, I used the occasion to hint at my preference to leave. But I stressed that I felt a duty to remain until the immediate domestic crisis was surmounted:
I have always believed that I should leave at a moment when some major task had been accomplished and when the transfer of responsibility could occur under conditions that assured continuity, and that made it clear that the position was not held for personal motives entirely, which is always difficult to separate.
Now, at this moment, it is not the time for senior officials of the Administration to talk about their resignations, until the framework of the future becomes clearer, and it depends, of course, also on the President’s conception of what one’s duties are.
I was committed to stay, but for how long I could not guess; privately, I estimated it as some additional months.
The Watergate questions were less easily disposed of. I now thought it probable that Haldeman and Ehrlichman would be forced to resign or inevitable that their roles would be much diminished. But I wanted to preserve to the greatest extent attainable the possibilities of a constructive foreign policy; for that I had to maintain that executive authority was unimpaired. Moreover, I felt pity for men who had been close associates over a long period. All these themes were in my extemporaneous reply:
On the [Watergate] case itself, of course, I know many of the people that you all read about, and, of course, I know them in a different way than you read about them, and it is difficult to avoid a sense of the awfulness of events, the tragedy that has befallen so many people who have, for whatever reason, or are alleged to have done certain things. So without prejudging anything, one should at least ask for compassion.
With respect to foreign policy, a great deal will depend on how foreign countries will assess the degree of authority in this country, the degree of dedication of the public to the objectives of its foreign policy.
I have no question that the President will insist, as he has said publicly, on a full disclosure of the facts. But when that is accomplished and the human tragedies are completed, the country will go on. Then we have to ask ourselves whether we can afford an orgy of recrimination, or whether we should not keep in mind that the United States will be there far longer than any particular crisis, and whether all of us do not then have an obligation to remember that the faith in the country must be maintained, and that the promise of the country should be eternal.
The moment proved as ill chosen for a new foreign policy initiative as for an appeal for compassion. The media reported my reply on Watergate almost to the exclusion of any reference to my carefully prepared speech on the Year of Europe. Part of the fault was organizational. To reduce the bureaucratic backbiting between the White House and the State Department, Nixon had suggested that I not announce the theme of my speech ahead of time. Therefore no briefing was given in advance; as a result, only the New York Times gave it major coverage, hailing my appeal for revitalization of the Alliance. The Washington Post led its news reportage with my answer on Watergate and consigned the Year of Europe to the concluding paragraphs. Some editorial opinion indeed treated my speech as a maneuver to divert attention from Watergate.
An editorial in the Washington Post of April 26 distinguished between compassion and an assignment of blame, which it insisted must take place. It refuted the idea that the authority and prestige of the Presidency abroad as well as at home could be salvaged only by insulating the normal functioning of government from the Watergate scandal. Everything, including the Year of Europe and all foreign policy, was secondary to Nixon’s “revealing the whole truth”:
Richard Nixon can restore what is essential to the nation and to himself by trusting the American people with all the facts. Mr. Nixon is in a terrible predicament at the moment, and nothing that affects him fails to affect the rest of us. We believe the situation can be redeemed. But we also believe that it can be redeemed only by his bending his every effort to win that popular trust which is essential to the functioning of the presidency, and that the only way in which he can win such trust is by pursuing and revealing the whole truth. . . . It represents the only hope he has of regaining public trust and, with it, presidential authority.
The New York Times of the same date questioned even the appropriateness of compassion:
When Mr. Kissinger speaks of “the tragedy that has befallen so many people” involved in Watergate, can he really be insensitive to the tragedy of those who remain without hope for amnesty from this Administration for having broken the law, not in pursuit of political power but in protest against a war they regarded as immoral?
Faith in this country, both at home and abroad, will best be preserved through an unflinching demonstration by the President that a single standard of justice prevails here, with the most powerful as subject to punishment as the weakest — and with the always desirable qualities of compassion and forbearance impartially applied.
Watergate was thus linked with Vietnam, which had indeed spawned it.
If the media thought I was too compassionate toward my colleagues, many in the White House thought I had gone too far in speaking of human tragedies as if they were already accomplished. George Shultz told me that Ehrlichman was of the view that he could maintain his position while Haldeman’s prospects were shaky. Len Garment reported that he had no idea what would happen next nor who was really responsible for what had already been disclosed. Also he had only a most fragmentary notion whence future revelations might descend upon us.
On the weekend of April 28–29, I was in New York on personal matters, mostly to see my future wife, Nancy. On Sunday afternoon, April 29, I received a phone call from Nixon at Camp David. Nearly incoherent with grief, he told me that he had just asked Haldeman and Ehrlichman to resign. Richard Kleindienst, the Attorney General, had also submitted his resignation. John Dean was being fired. The President said he needed me more than ever. He hoped I was abandoning any thought of resignation. The nation must be held together through this crisis.
My attitude toward Nixon had always been ambivalent, compounded of aloofness and respect, of distrust and admiration. I was convinced that he was at the heart of the Watergate scandal even if he did not know all its manifestations. He had set the tone and evoked the attitudes that made it inevitable. And yet there was another side to Nixon that made him a considerable figure and accounts for his surviving all his vicissitudes. I admired the self-discipline by which he wrested a sense of direction from the chaotic forces at war within him; I was touched by the vulnerability of a man who lived out a Walter Mitty dream of toughness that did not come naturally and who resisted his very real streak of gentleness. For all his ambiguities, he had by conspicuous courage seen our nation through one of its great crises. He had inspired and run the risks for a sweeping and creative revision of our foreign policy. He had effected a dramatic breakthrough to China; he had begun to construct a more positive relationship with the Soviet Union. He had attempted to free America from its historical oscillation between over-extension and isolation. His strange mixture of calculation, deviousness, idealism, tenderness, tawdriness, courage, and daring evoked a feeling of protectiveness among those closest to him — all of whom he more or less manipulated, setting one against the other.
It seemed quite natural both that I should speak to him warmly, urging him never to lose sight of the service he had yet to render, and that, having recovered his composure, he would make another of his elliptical sallies, at once a plea and a form of blackmail: “I hope you will help me protect the national security matters now that Ehrlichman is leaving.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. I was baffled but made no response, on the assumption that like so many of his odd comments this did not necessarily have a concrete basis. Later that evening I saw my old friend and mentor Nelson Rockefeller, and mentioned it. What could Nixon have had in mind? “Nothing,” replied Rockefeller, who was willing enough to support the President of the United States but could never bring himself to shake the personal dislike of Nixon developed over a decade and a half of rivalry. “He is trying to spook you.”II
The next morning, Monday, April 30, Haldeman called the senior White House staff to a meeting in his office. In attendance were Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Shultz, Roy Ash (head of the Office of Management and Budget), and me. With great dignity Haldeman said that he and Ehrlichman had decided to resign to enable the President to go on with the tasks that had brought all of us to the White House in the first place. (Neither made any reference to having been requested to do so by Nixon.) Those of us who stayed had to redouble our efforts, he said; we had important goals to reach; the President needed us more than ever. I replied for the others that we knew how much of their lives they had given to service; we would do our best; we wished them well.
