Nixon's Secret (80 page)

The
Washington Post
ran stories on Nixon’s “rehabilitation.” In 1986, Nixon was ranked in a Gallup poll as one of the ten most admired men in the world. Around this time Nixon gave a tour-de-force speech to the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association. Political pundit Elizabeth Drew wrote, “Even when he was wrong, Nixon still showed that he knew a great deal and had a capacious memory, as well as the capacity to speak with apparent authority, enough to impress people who had little regard for him in earlier times.”
Washington Post
publisher Katherine Graham shook Nixon’s hand and ordered a three-page spread called the “Sage of Saddle River.”

Although Nixon had served as a back-channel foreign policy and political advisor for Ronald Reagan, his contacts with President George H. W. Bush, who’s ascendency he aided, were minor and formal. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of China, Nixon set his sites on a dialogue with President Bill Clinton, who eventually defeated Bush in 1992.

Nixon understood the delicacy of the situation. He couldn’t invite himself. He had to finagle Clinton into an invitation. He sent the message through Senator Bob Dole and Democratic strongman Robert Strauss.

These efforts were met with frustration, as Clinton was described as noncommittal when approached. That meeting was far more difficult to arrange than might be thought. At this point, I will step aside and let veteran newsman Martin Kalb, who was a good friend and solid journalist, tell the story in his book,
The Nixon Memo:

“Ever since Clinton’s election in November 1992, Nixon had been trying to see Clinton and ingratiate himself with the new administration. He realized that it would not be easy. Nixon and Clinton were poles apart in experience, in outlook, and in ideology. Nixon was a Cold War Republican, Clinton a baby-boomer Democrat. Nixon expanded the American war in Southeast Asia, Clinton marched in protest against it. Nixon personified Watergate, Clinton’s wife had worked for Nixon’s impeachment on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee. Still, Nixon wrote Clinton a long, substantive, and thoughtful letter of congratulations. And in a November 19, 1992, op-ed piece in
The
New York Times
, he praised Clinton for ‘aggressively addressing a number of important issues during the transition period.’

“But if Nixon expected a quick response, he was to be disappointed. Shortly before Clinton’s inauguration, in mid-January 1993, Nixon resumed his effort to make an impact on the president-elect. He got Roger Stone to send an ‘urgent’ message to Clinton–that the situation in Russia was ‘very grave’ and that Clinton was not getting the ‘straight story’ from the State Department, principally, Nixon said, because Baker was a roadblock. Again, there was no response from Clinton or any of his aides.

“Immediately after the inauguration, Nixon, undaunted, sent another ‘urgent’ message to Clinton. This time Stone used Richard Morris, a pollster from Arkansas, as his intermediary. Stone told me that the Nixon message contained three points and what can only be construed as a whiff of political blackmail. First, Stone said that Clinton would find Nixon’s perspective on Russia to be ‘valuable.’ Second, a Nixon-Clinton meeting would ‘buy’ the president a ‘one-year moratorium’ on Nixon criticism of his policy toward Bosnia and other matters. And third, a Clinton-Nixon meeting would generate Republican support for aid to Russia and possibly for a budget compromise on Capitol Hill. Stone continued, ‘Morris told the Clintons that if Nixon was received at the White House, he couldn’t come back and kick you in the teeth.’

“A few days later, on the eve of Nixon’s February 1993 visit to Moscow, according to Stone, Morris called him and said that Clinton had agreed in principle to a meeting with Nixon, but no date had been set. Another week passed. Nixon, in Moscow, had met with Yeltsin and promised action. Stone called James Carville and Paul Begala, two of Clinton’s closest political advisers, and urged that a date be fixed, especially since now Clinton could also benefit from a Nixon briefing on his meeting with Yeltsin. Begala immediately saw the political advantages of a meeting. In his mind there was no point in antagonizing Nixon, not when so much of the Clinton program rode on a degree of GOP cooperation on Capitol Hill.

“Prodded by Stone, Begala rode herd on the matter of the meeting. He told John Podesta, who managed the traffic flow into the Oval Office, to make certain that the three-point Nixon message reached the president’s desk. ‘You really ought to call him,’ Begala advised. Yes, Clinton agreed, but again nothing happened.

