Nixon’s final, frightened days in the White House

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34128, 14 April 1976, Page 13

Nixon’s final, frightened days in the White House

The Watergate scandal which led to the resignation cf President Nixon is one ot the most dramatic political events of the turyMore than anyone else, two young ••Washington Post" ' reporters. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. were responsible for unearthing the scandal and bringing it to the door of the President himself. Now. in a chronicle of the last agonies of the Nixon Presidency, the two reporters have gone beyond that door.

Their book, “The Final Davs,” has rocked the world even before its publication next month. 't traces the effects of the scandal on Nixon, his wife, Pat, on his daughters and close aides. It provides intimate, sometimes shocking, glimpses into the mind and manners of the most powerful man in the world — his drinking, his confusion, his talk even of suicide. Xnd it offers telling insights into the President's

chief lieutenants — and their private views on him. The book illustrates the arrogance and obstructions as Nixon and his advisers tried to put the Presidency beyond the law — and the step-by-step way in which evidence was gathered from the most secret administration the United States has experienced. "The Press” has acquired the New Zealand rights to this remarkable book, and extracts will appear over the next few days.

President Richard M. Nixon was re-elected in November, 1972. by one of the most sweeping victories in American history. A few months later his Administration was a wreck and there was serious talk of his impeachment. This extraordinary reversal stemmed from what had first been laughed about as the “Watergate caper.” Five men with burglars’ tools and electronic bugging devices had been caught red-handed in the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Watergate complex of offices, luxury fiats, and a hotel in Washington. Their attempt at James Bondery collapsed in a ludicrous display of incompetence and bungling. But it ceased being a joke when one of the burglars turned out to be James McCord, security consultant to Mr Nixon’s re-election campaign committee. Responsibility for the break-in and for the cover-up that followed was traced deep into the White House by three forces: The Woodward and Bernstein reporting team, which produced a stream of revelations in the Washington Post: Judge John Sirica, who conducted the trial of the Watergate burglars; and the Senate select committee on the Watergate scandal, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin. Mr Nixon lost his cloest aides—Bod Haldeman, his chief of staff and John Ehrlichman his domestic affairs adviser. But the president himself clung to office. The sacked White House lawyer, John Dean, testified before the Ervin committee that Mr Nixon had personally presided over the Watergate cover-up. But there was no incontrovertible evidence against the President, and the search was on for the “smoking gun” which, alone, could force him from the White House.

The breakthrough came one day in July, 1973.

When, on July 16, 1973, Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of Nixon’s taping system, national security adviser Henry Kissinger was outraged. How did the president dare to tape their meetings without his knowledge? He professed incredulity. The irony was that Kissinger had an extremely efficient system of his own for monitoring and transcribing all his calls to the president. Yet Kissinger persisted. From an historical point of view alone, the president’s taping system was “insane.” he said. It was indiscriminate. "To tape eight years of conversation would take eight years to listen to.” He was contemptuous.

“To leave yourself to the mercy of historians like that is unbelievable irresponsibility,” particularly since Nixon conducted meetings with such fantastic indiscretion.”

For weeks Kissinger turned to his closest friends and aides for ad-

vice and gave free rein to his anger, raising questions about Nixon’s mental stability.

Perhaps he should refuse to accept the position of secretary of state, promised him in the spring, and get out of the man’s administration once and for all while he still had a chance to emerge with his reputation intact. It was the first time

dent had become more acute. “Sometimes I get worried,” he said. “The president is like a madman.”

Kissinger was deeply pessimistic. He had looked to the second Nixon Administration as a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a new American foreign policy, to achieve new international structures based on unquestioned American strength, detente with the Soviet Union and China, a closer bond with Europe. It seemed no longer possible. Watergate was shattering the illusion of American strength, he said, and with it American foreign policy.