That evening, Nixon went on television and, in a distraught presentation, announced the wholesale purge of his Administration. It was not easy to tell from his remarks whether he was concluding an era; it was impossible to believe that this rattled man could be ushering in a new one. His words were self-exculpatory; his demeanor did not convince one of his innocence. It was not the cold recital of available facts some of us had hoped for; but it was not a staunch defense of the record either. It fell between the two stools, defining rather than mitigating disaster. No one watching Nixon’s genuine desperation and anguish could avoid the impression that he was no longer in control of events.
As after every major speech, I called the Residence to offer reassurance. Rose Mary Woods, his fanatically and touchingly loyal secretary, answered. Haldeman had banished her to the periphery so as to gain control of all access to the President; now she was back as one of Nixon’s principal props. The President, she said, was too upset to come to the telephone. She would convey my good wishes to him.
But for me the evening would not end without a last, incongruous touch. The People’s Republic of China was in the process of establishing its Liaison Office in Washington. Weeks earlier, the Chinese advance team had invited me to dinner on April 30 together with other American friends in the Yenching Palace restaurant. The Chinese would not hear of cancellation. They simply moved the starting time to ten o’clock, after the President’s television address was completed.
We met in a festive setting, with the ubiquitous toasts to friendship and cooperation. Our Chinese Communist hosts clearly could not comprehend that a nation might destroy its central authority over the issues so far revealed — or anything comparable. Their principal concern was to get the strange period over with so that we could return to the fundamentals of the US–Chinese relationship. My host, Ambassador Han Xu, proposed an eloquent toast to the crisis that President Nixon had just so courageously transcended. Watergate, he averred, had found its proper conclusion.
For once the subtle Chinese analysis had failed them. Our travail had just begun.
The Transformation of the Nixon Administration
NIXON’S dramatic speech on the evening of April 30 accelerated the disintegration of the Administration. Watergate had begun to turn into a national obsession. No doubt Nixon’s distraught appearance, conveying an impression of both grief and evasion, did not offer the picture of a Chief Executive dominating a crisis. His assertion that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were two of the finest public servants he had known was difficult to reconcile with the decision to let them go; his implication that his closest associates and John Mitchell had kept him uninformed of major events over a period of years did not ring true to some and made him look weak to others. Nixon would probably have been better advised to forgo the speech and simply announce the restructuring of his Administration.
But no change in presentation could have altered the impact of the disclosures that now burst upon the American public: the details of the original Watergate break-in and wiretapping; the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist; the cover-up; the use of governmental investigative agencies to harass political opponents; and the juvenile escapades, such as the so-called enemies list — which in effect really amounted to a list of those not to invite to White House dinners, something that exists tacitly in every administration. The immature second level of the Nixon White House managed to turn this last triviality into another national scandal.
The disintegration of a government that only a few weeks earlier had appeared invulnerable was shocking to observe. The President lived in the stunned lethargy of a man whose nightmares had come true. The constant undercurrent of his life had been the premonition of catastrophe, which seemed to obsess him in direct proportion to his inability to define it and which dominated him especially when things seemed to be going well. Now at what should have been the height of his success it had all really happened; everything was crashing around him. Like a figure in Greek tragedy he was fulfilling his own nature and thus destroying himself. I am convinced that he genuinely believed his version of events, which was essentially that he had been let down by faithless retainers. And there was indeed an incommensurability between his punishment and his intentions. Anyone who knew him realized that the coarse side of his nature was a kind of fantasy in which he acted out his daydreams of how ruthless politicians behaved under stress. He thought he was imitating his predecessors; he had never meant it as a central feature of his Presidency.
In the weeks following Nixon’s April 30 speech, I received many queries from friends, some in hope, others in trepidation, as to when Nixon would launch one of his characteristically vicious counterattacks. But while he occasionally made dark references to doing so, he never considered it seriously. The inchoately expected disaster having finally struck, he seemed unable to do other than endure it, and at the pace set by his critics. He was reluctant to transcend it by putting out the entire truth all at once — because he genuinely did not know it, or had suppressed it in his mind, or knew that he was already technically guilty of obstruction of justice. But he equally resisted entrusting his defense to a lawyer experienced in high-level Washington politics — partly, no doubt, because he was embarrassed to find himself in the position of needing such a lawyer. So he simply endured passively, never sharing his knowledge with anyone, defending himself lackadaisically with evasions and half-truths, going through the motions of governing without the concentration, the attention, or the frenetic bursts of energy that had produced the achievements of his first term.
In the weeks after the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman he appointed John Connally, Melvin Laird, and Bryce Harlow to senior advisory posts on the White House staff. These men, seasoned in the ways of Washington, were supposed to give a sense of professionalism and solidity; they were meant to convey a new, respectable approach to governing. They certainly could have made a major contribution, but Nixon was too shattered to reach out genuinely. He did not institutionalize his government; he withdrew even deeper into his private resentments and terrors. Having invited distinguished leaders to the White House, Nixon could think of nothing for them to do. Without specific assignments they proved of little help. Within months they had all resigned.
In his growing loneliness, what Nixon needed above all was a keeper of the gate, someone to buffer him from the conflict that he now had even less desire to handle directly. This was reflected in the decision to bring in Alexander Haig to replace Haldeman as his chief of staff.
Al Haig and I had been colleagues for over four years. When Nixon had asked me in November 1968 to become Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, I thought it important to have on my National Security Council staff a military assistant whose responsibilities ran to the White House rather than to the Pentagon. Previously there had been a liaison officer from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I proposed to continue that arrangement; but he would necessarily echo the position papers submitted by the Pentagon. What I was looking for, with a war in Vietnam to end, was an officer who belonged to my staff but had the confidence of the military, who could explain the military point of view without being bound by it, and who at the same time would be able to represent White House thinking to the Defense establishment.
It was a delicate assignment. General Earle Wheeler, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was convinced that as a former professor I would be most comfortable with an officer with advanced degrees from world-famous academic institutions. Having taught there, I rated somewhat lower the wisdom evidenced by such degrees; at any rate, I was already reasonably familiar with it. I sought a more rough-cut type, someone with combat experience and therefore familiar with the practical complexities of operational planning. An old mentor, Fritz Kraemer, came up with the name of Alexander M. Haig, Jr., who was then a colonel on the staff of West Point. He was also strongly recommended by friends like Joe Califano and Robert McNamara, under whom he had served at the Pentagon during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. With his endorsement by both conservatives and liberals. I offered Haig the position on the basis of one interview.
Haig soon became indispensable. He disciplined my anarchic tendencies and established coherence and procedure in an NSC staff of talented prima donnas. By the end of the year I had made him formally my deputy. Over the course of Nixon’s first term he acted as my partner, strong in crises, decisive in judgment, skillful in bureaucratic infighting, indefatigable in his labors.
To be sure, nobody survives in the rough-and-tumble of White House politics — especially of the Nixon White House — without a good measure of ruthlessness. I could not help noticing that Haig was implacable in squeezing to the sidelines potential competitors for my attention. He was not averse to restricting the staff’s direct access to me or at least making himself the principal intermediary to the outside world — even if I partly encouraged the practice in order to husband my time to concentrate on the major issues. At the same time, I am sure, he was not above presenting himself to my subordinates as the good guy tempering my demanding, somewhat unbalanced, nature. He worked assiduously at establishing his own personal relationship first with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, then with Nixon. I did not doubt that they considered him more of a loyalist than me. As time went on, I began to wonder whether Haig always resisted Nixon’s version that I was a temperamental genius in need of reining in by stabler personalities; or whether Haig objected to the proposition that he could be helpful to my chief in fulfilling that need, making them partners in tranquilizing me, so to speak.