“For his part, as days passed with no call from the White House, an increasingly frustrated Stone encouraged Nixon to ‘bludgeon’ Clinton in much the same way as he had Bush. During the Vietnam War, as president, Nixon had employed a tactic that French journalist Michel Tatu labeled ‘credible irrationality,’ Nixon’s way of frightening the North Vietnamese into believing that he would be capable of doing anything to achieve his ends and they had better be accommodating. In this spirit he let Stone spread the work in Washington that he was losing his patience. Stone called Tony Coelho, a former Democratic congressman from California with superb contacts at the White House, and warned that Nixon was on the edge of exploding. The situation in Russia was desperate. Nixon had ideas—and a short fuse. Could Coelho help arrange a Nixon meeting with Clinton? The implication was clear: a meeting would buy time, information, and maybe cooperation; further delay would buy upheaval in Russia and political confrontation at home.

“Nixon also sniffed the political and journalistic winds and figured that, along with the private pressure, it was time for him to go public again. He decided that another ‘shot across the bow,’ as Stone put it, was now in order. It was to be a warning shot at the new administration that Nixon had to be recognized as a player in policy deliberations on Russia and Yeltsin. Once again, the shot was to be fired from the op-ed page of the
New York Times.
Stone later recalled warning his White House contacts that the ‘piece could be gentle or not so gentle.’”
6

When I approached both James Carville and Paul Begala, solid practitioners of the political craft and friends, they both said the president was receptive and said he would reach out to the thirty-seventh president. But the call did not come. Clinton advisor Dick Morris learned that Hillary was blocking the initiative, and it was Morris who would break the logjam by arguing that protocol would eliminate Nixon as a critic of the administration if he was received in a respectful way and that Clinton’s liberal bona fides allowed him to safely reach out to the ex-president. “If only Nixon can go to China, only Clinton can invite Nixon,” Morris successfully argued. Nixon was delighted when the invitation came.

After Nixon’s death, here is what I wrote for
The New York Times:

“So what did you think of him?” I asked Richard Nixon after his first meeting with Bill Clinton.

“You know,” Mr. Nixon replied, “he came from dirt and I came from dirt. He lost a gubernatorial race and came back to win the Presidency, and I lost a gubernatorial race and came back to win the Presidency. He overcame a scandal in his first campaign for national office and I overcame a scandal in my first national campaign. We both just gutted it out. He was an outsider from the South and I was an outsider from the West.”

Thus the 37th President revealed the special kinship he felt with the 42nd, despite their differences in party, philosophy and generation. And Mr. Nixon had a special reason to reach out: he was so deeply committed to the cause of increasing U.S. aid for the emerging republics of the former Soviet Union that he violated his own ironclad rule in dealing with successors—to give advice only when asked.

Mr. Nixon had dark suspicions that Hillary Rodham Clinton was blocking him; in 1974 she had served on the staff of the House committee that recommended impeaching him. More likely, the all-consuming confusion of a new Presidency was to blame. In any event, the call finally did come, and a few days later, on March 8, 1993, the two men met in the living room of the White House family quarters for a long private talk about aid to Russia.

It was a moment Mr. Nixon had foreseen. In 1992 he heard through the grapevine that President George Bush’s strategists were weighing inviting him to the Republican National Convention. Mr. Nixon reviewed his options with me. “I could go to the convention and give a speech praising Bush,” he said, “but that would be boring, and the only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring. I could go to the convention and deliver a rip-snorting attack on Clinton. If I do that and Clinton is elected, it would be very hard for me to reach out to him on the situation in Russia.”

Although Mr. Nixon wanted badly to be accepted again at his party’s convention, he issued a statement that afternoon that he would not attend and did not wish to be invited.

In the end, Mr. Nixon came to like Mr. Clinton and had enormous respect for his political talents. “You know that bit he does where he bites his lip and looks like he is pondering the question?” he asked me. “I think it’s practiced, but let me tell you, it’s great television.”

