The Wars of Watergate (15 page)

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John Bartlow Martin, a veteran political journalist and speechwriter for Democratic candidates since Adlai Stevenson’s first presidential campaign, suddenly found himself thinking the unthinkable during the last month of the 1968 presidential campaign. Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy did not give Martin much heart, but he found it unbearable to “imagine Richard Nixon in the White House.” “I thought Nixon a thoroughgoing scoundrel, a hollow man, a master of deceit, and, considering his and Joe McCarthy’s campaign against Stevenson in 1952, a real menace to civil liberties.” Martin berated fellow liberal Arthur Schlesinger, who refused to help Humphrey: “All right,” he said, “you can abstain if you want, but you’re going to help elect Richard Nixon.” In the early morning hours of November 6, as Nixon’s razor-thin victory margin became apparent, Martin had perforce to “imagine Richard Nixon in the White House.” He was not alone in his misery. Eugene McCarthy, who in his own indirect way had contributed to Nixon’s victory, evoked poetic images for his lament: “It is a day for visiting the sick and burying the dead. It’s gray everywhere—all over the land.”
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Nixon’s narrow triumph and his decline in the polls prior to Election Day reflected his innate capacity for survival. He had survived eight grueling years as Eisenhower’s Vice President; he had survived the heartbreaking loss of the presidency in 1960; he had survived the humiliating defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial campaign; he had survived the 1968 primary season and the convention—largely by default, but also by his resolve and stamina; and through a combination of perseverance, luck, and the self-inflicted wounds of his opponents, he had survived the electorate’s close decision on November 5. Survival is success of its own sort; but now Nixon needed success to survive.

As Richard Nixon prepared to take office, he felt like a long-deprived heir ready at last to assume his rightful estate. He was serene. He had waited through an eight-year apprenticeship, a hairline defeat, and then another eight years in a political purgatory. Perhaps, he reflected, the “wilderness years” had been good, giving him needed time for education and growth. What had he learned? “I knew,” he later wrote, “what would
not
work. On the other hand, I was less sure what
would
work.” Nevertheless, he had “definite ideas about the changes” he thought necessary. “As 1968 came to a close, I was a happy man,” Nixon recalled.

But Nixon’s serenity belied alternating moods of anger, suspicion, and hostility, moods that eventually governed his behavior as president and guided the conduct of those who served as the instruments of his feelings. The politics of
ressentiment
had elected him in 1968; his own resentments flowed generously within his political and philosophical juices. “Fight,” “battle,” “enemies”—these are key words in the Nixon vocabulary, amply reflected in his tapes and memoirs. Life was conflict, not accommodation. Enemies, he believed, fought his good intentions; enemies must be confronted, contained, and eventually defeated.

Enemies lurked both without and within the governmental apparatus. Nixon had longstanding grievances against the “liberals,” whom he identified chiefly within the media and among intellectuals. Officially, they were entangled with the Democratic-controlled Congress and what he believed to be a bureaucracy still dominated by the “old New Deal crowd.” Nixon
alternately despised and feared Washington’s “iron triangle”—legislators, bureaucracy, and lobbyists—but he altered the geometric design with a fourth side: the media. He channeled enormous intellectual energies and emotional drives against “the establishment,” his own “iron square.”

Nixon assuredly had a fair share of real enemies. A good deal of the working media did not like him; the Democratic leadership in Congress had nursed resentments of their own for nearly two decades; and indeed, some bureaucrats (quite naturally) preferred their own vested interest, however archaic, to presidentially desired policy changes.

But the times were special. The militancy of the antiwar movement had not abated in the slightest with the election, and for good reason: the war itself had not abated. Rather, during the first two years of the Nixon Administration, it broadened. For those within the Administration, from the President on down, outside agitation—whether it came from antiwar activists, environmentalists, or civil rights advocates—mirrored the hostility within and contributed to both a sense of isolation and a feeling of “us” against “them.” Several years later, in a rambling conversation with his aide John Ehrlichman, the President bitterly assaulted environmentalists. He thought them “overrated,” and that they served only the “privileged.” Their issue, he said, was just “crap,” and for “clowns,” and “the rich and [Supreme Court Justice William O.] Douglas.” The tensions, from both sides, only further poisoned the political air.