Yet this is no more than saying that I recognized Haig as formidable. One of the most useful tools of the trade of chiefs of staff is to present unpleasant orders as emanating from an implacable superior who has already been softened to the limit; it was a tactic I used myself in my relationship to Nixon. Nor had I strenuously objected when others had put me in the position of the good guy in the White House. In that sense Haig hoisted me with my own petard.
As for Haig’s relations with Nixon and his entourage, in the context of White House psychology it was not easy to determine the dividing line between going along with the minimum prejudices required for the effective operation of my office and encouraging these prejudices to advance personal ambition; probably the dividing line occasionally became blurred even in Haig’s mind. During the stormy closing phase of the Vietnam negotiations in 1972 and my gradual emergence as a public figure, making my relations with Nixon difficult, Haig drew closer to Nixon — partly out of genuine conviction (he probably would have preferred a purely military outcome), partly as a response to the conflicting pulls of loyalty to his immediate superior (me) and duty to his Com-mander-in-Chief, the President. This caused moments of extreme exasperation in my relationship with Haig and some tense long-distance exchanges. And yet in the end they were always superseded by my admiration for Haig’s integrity, courage, intelligence, and patriotism.
At the beginning of Nixon’s second term, Haig wanted to — and Nixon and I reluctantly agreed that he should — resume his Army career. Too long a period in a staff job, no matter how exalted, could only damage Haig’s future advancement. He was made Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, a four-star rank culminating a spectacularly rapid rise from colonel within four years.
On the evening of May 2, 1973, I received a phone call from Rose Mary Woods. Nixon wanted to bring Haig in as chief of staff, she told me, for a week or two. He was afraid of my reaction; I might resent seeing my former subordinate in a technically superior position. She hoped that when Nixon told me the next morning I would not give him a hard time; I should remember that he was still distraught over the departure of Haldeman and Ehrlichman; he needed bolstering and support. She was, of course (she said), calling on her own without her boss’s knowledge. (The odds were that he was standing beside her, prompting her while she talked.)
It was vintage Nixon: the fear of confrontation; the indirect approach; the acute insight into my probable reaction; and the attempt to soften it through a preposterous charade that would get him over the first hurdle. Anyone familiar with Nixon knew that his need for a chief of staff could not possibly end in a week or two. In the midst of Watergate the need would be greater than ever. I had often witnessed, and occasionally participated in, little games just like this: the sugarcoating of unpalatable decisions, first establishing the principle and then obtaining acquiescence in the measures it inevitably implied.
Nixon was right, as usual, in his psychological estimate of me. It is always difficult to reverse the relationship with a subordinate. And given Haig’s interest in national security matters, there was the potential for rivalry on substance. Yet I realized, too, that the situation had gone far beyond normal bureaucratic rules or White House jockeying for position. If a national catastrophe was to be avoided, coherence had to be restored to the government and especially to its center in the White House. Nixon had depended on Haldeman during his entire first term; he clearly could not function without a strong chief of staff to shield him from the day-to-day management of the bureaucracy and to implement his decisions. Watergate made it impossible to bring in a completely new personality. In any event, no one was so well qualified as Haig, who was familiar with Nixon’s personality, his style of operation, and his psychological needs. I therefore decided to put the best face on the situation and to make the inevitable easy on everybody.
Haig tactfully called on me the next morning. He would not accept the position without my blessing, he said; it was only for a week or so anyway. This was, of course, as much nonsense as Rose Woods’s original proposition. Given his high commitment to service, Haig would not refuse a request by the President no matter how I might feel about it. Nor once established at the White House would he be able to leave after a few days; there could be no rapid change in the necessity that had brought him there. In any case Haig was the only possible choice. I told Haig with conviction that he had to accept, even though it would probably mean the end of his military career. Haig replied that when he had gone on patrol in Vietnam he risked not only his career but his life; he had no right to abandon his Commander-in-Chief in distress. He was shamingly right.
After these preliminaries were over, Nixon called me on the telephone (he was not yet ready to face a direct confrontation). Infinitely ingenious, he had come up with an irresistible argument for Haig’s appointment: It was designed to enhance my influence; it was aimed at, of all people, Agnew. Haig was essential, said the President, to keep Agnew from “trying to step into things. Well, Agnew can’t — we just can’t allow that to happen.” It was mind-boggling to think that a Chief Executive needed a high-powered chief of staff to control a Vice President who had been given little to do, had a skeleton staff, and was in no position to “step into things.” At any rate, Nixon insisted, I should have no concern about my continued paramount role in foreign policy-making: “You and I are going to handle it. I’ve just got to get somebody that can — it’s a curious thing — that can handle that so that you and I can do the other, see.” I replied that the various functions would all sort themselves out in practice. Nixon seemed vastly relieved when I told him that I had urged Haig to accept.
So Haig became White House chief of staff. It was fortunate for the nation. His strength and discipline preserved cohesion in the executive branch and helped the government to traverse Watergate without totally disintegrating. He furnished psychological ballast to a desperate President. He did so without catering to Nixon’s every prejudice; he ensured that Nixon’s preferences and orders would be screened by a governmental structure capable of advising the President in a mature way about the national interest.
Haig’s first act was to abolish arbitrary procedures. He understood that it was no longer possible — as it had never been desirable — to present decisions as emanating from Presidential fiat. He made a major effort to broaden participation in decision-making. By May 18 he reported to a rump session of the Cabinet that the Cabinet members’ status had been raised, the profile of the White House staff lowered. A shake-up of White House personnel was under way. A sincere attempt would be made to improve relations with the Congress.
To be sure, Watergate imposed some of these measures. The fact remains that Haig gave substance to a vague necessity and a sense of direction to a demoralized Administration. No internal reorganization could ever quite catch up with the rate of disintegration impelled by the seemingly endless revelations, crises, and investigations; still, Haig served his country well and honorably in its extremity.
For the next fifteen months Haig and I worked in closest harmony. It did not exclude occasional petty squabbles over status — such as a debate over who got the bedroom closer to the President’s in the Kremlin during Nixon’s visit to Moscow in 1974 — but those were minor. Haig dealt with domestic issues; I was responsible for foreign policy and national security. I made no major recommendations to Nixon without discussing them with Haig; he kept me generally informed of key developments on the domestic side, and especially Watergate, that might affect foreign policy. Together with others we sought to hold the ship of state steady even while its captain was gradually being pushed from the bridge. And noble service was performed by people like George Shultz, Arthur Burns, William Simon, Leonard Garment, James Schlesinger, Anne Armstrong, and others, who considered our national tragedy as a call to duty, affirming through their conduct the continuing and overriding values of our nation.
IT was like living on a volcano: Those of us who sought to keep the government going had no idea when another eruption would start. Almost every meeting with Haig or Garment or the various lawyers ended with the query: Is it all out yet? To which the invariable answer was that no one knew. It was impossible to guess what other obscure staff member had sought to prove his dedication by extralegal or improper activities. For nearly two months the torrent of revelations seemed unending.
