Read After the Tall Timber Online
Authors: RENATA ADLER
As for why Nixon would submit to the Judiciary Committee doctored transcripts of tapes the staff already had, that nearly worked. The White House released its thick book of doctored transcripts on April 30, 1974. The regular staff, at the time, was in such a daze of fairness that it simply could not find systematic discrepancies between the White House version and the true version of eight conversations that overlapped. When the EOB tapes turned out to be mostly garble, interrupted by hissing, buzzing, and tapping noises, Doar considered abandoning this form of evidence. The lore-manufacturing apparatus, at this point, introduces a blind lady, with miraculously sensitive ears. There was no blind lady. A blind man who listened to the EOB tapes couldn’t understand them either. A member of Doar’s small group insisted, threatening to resign over the question, that Doar permit him and a tape expert to re-record from originals at the White House, and later (when White House Attorney Fred Buzhardt withdrew access to originals) from the tapes in Judge Sirica’s chambers. The tape expert and the member of the group who had threatened to resign found two others to “go into the mud,” as they put it, for hundreds of hours, filling out each transcript, word by word. The rest of the small group initiated work on the discrepancies—weeks after the White House transcripts were released.
The grand jury had based its presentment, mainly, on the tape of the March 21, 1973, conversation in the Oval Office between the President and John Dean. St. Clair directed his whole case, such as it was, toward showing that the President had not unequivocally authorized the payment of hush money on that day. But the “I don’t give a shit . . . I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else . . . save the plan” conversation, which persuaded Republican congressmen Thomas Railsback and Robert McClory to vote for impeachment, took place on March 22, 1973, in the EOB. It was deleted from the White House transcripts and unintelligible on the Special Prosecutor’s. The grand jury never heard it. It is even possible that nobody at the White House ever heard it, that it was always mud. Barely possible. The recopying had just reached the tape of March 22, 1973, when Buzhardt cut off access to the tapes.
In this context, too, there is a particular point about the transcript of June 23, 1972—the tape that was supposed so profoundly to have shocked the President’s defenders that it obliged them to persuade him to resign. The few, very few, Nixon associates who have not tried since his resignation to save themselves at his expense claim that both Buzhardt and St. Clair had read in May this transcript which so astounded them in July. Buzhardt has said that he knew all was lost when, in late July 1973, he listened for the first time to the tape of June 23, 1972, and heard the incriminating word “Gemstone.” The inquiry’s tape expert says it took months for him to be able to decipher that word. In any case, it is certain that both Buzhardt and St. Clair were familiar with the contents of the tape before the Judiciary Committee voted, and did not trouble to let any of the President’s defenders on the committee know. Months later, during the trial of
U.S. v. Mitchell, et al.
, it became clear that this transcript also had been doctored; neither of Nixon’s lawyers had called attention to those excisions in July when they had listened to the tape. When one recalls that the President, in the statement with which he released the transcript, made a special point of admitting that he had concealed it from his attorneys—when one realizes that the worst strangler, dope-pusher, child-molester, finds it unnecessary in adversity to apologize to his own counsel—it seems possible that in this little episode the President was framed. St. Clair felt that, before the case reached the floor of the House, he ought to show Congressman Wiggins, the President’s major defender on the committee, that transcript of June 23, 1972. Having received what must have been a considerable shock when Wiggins, enraged, told him the transcript meant the case was lost (and that if the White House did not at once make the transcript public, he, Wiggins, would), St. Clair must have returned to his client with an assurance that the problem was not insuperable—as long as the President’s counsel did not resign. St. Clair, however, would feel obliged to resign unless the President stated publicly that he had withheld from his attorneys the knowledge of this tape. The President believed, and did as he was told. And St. Clair was able to tell the press that he was not, after all, the first lawyer whose client had lied to him.