Nixon and his associates personalized the opposition, and again not without cause. The resistance and civil disobedience of the 1960s confronted a system which some considered evil and intolerable. Much of that activism was condoned by politicians, intimidated intellectuals, and the media. Nixon’s election, for them, constituted a self-fulfilling prophecy, justifying more opposition, more disobedience. The whole business was circular, as Alexander Bickel observed: “Men who are loudly charged with repression before they have done anything to substantiate the charge are apt to proceed to substantiate it.”
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Various Administration officials reflected on the times and their feelings. Ehrlichman flatly denied any notion of White House paranoia toward antiwar demonstrations. Others have testified to the contrary. Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deeply resented the demonstrations. He remembered the “tension” because of the war, the opposition, and the media. The President himself acknowledged that “I was a paranoiac, or almost a basket case with regard to secrecy,” fearing that leaks would jeopardize diplomatic negotiations or even reveal the precariousness of the military situation in Vietnam.

William Ruckelshaus was in the Department of Justice in October 1969 when tens of thousands of demonstrators converged on the capital. Ruckelshaus had a well-earned reputation as a moderate man and was hardly a
presidential sycophant. But he recalled the tear gas that drifted from the streets into the Attorney General’s office (“so much you could hardly speak”) and the buses surrounding the White House for security purposes: “My Lord,” he said, “you don’t have to be paranoid to say everything ain’t working just swimmingly here.” The net result of the demonstrations, according to Ruckelshaus, was that they provoked extreme reactions on the other side as well. However justified the civil disobedience, the counter-reaction, he thought, “inevitably” would go beyond what good judgment considered appropriate. White House aide Jeb Stuart Magruder later testified to the alternate feelings of frustration and anger among the President’s men. The President’s opponents, Magruder contended, failed to appreciate his efforts to end the war on his often-articulated basis of “peace with honor.” Their resistance created “frustration and a feeling of impotence”; consequently, Magruder admitted, the President’s men grew more callous toward their enemies, whom they saw committing illegal acts with the approval of a large portion of the American public.
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Wars historically impose enormous strains on the Constitution, and the Vietnam war proved no exception. The Administration’s responses to antiwar activists (wiretapping), demonstrators (mass arrests), and leaks from Administration operations (more wiretapping and illegal break-ins of private offices to obtain ostensible evidence) reflected a government threatened from without and besieged from within. Nixon’s oft-declared insistence that he would not be the first American President to lose a war to a large degree inspired his Administration’s behavior and justified it to him and his loyal supporters.

Nixon’s first term often is viewed as a successful one—after all, the American voters enthusiastically endorsed it in 1972. A decade after the President’s resignation, some historians and journalists, following Nixon’s lead, sparked a burst of revisionism that ranged from a view of Watergate as but a blip on the continuum of both American and Nixonian history, to a full-blown public declaration of rehabilitation by some members of the media the ex-President had once fought so bitterly. Nixon’s historical reputation, it was argued, would stand or fall on his policy achievements, and some commentators argued that his domestic triumphs far outstripped those in foreign policy.
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Nixon himself claimed little in the way of legislative achievement. To be sure, he lacked LBJ’s congressional majorities, not to mention his standing and skill with Congress. Nixon’s own party, moreover, was badly divided on legislative goals. When the President pushed an affirmative-action program, Senate Republican leader Dirksen warned that Nixon would split the party if he insisted on the law. “[I]t is my bounden duty to tell you,” Nixon
remembered Dirksen as saying, “that this thing is about as popular as a crab in a whorehouse.” The most famous Nixon proposal was the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), a promising welfare-reform proposal pushed by Daniel P. Moynihan and other academic experts. But this project floundered amid Left-Right legislative and White House pressures. In the end, Nixon himself abandoned the idea, and FAP died aborning.