Among the most startling was the disclosure that Nixon had been tape-recording all his conversations since early 1971. I learned about it a few weeks after Haig took over as chief of staff. He told me to be careful about anything I said in the Oval Office; it contained a voice-activated tape-recording system.
Only Haldeman and Alexander Butterfield, his deputy who operated the system, seem to have known of its existence. Even Ehrlichman appears to have been kept in the dark. The idea was first suggested when Nixon found in the White House a taping system installed by President Johnson. He had it removed then, but he obviously looked more favorably on it as he found himself engulfed in leaks painting him as the villain of the Administration. (He forgot that Johnson’s system was controlled from the President’s desk and thus permitted selectivity before, during, and, if necessary, after a conversation.) Some taping seems to have taken place also during the Kennedy period.4
Nixon’s tapes were made to be deposited in the Nixon Presidential Library for the use of future researchers. Haldeman has written that Nixon’s motive was to protect himself against associates who might seek to disavow discussions in which they had participated. It was a high price to pay for insurance. Insofar as the Cambodia incursions gave impetus to his decision, I was apparently an unwitting cause as well as target. The purpose was to prevent me from emerging as the “good guy” on decisions in which I had taken part.5 Obviously, Nixon had no idea that his own style of conversation, the degree to which the romantic and the real merged in his mind, would place him in jeopardy — not so much legal as historical. Even men less complex than Nixon might have trouble surviving so pitiless and literal a record as years of transcribed offhand comments or extended conversations separated from context — especially after the witnesses who might explain their real significance have passed from the scene. Since the tapes were activated by sound, the system was beyond the control of even its originator. This was ironically symbolic of a White House mood that had run essentially out of control: an excess of faith in mechanical procedure compounded by a literal-mindedness that, assigned the task of producing a record, did so with a vengeance — in a manner certain eventually to destroy the image Nixon was so passionately cultivating.
Anyone familiar with Nixon’s way of talking could have no doubt he was sitting on a time bomb. His random, elliptical, occasionally emotional manner of conversation was bound to shock, and mislead, the historian. Nixon’s indirect style of operation simply could not be gauged by an outsider. There was no way of telling what Nixon had put forward to test his interlocutor and what he meant to be taken seriously; and no outsider could distinguish a command that was to be followed from an emotional outburst that one was at liberty to ignore — perhaps was even expected to ignore.
How Nixon would have used these tapes, had his Presidency run its normal course, I cannot say. I doubt whether anyone had begun to think about the problem of even transcribing, let alone organizing, seven years of conversation: A psychiatrist friend once told me that he taped his patients until he realized “it takes an hour to listen to an hour.” As for their value for historical research by some indefatigable listeners, it must be doubted. What could anyone uninitiated make objectively of the collection of reflections and interjections, the strange indiscretions mixed with high-minded pronouncements, the observations hardly germane to the issue of the moment but reflecting the prejudices of Nixon’s youth, all choreographed by the only person in the room who knew that the tape system existed and could therefore produce whatever tableau suited his fancy? The significance of every exchange turns on its context and an appreciation of Nixon’s shifting moods and wayward tactics. Remove these and you have but random musings — fascinating, entertaining, perhaps, but irrelevant for the most part as the basis for the President’s actions.
One of Nixon’s favorite maneuvers, for example, was to call a meeting for which everybody’s view except one recalcitrant’s was either known to him or prearranged by him. He would then initially seem to accept the position with which he disagreed and permit himself to be persuaded to his real views by associates, some of whom had been rehearsed in their positions, leaving the potential holdout totally isolated. It took a strong man to maintain his position when the contrary arguments had obviously convinced the President.6
If the President’s own words are a quicksand for researchers, the responses of his interlocutors are hardly solid ground. A Presidential Assistant has to balance the wisdom of scoring a passing point against the risk of losing the President’s backing in his area of responsibility. Presidents, by nature, desire to prevail. But it was especially tempting to fall in with Nixon’s musings because experience had taught that his more extravagant affirmations rarely had operational consequences. No doubt many of us in the inner circle listened in silence to reflections we would have challenged in abstract intellectual debate; we sometimes made a contribution more to meet the needs of the moment — one of which was to be able to depart quickly in good grace — than to stand the test of deferred scrutiny.
After the taping became known, I understood various things in retrospect, both innocent and contrived. For example, I was present at practically every Presidential conversation with a foreign leader, formally as note-taker. In a bizarre memorandum in early 1971 Haldeman instructed the staff not to pay too much attention to substantive details in our records of Presidential conversations; we should concentrate on atmosphere and personal impressions. It was one of the orders I ignored, at least to the extent of making sure a good record existed. I thought it an undue burden for the President to have to dictate his own notes; they would, moreover, be highly unreliable and I said so to Haldeman. He did not enlighten me about the President’s other methods for making a record of substance.
Other, more devious, patterns became clear when I knew about the taping. Many conversations that had made no sense at the time fell into place. I could see occasions where I was set up to prevent my dissociating myself from some course or to get me on record in supporting some complicated design. For example, on the day Nixon had ordered the bombing and mining of North Vietnam, I was called to his study in the Executive Office Building five minutes before the relevant order was to be signed. I was confronted by Haldeman, who listed all the arguments against proceeding, contrary to everything said the previous week. Nixon was silent. I defended the decision, insisted that it was now too late to change it, and rounded on Haldeman for mixing into substance. Nixon thereupon signed the order without comment. The tape will show counterargument by Haldeman, strong advocacy by me, silence by Nixon.7
As Watergate made only too evident, however, no one could possibly prearrange every conversation during every waking hour over a period of years. The spider got entangled in its own web. Even had Watergate not occurred, the tapes would have damaged Nixon’s reputation severely and the more so the longer their release was delayed and the memory of Nixon’s idiosyncrasies faded. Had matters gone as planned — and the tapes trickled out posthumously — Nixon would have managed the extraordinary feat of committing suicide after his own death.
Weirdly enough, I doubt that my new knowledge of the tape system in 1973 changed very much what I said to the President afterward. He was so much in need of succor, so totally alone, our national security depended so much on his functioning, that these goals overrode the knowledge that what was being said would be heard and read by posterity long after its context had been obliterated.
The tapes came to my consciousness again in late June during the week that John Dean, the former White House Counsel, was testifying against Nixon on national television before Senator Sam Ervin’s Watergate Committee. Haig told me that consideration was being given to releasing a tape that contradicted the testimony. He had not listened to any tapes himself. The lawyers, who had apparently been given a few (by whom I never learned), thought they had caught Dean in a serious misstatement. I warned Haig that the release of one exculpatory tape would reveal the system and lead inevitably to the demand that all the tapes be released. It should be done only if Nixon was prepared to take this step. Whether on the basis of my recommendation or because the lawyers found the tape less helpful than they believed at first, I heard nothing further of the proposition.
The next time I thought about the tapes was when their existence was publicly revealed on television by Alex Butterfield before the Ervin Committee on July 16. Bryce Harlow and I chatted about it; he said his wife was jubilant; the foxy Nixon had once again confounded his opponents; the tapes were certain to exonerate him. Harlow and I were less confident. We had no knowledge of what the tapes might reveal with respect to Watergate. But from what we did know, about what happened when our leader was seized by either exaltation or despondency, we suspected that the release of the tapes would prove uniquely damaging.