As for not having found and turned over a single tape the President looked good on, it is fairly clear, from the tape of June 4, 1973, that Nixon, with the concurrence of Ziegler and earlier Haldeman (and Haig, with his loving assurance, “Only you. Only you”), was under the impression that he sounded pretty good on most of them. On June 26, 1973, Nixon again listened to himself on tape. Within days, the Ervin Committee heard from Butterfield. And St. Clair, who liked to insist that he was defending the presidency, when he was actually using the presidency to protect a criminal defendant and then using the President himself to protect the President’s lawyer’s name, never did give a straightforward reply when members of the committee asked whether he had listened to any tapes at all. He could presumably have asked Buzhardt to find a good tape, but neither of the lawyers seems to have felt a necessity for finding one, they were so preoccupied with the minuscule questions posed by the tape of March 21, 1973. Finally, why not have flooded the committee, as is often done in antitrust cases, with unassimilable evidence? As well ask why the White House lawyers were remiss in almost everything. There was every reason, however, for President Nixon not to want to do it. And the inescapable inference, I think, consists in the explanation why.
III. WHAT’S MISSING?
A piece last year in
Esquire
raised the question of how it was that
The New York Times
at first missed the story of Watergate. One explanation was that
Times
reporters had been following leads on other stories—drug-taking by a high government official, and so on—stories that did not yield. Many papers ultimately made their contribution. The Washington
Star
, interviewing a gardener, discovered that a recent visitor at San Clemente had been Judge Matthew Byrne, of the Ellsberg trial; that broke the story of the offer to him of the directorship of the FBI. The Providence
Journal
broke the story of Nixon’s income tax. The
Los Angeles Times
, Jack Nelson in particular, broke various stories.
Time
revealed the seventeen wiretaps. Other reporters uncovered important stories—as, of course, did
The New York Times
. But the reporting that led most directly to Nixon’s departure from office was unquestionably Woodward and Bernstein’s in the
Washington Post
. The author of the
Esquire
piece concluded that
The New York Times
had been remiss. It seemed more likely, though, that Watergate, and the important revelations it led to, were not the story. And I don’t mean the tip of the iceberg here. I mean that, in spite of all the Watergate cover-up talk on the few known transcripts (out of three years, after all, of recorded conversation), Nixon simply did not think Watergate was the front he was vulnerable on.
If one bears with this line of thought, that Watergate was not the story, then the problem is what was. It is hard to sustain a belief in a conspiracy within his administration against him. It would be unreasonable to expect to drive from office, by means of tapes in his sole possession, the man who had appointed (and who presumably had compromising tapes of) the presumptive heads of any such conspiracy. Moreover, no evidence on a grand enough scale ever came
out
about President Nixon to support a view that the intelligence agencies had conspired to produce such evidence. Finally, it is clear from the Church Committee documents and from more recent, almost daily news reports that the agencies had problems enough with secrets of their own to preclude an interest in the removal from office of a chief executive—when that removal would lead, as it inevitably did, to investigations of the agencies themselves.
Even less convincing are theories that the offenses at the heart of the Nixon administration had to do with a Hughes connection, or with the Bebe Rebozo $100,000. So many people, Republicans and Democrats alike, have had some sort of Hughes connection. As for Rebozo, a memorandum of June 16, 1972, from Gordon Strachan to H.R. Haldeman, does report a complaint from Florida CREEP contributors that they had “already given through Bebe.” But, as events in the intervening years, concerning kickbacks and financial-political scandal of all kinds and on all sides, demonstrate—and as the fact that no article of impeachment having to do with taxes or finances was ever passed confirms—the President could not have been impeached simply over money. Vice President Agnew did have to resign over money, but it seems beyond question that this resignation would not have occurred had it not been for Watergate—when the President viewed the prospect of Agnew’s resignation as protection for himself.
The minds of assassination theorists run, perhaps, to murder: the shooting of Governor Wallace; or the crash of the plane bearing Mrs. E. Howard Hunt. But it is unlikely that the Nixon scandal had to do with murder—else why not have murdered a few more people, and those more key? One arrives suddenly at the territory of the florid killings, Jimmy Hoffa, Sam Giancana, John Roselli—and at the Church Committee documents—in a most unlikely way. Because what was happening in the name of intelligence activities provided, at least, a context for the way Nixon conducted his administration; and because the Church investigation itself provides an example of not wanting to know too clearly, or to state at all, what your own research unmistakably implies.