Similarly, he vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill in late 1971, with a strident ideological message that was designed to appease conservatives embittered by the President’s decision to visit China. Perhaps Nixon’s most prominent domestic move was the imposition of wage and price controls in 1971, although years later he devoted several pages of his memoirs to repudiating that same policy.
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Foreign policy, of course, offers a weightier argument for Nixon’s leadership qualities. Here the President was in his favored milieu. In the years following World War II, Congress had tended to accord presidents preeminence in foreign-policy matters. Thus Nixon had greater opportunities to act in this area than he did in domestic policy. Certainly, his move toward rapprochement with China was a major historical achievement—whatever his mixed motives and his own past efforts and commitments toward isolating the Chinese. Visiting China in 1972, he toasted the event as “the week that changed the world.” Perhaps he exaggerated, but his trip did in fact change the relationship between two great nations, and, as Nixon noted fifteen years later, the move showed that through cooperation between the two nations, “the world
can
be changed—and changed for the better.”

His moves toward détente with the Soviet Union are especially intriguing; ironically, their long-range success and wisdom have earned Nixon extraordinary enmity from many of those who otherwise loyally supported him. Finally in the survey of his foreign policy, the Vietnam war proved to be no less a burden for Nixon than it had been for Johnson. Nixon promised to withdraw American troops, gain the release of prisoners of war, and secure “peace with honor” while preserving the integrity of South Vietnam. American soldiers came home, along with the POWs, but only after losses in men and matériel that almost matched those suffered under Johnson. The resulting North Vietnamese takeover of all of Indochina confirmed much of the contemporary skepticism and contempt for Nixon’s vaunted “peace with honor.”
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The public achievements of Nixon’s first term are scattered. They merit historical recognition, but have little to do with what always will make Nixon unique: his resignation in disgrace, amid ever-mounting scandals. The revelations that followed the break-in at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972 pierced the curtain that had masked the seamy side of the Administration for almost four years.
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Therein lay the origins of the tragedy that engulfed Richard Nixon and the nation.

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John Mitchell, Nixon’s 1968 campaign manager and the first of his five Attorneys General, testified in 1973 about the “White House horrors,” a term he applied generically to a range of political “dirty tricks” he considered far more disturbing than the Watergate break-in. Mitchell’s comment was pointed at roguish presidential aides who he believed had misled and badly advised the President. Other contemporaries referred to the staff more charitably, characterizing them as the “Beaver Patrol,” dutifully parceling out “Mickey Mouse” missions. The sarcastic veneer of that judgment barely concealed the reality that Richard Nixon commanded the patrol and dictated its missions.

The Nixon presidency marked a further evolution in the style and life of the White House. Since the Eisenhower years, it had come increasingly to resemble a monarchical court. Former Johnson aide George Reedy accurately portrayed that development and uncannily anticipated its continuance. White House life, Reedy wrote, basically served the material needs of the President, from providing the most luxurious means of travel to having a masseur constantly present. But, more important, he was treated with kingly reverence. “No one speaks to him unless spoken to first. No one ever invites him to ‘go soak your head’ when his demands become petulant and unreasonable.” Reedy’s master was well known for his almost compulsive drive for micro-managerial control which paralyzed initiatives and innovations from others. In Johnson’s White House, presidential aides seemingly existed to carry out the leader’s whims and decrees and, in time-honored fashion, they were to have a “passion for anonymity.”
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Nixon’s conception of his role varied only slightly from Johnson’s. That same drive for control, that same intensity of involvement across a wide spectrum of activities, from the most global and profound to the most localized and petty, characterized Richard Nixon’s behavior. For many, Nixon’s staff, especially Haldeman, his main “gatekeeper” (as the President characterized him), and Ehrlichman, served as scapegoats, as the “bad Germans,” to explain the darker side of the Nixon Administration. Senator Dirksen had complained of having to work through the White House’s “Berlin Wall”—meaning Haldeman and Ehrlichman. House Republican leader Gerald Ford likewise excoriated these aides for their apparent view that Congress existed “only to follow their instructions, and we had no right to behave as a co-equal branch of government.” But Ford later conveniently discovered that such attitudes were not exclusively held by presidential aides. As President himself, Ford savored his prerogatives; Congress, he complained, had disintegrated as an organized legislative body.
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