The day that Alex Butterfield publicly disclosed the existence of the tapes I had dinner with Nelson Rockefeller at the residence he maintained in Washington. He held that the tapes should be destroyed forthwith. They represented a breach of faith with anybody who had entered the Oval Office. Since no one could go through all of them concurrently, they lent themselves to a form of selective blackmail either by Nixon and his associates or by whoever wound up controlling them. But Nixon was at that time in a hospital with pneumonia. He was not soliciting opinions. When he emerged it was too late; legal processes to claim the tapes had started.
In retrospect it is clear that from then on the Nixon Presidency was irredeemable. So long as the testimony of senior aides was in conflict, there was some possibility that once the Senate hearings had concluded, boredom and the impossibility of deciding among the different versions conclusively would cause the crisis to run out of steam. The revelation of the White House taping system ended any such possibility. The initial outrage at the practice of secret taping made it appear that Nixon had committed some unique wrong; the fact that his predecessors had also used taping systems was ignored. But if taping in the Oval Office was not unprecedented, it had never been given such painstaking publicity. Nor, more important, had there ever been an occasion when tapes could determine the potential criminal culpability of a President and his immediate staff. Thenceforth Watergate was transformed into a bitter contest between the President on the one side and the Congressional investigating committees and the Special Prosecutor (appointed in May) on the other, as Nixon sought to keep exclusive control over the tapes by invoking the constitutional principle of the separation of powers.
Whatever the fine points of the legal debate, it necessarily placed Nixon in the position of withholding information that on the face of it could settle the various allegations once and for all. From then on, the issue was no longer the relative credibility of the various witnesses but the President’s attempt to withhold evidence. Regardless of the outcome of that litigation, its very nature — with the implication that there was guilty knowledge to hide — destroyed what was left of Nixon’s moral position. It made him a lame duck six months into a Presidency won by the second largest plurality in American history.
The “Plumbers” and the Wiretaps
WHAT did he know? When did he know it?” These questions by Senator Howard Baker became one of the hallmarks of the televised Watergate hearings conducted by Senator Ervin’s Select Committee. As the investigations and allegations spread, more and more members of the White House staff were being asked to account for a wider and wider range of decisions. The break-in and cover-up at Watergate and the burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist came to be linked with controversial foreign policy decisions that were totally unrelated. The bombing of Cambodia or covert operations in Chile were thrown into the cauldron and pursued in an effort to vindicate a philosophical and political point of view by quasi-judicial proceedings. Inevitably, I as security adviser during the period in question became involved in the controversy. Early in the Watergate ordeal, Nixon’s enemies had a vested interest in focusing all attention on him and in leaving those conducting foreign policy out of the general assault. As Nixon weakened, even more after he left office, the few survivors of the debacle became the targets for those drawing emotional sustenance from Watergate. That small minority feeding on its resentments sometimes seemed to imply that there had been no President making decisions, only a security adviser.
I shall deal with Cambodia and Chile elsewhere. I knew nothing of the Watergate break-in, or the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The area of activity that critics have emphasized is the effort to protect national security information. For the sake of a complete record I shall deal with it here.
The Office of the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs must self-evidently be concerned with safeguarding military and diplomatic secrets. A nation that cannot be trusted to maintain the confidentiality of sensitive exchanges loses the ability to conduct diplomacy. It will be crippled in negotiations; it will be deprived of crucial information. If every exploratory contact immediately becomes public before even the reaction of the other side can be ascertained, the frank communications so necessary to clarify positions cannot take place. Diplomacy becomes trench warfare. If internal deliberations are leaked, foreign governments gain an advantage and candid advice to the President by his colleagues is inhibited.
No doubt administrations tend to confuse what is embarrassing politically with what is essential for national security — the Nixon Administration perhaps more than most. Fairness dictates acknowledgment, however, that few administrations since the Civil War faced a more bitter assault on their purposes, a more systematic attempt to thwart their policies by civil disobedience, or a more widely encouraged effort to sabotage legitimate and considered policies by tendentious leaks of classified information in the middle of a war.
As security adviser I thought it my duty to help stanch these leaks. We had to demonstrate to the world, to friends as well as adversaries, that we could conduct a serious foreign policy even in the midst of bitter controversy; that we were worthy of confidence and capable of guarding the secrets of others. If our government remained passive when stolen documents became media currency, confidence and the ability to negotiate would be undermined.
The issue became particularly acute in June 1971 when 7,000 pages of confidential files on Indochina from the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies — the so-called Pentagon Papers — were leaked to the press. None of these documents was embarrassing to the Nixon Administration. They could have been used to support the proposition that we had inherited a mess, and some in the Nixon White House urged that we exploit them in this way. Indeed, at the beginning I thought that our own people had leaked the documents for precisely that purpose. When I learned of their publication, I spoke to Haig from California demanding that the culprit be severely punished.
But from the beginning Nixon thought it improper to place the blame for the Vietnam war on his predecessors. In his view he owed it both to those who had given years to that struggle, and to the families of the dead, not to discredit their sacrifice as the error of one President. He was rewarded for this generosity by seeing many of those who had made the decisions to send troops encourage the civil disobedience that so complicated the efforts to extricate them. Thus, when the Pentagon Papers became public, Nixon was consistent. He rejected a partisan response. He took the view that the failure to resist such massive, and illegal, disclosures of classified information would open the floodgates, undermining the processes of government and the confidence of other nations. Nor was his a purely theoretical concern. We were at that very moment on the eve of my secret trip to Peking; we were engaged in private talks with Hanoi that we thought — incorrectly, as it turned out — were close to a breakthrough; and we were exploring a possible summit with Moscow, together with a whole host of sensitive negotiations from a Berlin settlement to SALT. All these efforts would be jeopardized if the impression grew that our government was on the run and its discipline was disintegrating. And it was obvious that the motive of both the theft and the publication of the Pentagon Papers was political warfare to force us to accept terms on Vietnam that we considered dishonorable.
I shared Nixon’s views; I almost certainly reinforced them. I believed then, and do now, that our system of government will lose all coherence if each President uses his control over the process of declassification to smear his predecessors, or if he treats the defense of secret documents as a question of partisan expediency. I certainly felt strongly that the executive branch had to be perceived as resisting such a massive breach of trust. I was aware of the legal steps to attempt to enjoin publication in the courts; I was not formally consulted about them but I considered it the correct decision.
But until I read about it in the newspapers, I knew nothing of the White House “Plumbers unit” burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the admitted perpetrator of the Pentagon Papers theft. The break-in was sordid, puerile, and self-defeating: It aborted the criminal trial of the individual who flaunted his defiance of the laws against such unauthorized disclosures. I have difficulty to this day understanding the rationale for the break-in; had the psychiatrist’s documents proved Ellsberg unstable it would have helped his defense rather than the government’s cause. But if it was stupid practically, it was inexcusable on moral grounds; a White House-sponsored burglary conducted with no color of law enforcement authority cannot be anything but a disgrace.