IV. TRANSACTIONS
The Church Committee’s report on intelligence activities consists of seven volumes. Like most government documents, they are hard to read. The first volume,
Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders
, was, politically, the right place to begin. A bipartisan majority of the committee could agree to investigate these matters—past and foreign—precisely and only because they were remote, indifferent, a subject in which nobody had anything politically to lose. If someone had really managed, in the early sixties, to assassinate Fidel Castro, the whole country probably would have been for it. There was, in those days, no Left to speak of. The rest, among investigators, press, citizens at large, was just consensus and hypocrisy. Consensus, because in the matter of old and failed assassinations, all parties could agree to a distraction from the real and serious questions: whether, for instance, the agencies were doing what they were authorized and paid to do, and at what price; whether there was any way to keep them, domestically, within the law. Hypocrisy, because everyone could agree to be outraged that such plots were ever contemplated—when it was, and is, by no means clear that they were not always part of what has been required, from time to time, of an intelligence agency.
One might even have thought naïveté compounded with consensus and hypocrisy, in that people could seriously entertain the idea that foreign interventions of a high and violent order could be undertaken by underlings, without the knowledge of the various Presidents. This would involve a misunderstanding of the presidency so profound that it brings in just the cast of mind that made it difficult to know what Nixon did: a bureaucratic logic of passing the buck downward, of presuming, in the name of “fairness,” the ignorance of the man in power, beyond the farthest reaches of common sense. What did the boss know and when did he know it makes sense only as the question of a jury lawyer whose client is the boss. The presumption of innocence is, after all, a practical, moral convention for the conduct of fair trials. It was never meant to go any further, to suggest that truth itself, say, consists in the outcome of a conflict of legal strategies. And certainly not to express the Mafia ethic that the lowest takes the rap.
But when the Mafia itself, literally, was brought into the story, there was something in the details that began to obscure the drift. The collaboration of the CIA and the Mafia in a plan for a foreign assassination had its initial plausibility. The Mafia had had profitable operations in Cuba; it must have longed to have them back. Then, with Sam Giancana, John Roselli, even Judith Campbell Exner, Frank Sinatra, the rococo elements appear—giving rise to at least one speculation, and one certainty. The speculation: that the whole story is backward, that there might have been a White House connection with the Mafia, perhaps accidentally and carelessly. The connection would have come, inevitably, to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover—whose FBI cannot, as it claimed, have been bugging a Mafia phone, but must have been tapping the White House phones for many years, for the FBI director’s purposes. There cannot have been any other reason to wait
fifty-four
weeks to bring the Roselli-Giancana matter to President John Kennedy’s attention. To exactly the degree that a connection is dangerous to the national security, its termination, too, is presumably no less than urgent; it took Hoover more than a year to feel that urgency. It was obviously just a moment when, for whatever reason, Hoover felt he must deal this card. As for the CIA, when this Mafia connection, by whatever route, came to its attention, the White House might have said—as it said so recently, in the case of the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—Stay away from that. That’s national security. The CIA’s employment of the Mafia for purposes of assassinating Castro would have become the consensual fiction. Advantage to the Mafia: such private services as having the CIA break into the apartment, years ago, of the singer girlfriend of that jealous lover, Sam Giancana; tax relief; and relief from various other legal pressures, probably.
That would be a speculation. But a certainty is this: that, at some unspecified point in its history, the CIA began to include the investigation and control of narcotics traffic, without mandate or explanation, in its own interpretation of its intelligence work; that, in recent years, virtually every group that has newly claimed the control of narcotics as part of its mission (from Egil Krogh’s Plumbers, through the units of John Caulfield and G. Gordon Liddy, when they came from drug-enforcement agencies) has used that claim as a cover for some crime; that the CIA, in the course of the Church Committee hearings, was unable to give any satisfactory account either of its dealings with the opium-running tribesmen of Southeast Asia, or for allegations of drug traffic by its own Southeast Asian airline, Air America. A report by the CIA’s own inspector general concluded that there was “no evidence that the Agency . . . has ever sanctioned or supported drug trafficking
as a matter of policy
” (italics added). Those words in italics must constitute the weakest disclaimer of criminal activity by a governmental agency ever to be seriously presented in any public forum.