He thought the Whitewater affair could pose serious problems. When I pointed out that the poll numbers reflected no damage to Mr. Clinton’s popularity, Mr. Nixon observed that Watergate had not hurt him either, until the televised Senate hearings. “The American people don’t believe anything’s real until they see it on television,” he said. “When Whitewater hearings are televised, it will be Clinton’s turn in the bucket.”

Perhaps. But if Mr. Nixon’s advice to his young successor provides for a surer American foreign policy and increases the chances of peace, then we all profited more than either of them.

—
New York Times
, April 28, 1994

The two presidents forged a solid bond of respect and admiration toward each other during the time Clinton was in office. Nixon often praised him for his political talents, but he thought some of his tactics were staged. He told me, “I think it’s practiced, but let me tell you, it’s great television.”

Nixon blamed Hillary Clinton for blocking his early attempts to meet with the president calling her a “red hot,” a term used to describe extreme leftists in the 1950s. In 1974 Hillary Clinton was a staff lawyer for the House of Representatives Judicial Impeachment Inquiry Committee, which was responsible for investigating whether or not there was enough evidence to impeach or prosecute President Nixon for the Watergate affair. Hillary had been fired for her role in writing fraudulent legal briefs, lying to investigators, and confiscating public documents to hide her deception and conspiring to hinder the defense of Richard Nixon. “She was out to get me,” the former president told me when he called to brief me on his White House visit. “He [Clinton] really appreciates my help and he’s much smarter than Bush,” Nixon said ebulliently. Clearly, Nixon thought he was in play again, despite Hillary’s best efforts.

Hillary’s actual role in 1974 bears examination. Hillary began her political career at Yale Law School, where she was a close confidant of her political professor, Mr. Burke Marshall, the chief political strategist for the Kennedys.

Mr. Marshall helped Hillary get her job as a congressional staff lawyer, which then allowed him to place her in the Watergate investigative committee through his close connections to the Democrat chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Peter Rodino, a congressman from New Jersey.

Hillary’s placement as a House of Representatives lawyer allowed Marshall to then inject her into the Judiciary Committee that was investigating Watergate. In addition to Hillary, there were two other close allies of Marshall that were also added to the Nixon impeachment inquiry staff to harm Nixon’s defense. They were John Doar, who was Marshall’s deputy when he was in the Justice Department and whom Rodino appointed as head of the impeachment inquiry staff, and the other was Bernard Nussbaum, who was assistant US attorney in New York and a close friend of Rodino’s. Nussbaum was placed in charge of directing the investigation into Watergate and Nixon’s potential prosecution.

It was a partisan project that Hillary Clinton, a twenty-seven year old staffer on the House Judiciary Committee, helped coordinate with senior Democratic leaders to manipulate the political process and strip President Nixon of his constitutional rights to a fair hearing.

Hillary’s boss, Jerry Zeifman, the general counsel and chief of staff to the House Judiciary Investigative Committee during the Watergate hearings, fired Hillary after it was uncovered that Clinton was working to impede the investigation and undermine Nixon’s defense. He told Fox News that “Hillary’s lies and unethical behavior goes back farther—and goes much deeper—than anyone realizes.” Zeifman maintains that he fired Hillary “for unethical behavior and that she conspired to deny Richard Nixon counsel during the hearings.”

When asked why he fired Clinton, Zeifman responded, “Because she is a liar.” He went on, “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”
7

Zeifman wrote candidly about his encounter with a young Hillary Clinton when she worked for him as a staff lawyer. He mentioned a number of facts that he thought people should know about how the prospective presidential contender conducts herself. He said, “Because of a number of her unethical practices I decided that I could not recommend her for any subsequent position of public or private trust.” Other Judiciary Committee staffers who worked with Clinton, such as Franklin Polk, the chief Republican counsel on the committee, have confirmed many of the details of what Zeifman has reported.

Zeifman stated, “Nixon clearly had right to counsel, but Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.”
8
When Nixon was leaving the Clinton White House after a three-hour discussion with the loquacious Arkansan, Hillary greeted him as he left. “How did you find her?” I asked. “Cold, cold as ice,” Nixon said.