The “Plumbers unit” — so called because its job was to stop leaks — was part of John Ehrlichman’s office. As with several other aspects of Watergate — the enemies list, for example — the infantile nomenclature did more than the substance of the activities to raise the presumption of sinister purpose. In itself there was nothing startling about assigning two staff members to look into leaks of classified documents. The need for it appears to have been compounded in Nixon’s mind by his growing distrust of J. Edgar Hoover, then the Director of the FBI. By 1971 Nixon had become convinced that Hoover would conduct investigations assigned to him capriciously, stopping at nothing to destroy individuals who had incurred his displeasure or jarred some personal prejudice, going easy on suspects where there was a personal link. Nixon believed that Hoover’s friendship with Ellsberg’s father-in-law would prevent a serious investigation of the Pentagon Papers theft. Moreover, Hoover was quite capable, Nixon thought, of using the knowledge he acquired as part of his investigations to blackmail the President. Nixon was determined to get rid of Hoover at the earliest opportunity after the 1972 election and he wanted to supply no hostages that might impede this process.III
What was striking about the “Plumbers” was not their existence but that the assignment should have been given to two such clean-cut, middle-class young men who had no investigative training whatever. Egil Krogh and David R. Young looked like advertisements of the decent, idealistic young American. And fundamentally that is what they were. I barely knew Krogh, but had brought David Young to Washington after having made his acquaintance in Nelson Rockefeller’s office. He became my personal assistant because I wanted near me somebody who I considered had ability, high moral standards, and dedication. The appointment did not work out because Young ran afoul of the redoubtable Haig, who carefully protected his access to me, and because Young was overqualified for the kind of work the position required. In January 1971 Young was shifted from my immediate office to a make-work job of research in the White House Situation Room. He was rightly dissatisfied with this assignment and happy when Ehrlichman hired him in July 1971, while I was on the secret trip to China. Upon my return the job was presented to me as — and indeed it was, at first — an interagency review of the declassification system. Ehrlichman’s hiring of Young was not uninfluenced by the petty jealousies of the White House staff; he lost no opportunity to rub it in that he knew how to use talented men better than I. I, in turn, was displeased that Ehrlichman had recruited one of my staff members without consulting me and while I was out of the country. From this assignment, or as part of it — I never knew which — David Young found his way to the “Plumbers.”
The essentially pointless question of whether “I knew about the Plumbers” became another controversy in the Kafkaesque atmosphere of Watergate. Unbelievable as it may appear to the outsider, it is difficult to reconstruct what others in a large bureaucracy thought one knew. I was, of course, fully aware that Ehrlichman’s office had responsibility for investigating security leaks, though the details were carefully kept from me except when they affected my office directly. I did not realize, or bother to inform myself, that a special unit existed to investigate security leaks and that its members essentially had no other duties. I assumed instead that staff members were assigned to conduct these investigations on an ad hoc basis, including Krogh and Young, though it is quite possible that Krogh and Young thought I knew that theirs was a full-time mission all along. But even had I known this, I would not have found it improper that the White House sought to protect its classified information by an investigative unit, so long as it operated within the law. Nor do I think to this day that the “Plumbers unit” — apart from the burglary — was illegal or improper given the context of the time.IV
Another episode, and one in which I did play a part, was the installation of seventeen wiretaps on individuals between May 1969 and February 1971. I reported on the wiretapping in my first volume,8 but I return to it here because it became known in 1973. The mysterious “national security matters” that Nixon had spoken of the night before Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned turned out to be the wiretap records, which had been stored (unknown to me) in Ehrlichman’s safe, were confiscated by the FBI when the latter resigned, and soon began to leak out. The wiretapping became a major controversy in 1973, and again in 1974. It was linked by some to Watergate to prove that the Nixon Administration had a pervasive inclination to unlawful behavior.
On this issue hypocrisy is rampant. The myth has been fostered that electronic surveillance was an invention of the Nixon Administration. Of course, that is absurd. Wiretaps may be unpalatable, but they are as ubiquitous as the telephone and almost as old. All major West European democracies — including Britain, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany — use wiretaps for investigative and intelligence purposes on a scale dwarfing the activities of the Nixon Administration. But that is only the beginning of the double standard. Wiretapping by past Presidents of both political parties seems to have been more widespread, with fewer safeguards and looser standards than in Nixon’s relatively small number of cases so cherished by his enemies. That is what law enforcement officials indicated when Nixon assumed the Presidency and there is voluminous published evidence to the same effect: Franklin Roosevelt seems to have used wiretaps to monitor the activities of White House staff aides, isolationist leaders, political opponents, and journalists; the hoary practice apparently continued with vigor through all successor administrations until Nixon came into office.9 Moreover, the wiretapping for national security purposes in 1969–1971 clearly complied with the administrative and legal procedures in effect at the time; judicial warrants for them were required only after a Supreme Court decision of 1972.10
That wiretapping is distasteful is unquestionable. But so is the willful and unauthorized disclosure of military and diplomatic secrets in the middle of a war. Those responsible for national security in early 1969 were warned by their predecessors — Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson, in particular — that a dangerous practice was growing in the bureaucracy: Some who disagreed with national policy felt free to try to sabotage it by leaking classified information in clear violation of the law. We found the warning borne out as negotiating positions, military operations, and internal deliberations cascaded into the media. The media took the position that they had no responsibility to the country but to print or broadcast. It was up to the Administration to keep its own secrets — which is precisely what it attempted to do.
By the spring of 1969 Nixon became convinced that the leaks of military operations and sensitive negotiations were jeopardizing American lives. He consulted Attorney General John Mitchell and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at a meeting on April 25, a portion of which I attended. Hoover recommended the institution of wiretaps, which he pointed out had been used in all previous administrations at least since FDR’s for these and other much less justifiable purposes. The Attorney General affirmed their legality. Nixon ordered them implemented on the basis of three categories: officials who had access to the classified information that had been leaked; officials in sensitive positions who had adverse information in their security files; and individuals whose possible involvement emerged from the FBI investigations. Later, Nixon courageously assumed full responsibility for the decision in a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 12, 1974:
I wish to affirm categorically that Secretary Kissinger and others involved in various aspects of this investigation were operating under my specific authority and were carrying out my express orders.
Remarkably, this did not still the semantic contortions that accused me of “initiating” or “authorizing” or “ordering” the wiretaps. Given the somewhat haphazard bookkeeping — only Hoover kept records and he was a master at protecting himself11 — there is no clear-cut documentary record. But a little common sense is in order. It would have been unthinkable for a brand-new recruit to the Nixon entourage, widely distrusted for his liberal associates and with foreign policy responsibilities only, pulling off in his third month in office the initiative for and institution of a law enforcement program in the exclusive jurisdiction of such heavyweights as John Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover.
The truth is simpler. I agreed strongly with Nixon that something had to be done to stem the leaks; Mitchell and Hoover recommended the program; Nixon ordered it; my office implemented the part of identifying to the FBI persons we knew to come under the first of the three criteria established by Nixon: that is, persons with access to the leaked information. In each case, the FBI requested authority from the Attorney General to wiretap these persons. The FBI sporadically sent to my office brief summaries, averaging about a page in length, of conversations that it considered to represent discussions of secret military or foreign policy matters.
Eventually under this program, wiretaps were established by the FBI on seventeen officials and newsmen. My office did not supply all the names nor was it aware of every wiretap.V (If someone was tapped but no conversation touched on military or foreign affairs, he would not be the subject of reports and I and my office would have no way of knowing about the tap. There was no opportunity, and even less desire, to spend time pruriently reading over transcripts of personal conversations.) The short summary reports of conversations touching on what the FBI considered national security matters were sent to my office, the President’s, and Haldeman’s for a year. In May 1970, a year after the first tap, Nixon ordered that my office be dropped from the distribution; I no longer saw any reports. Thereafter Haldeman was apparently the sole recipient until the whole program was discontinued in February 1971.
In reflecting about the subject, I cannot add a great deal to what I have written in my first volume:
. . . I went along with what I had no reason to doubt was legal and established practice in these circumstances, pursued, so we were told, with greater energy and fewer safeguards in previous administrations. The motive, which I strongly shared, was to prevent the jeopardizing of American and South Vietnamese lives by individuals (never discovered) who disclosed military information entrusted to them in order to undermine policies decided upon after prayerful consideration and in our view justified both in law and in the national interest. I believe now that the more stringent safeguards applied to national security wiretapping since that time reflect an even more fundamental national interest — but this in no way alters my view of the immorality of those who, in their contempt for their trust, attempted to sabotage national policies and risked American lives.12
In retrospect it is also clear to me that while electronic surveillance is a widely used method of investigation in democracies, the wiretapping of one’s associates presents an especially painful human problem. I was never at ease about it; it is the part of my public service about which I am most ambivalent. At the time, I simply preferred it to the alternative, which was to separate from their posts those who were suspected of unauthorized disclosures of information. No doubt Nixon and his inner circle savored the notion that some colleagues of the Harvard outsider and Rockefeller associate were suspected leakers. And some officials of the FBI used the opportunity to vindicate their judgment in cases where their reservations about security clearances for my staff had been ignored. For these reasons I may well have subconsciously leaned over backward in resolving my ambivalence about the program. It does not change the fundamental fact that, as far as I knew, the only motive was to protect classified information against unauthorized disclosure in the middle of a complicated war. I had no reason to challenge the claim of the Attorney General that the program was legal and proper. Still, I want to express my regret at the anguish that may have been caused to any individual by a procedure that has since been modified by court decision.
Having said that, I feel entitled to record my dismay at the harassment in lawsuits and print ever since by some who knew very well that I was torn between doing my duty as I saw it and sparing them personally. I even warned some of them about the suspicions of my superiors and cautioned them that they were under scrutiny. By the same token I am grateful to those who were tapped but have remained or become close friends, reconciling their sense of grievance with understanding of the practices, motives, and circumstances of the time.
MY predominant concern during Watergate was not the investigations that formed the headlines of the day. It was to sustain the credibility of the United States as a major power. We were tragically back to the domestic disunity of the first term. While this time the national trauma had not grown out of foreign crisis — Vietnam — it would nevertheless affect our international position profoundly. We could — and did — take diplomatic initiatives; we could — and did — utter fierce warnings against threats to our security. But the authority to implement them was beginning to seep away for reasons quite beyond the reach of those conducting foreign policy, in a purgatory in which there were no victors, only victims.
For a while, the real cost of Watergate to the conduct of foreign policy was not apparent. Patriotism and a sense of the awfulness of events induced many traditional critics to suspend their assaults. As an individual I led a charmed life; I became the focal point of a degree of support unprecedented for a nonelected official. It was as if the public and Congress felt the national peril instinctively and created a surrogate center around which the national purpose could rally. But that was a pale substitute for the real thing and it evaporated progressively.
Tawdry revelation was matched by a vile animus. A journalist not known for his friendship to Nixon called me to say he was shocked by the “bloodlust” surfacing among many of his friends: All they seemed to be able to think of was “get him, get him, get him. As if they were gladiators that wanted to kill.” William Safire tells of a prominent editor who insisted to him, around this time in 1973, that a “bloodletting” was absolutely necessary.13
The symptoms of weakening authority were everywhere. By May 10, 1973, we were receiving reports that Chinese officials were discreetly asking visitors about the extent of the damage to Nixon’s authority. They seemed to think that “organized groups” in the United States, determined to jettison the President’s foreign policy, were orchestrating the opposition.
The same queries were put to me in the Soviet Union, where I spent May 4 to May 9 to prepare for Brezhnev’s June visit to the United States. At first the Soviet leaders seemed to treat Watergate as a passing phenomenon. But as the revelations began to accumulate and the investigations went on and on, one began to notice efforts to dissociate Brezhnev from Nixon. In early May, Brezhnev told me that he intended to bring his wife and children to America. On June 12, less than a week before his arrival, we were suddenly informed that his wife could not come: “[T]he doctors are flatly against that. As for the daughter and the son, they have had their own compelling reasons preventing them from making such a trip now.” A stop by Brezhnev in Houston was also canceled without explanation or consultation. The impression that Watergate was a key factor in Soviet thinking became unavoidable when the same message explained that Brezhnev was going with Nixon to San Clemente against the judgment of his doctors because
if somebody speculates that my suggestion not to fly to California is somehow connected with the internal events in the United States, this is absolutely not true, Mr. President. There is no basis for such an interpretation. The President knows full well that from the outset we have unhesitatingly followed a consistent line in relations with him and our respect and my personal respect has not diminished a bit.
This apparent token of solicitude could equally plausibly be explained as a heavy-handed Soviet attempt to remind the President of his weakened position. In either case it was profoundly demeaning to think that the President required an assurance of continued personal esteem from the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The erosion of executive authority affected not only adversaries; it blighted as well relations with our friends. West German Ambassador Berndt von Staden told me that the cynical West German press coverage of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s visit in early May was undoubtedly caused by its coincidence with the speech announcing the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. In my June 8 meeting with French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert, he insinuated that the purpose of the Year of Europe was to ease our domestic situation; it forced me to remind him that it had all been planned before Watergate (as Jobert knew very well from a conversation I had had with President Georges Pompidou in December 1972). The subject came up again when I met with the allied representatives to the North Atlantic Council in San Clemente on June 30 (they were touring the United States); with the Italian Ambassador on July 24; and on the visits of German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel and British Cabinet Secretary Burke Trend in July — always politely, even compassionately. But the policy of a great power is sustained by respect, not compassion.
On August 4 Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, a man of singular intelligence and judgment and a true friend of the United States, interrupted a meeting of Commonwealth heads of government in Ottawa to fly to New York for a private meeting with me at Kennedy Airport. His sole purpose was to have the opportunity to judge the impact of Watergate on the foreign policy of the United States. “You are the anchor of the whole non-Communist world,” he said nearly in despair, “and because of righteous indignation this anchor is slithering in the mud.” His fear was that if Nixon was overthrown, for whatever reason, the strong foreign policy that Nixon represented would also be undermined. In 1976, a new President would be elected who saw his election as vindication of the antiwar, neo-isolationist position. This must not happen: “My survival depends on it,” he said.
As so often before, Lee Kuan Yew was prescient. Friendly countries needed then, and still need, a strong Presidency for their security; even adversaries are more comfortable with a predictable, coherent America. Against my premonitions, I was duty-bound to reassure my old friend from Singapore. We would maintain the nation’s strength and purpose, I said; we would surely get through this crisis as we had overcome so many others. I asserted that the policy of our successors, whoever they might be, would maintain a strong America. I do not know whether the perceptive Lee Kuan Yew believed me; I tend to doubt it. I have been too embarrassed to ask him.
In mid-1974, the distinguished columnist of the Washington Post, Chalmers Roberts, wrote perceptively in Foreign Affairs:
Foreign policy is made both by commission and omission. It is affected by mood and nuance, by judgments of strengths and weaknesses, by one government’s measure of another’s will as well as its ability to act, by one national leader’s perception of a rival or friendly leader’s political standing in his own country and its effect on both national power and policies.14
That was the issue precisely. With every passing day Watergate was circumscribing our freedom of action. We were losing the ability to make credible commitments, for we could no longer guarantee Congressional approval. At the same time, we had to be careful to avoid confrontations for fear of being unable to sustain them in the miasma of domestic suspicion. (When we went on alert at the end of the Mideast war in October 1973, I was asked at a press conference whether it was a Watergate maneuver.) Deprived of both the carrot and the stick, we could only watch with impatient frustration as first Hanoi and then Moscow began to exploit our discomfiture.
For better or worse it fell increasingly to my office to hold foreign policy together. There was now an entirely different atmosphere in the White House from that in the first term. Gone were most of the arrogant young men of the Haldeman era, cockily confident that all could be planned and every problem would yield to procedure. Only Ronald Ziegler remained, as head of the press office, carrying out an impossible task with loyalty and dedication. The White House staff, in any event, no longer had the authority of a strong President or the self-assurance of participating in a great cause. Senior members of the White House had to establish their right from case to case by performance, conviction, and the ability to appeal to a sense of the national interest in excruciatingly difficult circumstances, of which the most serious was the inability to articulate the extent of our peril.
At every press conference I was asked about the impact of Watergate on foreign policy. I consistently denied any relationship. Though everyone knew it to be untrue, only a show of imperviousness would enable us to salvage anything. A great power is given no quarter because it has trouble at home. We could surmount our perils, if at all, only by demonstrating self-confidence and continuing to insist that we would defend the national interest against all obstacles, foreign and domestic.
But I was filled with foreboding. The country seemed in a “suicidal mood,” I said to one friend in May 1973, and it was bound to erode our world position: “Four or five years of amassing capital in nickels and dimes is being squandered in thousand dollar bills.” To another friend in July I confided: “At no crisis in the last fifteen years did I think the country was in danger. But I genuinely now believe that we could suffer irreparable damage.” And later:
[T]he difference in any effort you have ever known as between greatness and mediocrity is a nuance. You can’t describe it. And it took us two years when no one understood what we were doing to get it. One success created the necessity of the other. When it unravels it will go the same way. For two years you won’t see anything, and then you start pulling the threads out. I can go to the Hill and say, gentlemen, here are the dangers. You will have a Mideast war if this keeps up.
This is more or less what happened, though self-pity was no help. I could not go to the Congress with a warning because I would have been at a loss to recommend a different course of action. The Senate hearings were theatrical and procedurally unfair; there was no opportunity to cross-examine, no advance information of charges. But the rot it exposed was real enough. The essence of the problem lay within the Administration, not with those who were exposing it, however self-righteously. Once Watergate erupted, it was impossible to arrest its course. Many old-line opponents of Nixon understood very well what was happening to their country’s prestige and were horror-struck. The best they could do was to ease the task of those few in authority trying to steer the wreck.
In this manner I, a foreign-born American, wound up in the extraordinary position of holding together our foreign policy and reassuring our public. It had nothing to do with merit; it was evoked by a national instinct for self-preservation. While I had not discouraged the public attention in the first term by which I was made the good guy, this new and higher responsibility was too elemental, too awe-inspiring, to be consciously sought. The responsibility that seemed to devolve upon me had to be used to foster the impression of continued American strength, resolve, and indeed active involvement in world affairs, to convey the conviction that amidst all our trials we remained masters of our fate.
I would not have chosen the role, and I surprised myself by not feeling up to it, though I tried hard not to show it. But all survivors of the debacle had an inescapable duty to contribute what they could to a sense of national purpose, and I did my best. It imposed a style of diplomacy leaning toward the spectacular; a show of driving self-assurance that would cause potential adversaries to recoil from a challenge. Some of it no doubt reflected vanity; much was conscious decision growing out of awed reflection. We needed a visible, if necessary theatrical, affirmation that America would survive its anguish and still build a better world. It was a measure of the straits in which Nixon found himself that he accepted this state of affairs; it was a tribute to his tenacity and patriotism that he did so with good grace.
Yet the political prerequisite for getting through this period was that decisions be seen to reflect a functioning Presidency. Nixon no longer had the margin of maneuver or the personnel for the intricate minuets with which he had managed affairs in the first term. Both he and I had been reduced to fundamentals. He governed by more conventional procedures. And I worked at holding together a national consensus on foreign policy. The rambling talks between us became more reflective just as the taping system stopped and, in a curious way, less anxious and frenetic; when the worst had already happened, only principles remained.
Increasingly, I sought bipartisan Congressional support. While it proved impossible on some neuralgic issues such as Indochina or Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, there was more unity on foreign policy than in any other area. It was as if the Congressional leaders too had become horrified by the tidal wave that was carrying the country forward, threatening to engulf the just and the unjust alike.
By holding foreign policy together I no doubt eased the consciences of some of Nixon’s more implacable adversaries. But there was no choice. And in the final analysis Nixon’s fate was ordained once the White House staff began to fall apart and to turn on him. From that point the duty to the nation was to preserve its security and credibility by creating a facade of unity and purposefulness. The edge of a precipice leaves scope for only one imperative: to obtain some maneuvering room.
So it fell in part to me, in part to Haig, and to both our staffs, to bolster our wounded President whose fortitude compelled respect and whose suffering evoked a curious warmth. For the worst punishment that befell Nixon was the knowledge that in the final analysis he had done it all to himself. And in his extremity he acted with high purpose in the field of foreign policy; he seemed driven by the consciousness that even if his Presidency could not be saved, the nation must be.
I. I had published an article in the January 1969 Foreign Affairs with my ideas on the subject, written before I was appointed to be Nixon’s national security adviser. After criticizing the Johnson Administration’s strategy, I suggested a two-track approach: The United States and North Vietnamese should negotiate on the military issues (mutual withdrawal, cease-fire, and return of prisoners of war), while the South Vietnamese parties settled the political problems among themselves.1
II. The next morning it became apparent that Nixon had been talking about the wiretap records. John Ehrlichman hinted to me that he had some “national security” records to turn over to me. I refused, and called Attorney General–Designate Elliot Richardson and suggested that he take custody of them.
III. Hoover died in early May 1972.
IV. The “Plumbers” issue came up periodically afterward. See Chapters XVIII and XXIV.
V. Of the seventeen, only six were the subject of reports that were ever sent to my office. Three names (I learned later) were suggested by Haldeman’s office, not mine. Of the names listed in the FBI memoranda as “requested” by Colonel Haig or myself, four or five were in fact specifically urged on Nixon by Hoover in the April 25 meeting (including three members of my staff), and additional names came up in the course of the surveillance of others and were called to our attention by the FBI. Another four seem to have originated with Nixon.