A code of silence was upheld rigidly by those near Kissinger, which didn’t involve shielding his private life from public view. It meant keeping Kissinger’s personal view of Richard Nixon secret — from the public, from the press and from the president’s own staff. Prospect appalls Though mitigated by admiration for certain elements of the Nixon character, Kissinger’s basic attitude towards the president was one of loathing and contempt. Kissinger’s friends knew that disclosure of that secret could destroy both him and, they felt, the country’s foreign policy. In the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur war and faced by the Arab oil boy-

cott, that was an appalling prospect. As the Watergate crisis intensified, keeping Kissinger in office came to be view’ed by some — and that included Kissinger himself — as essential to the national security.

Three weeks after Nixon was elected president in 1968 he asked Kissinger to serve as his national security adviser. Kissinger had earlier told friends and associates that Nixon was “unfit” for the presidency, “dangerous” and capable of unleashing nuclear war. But after meeting the president-elect, he shifted his assessment. The man whose ap-

paper flow to the president.

Installed in the West Wing basement of the White House, Kissinger aspired to a personal relationship with Nixon in which two men, guided by the same general philosophy and approach to foreign affairs would reach decisions jointly. Instead Kissinger found himself screened off from the president by the bureaucratic stops that Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, had created al his boss’s direction.

Like every other member of the ~ new administration, Kissinger dealt with Nixon primarily on paner. Both Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, he complained, were determined to keep him at a distance from Nixon.

The president’s two principal aides were “idiots” and “Nazis,” he said. What kind of man would surround himself with such imbeciles?

For their part, Haldeman and Ehrlichman openly ridiculed Kissinger: he could not be trusted because of his liberal friends.

Ehrlichman half jokingly insinuated that Kissinger was “queer” and wondered aloud to Kissinger’s assistants whether Henry, a divorced bachelor, would know what to do with a girl at a Georgetown cocktail party. “Were there any boys at the party for Henry?” Eh-

rlichman once asked, pleased with his own joke. In his meetings with the president, Kissinger was almost never able to get a decision on the spot. Instead, the president listened to his presentations impatiently and told Kissinger that he would inform him in due course of whatever actions he wished him to take.

Often Kissinger returned to his office shaken, chewing his nails, worrying and waiting. It was a dangerous system, Kissinger believed, particularly with Haldeman taking the notes.

The president’s mind was not sophisticated

face, Kissinger offered only high praise. Once, when Nixon met India’s Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, he made it evident that he did not know where Bengal was. Kissinger cited the incident as one more example of Nixon’s “sec-ond-rate mind.” But Kissinger’s assistants knew his habit of making scathing, derogatory comments about nearly everyone. Each had heard himself called a “second-rate mind” or worse. Bombing plan The security adviser had referred to one colleague as a “psychopathic homosexual.” This had caused Leonard Garment, a Nixon lawyer, to say: “Henry’s characterisations are like his girl friends — affectations.” In 1969 one issue dominated all others: Vietnam. Elected on a pledge to end the war. Nixon meant to operate on all fronts, and Kissinger opened up secret peace negotiations in Paris with representatives of North Vietnam. At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger were secretly formulating a plan for bombing on a massive scale.

As the president paid more attention to the war and spent more and more time reviewing options, Kissinger’s influence grew. He fought to bring most major State and Defence

Department decisions through the National Security Council. That gave him absolute control over the paperwork — which, in turn, increased his control over more and more of the president’s meetings.

Kissinger was more willing to do the president’s bidding than were Secretary of State Rogers and Defence Secretary Melvin R. Laird. He asked how, not why. If the president wanted a plan that included the most minute details of conducting an all-out war in South-East Asia Kissinger came up with it. If Nixon decided to shelve the plan and send Kissinger secretly to Paris to negotiate peace, Kissinger did it.

Nixon’s inconstancy, combined with Kissinger’s unwillingness to take a stand, confused Kissinger’s staff. There was no appar-

ent policy. The President seemed to change his mind so often, and in such extreme ways. Race prejudice “Nixon is a man who can’t be pushed too far,” Kissinger warned his associates. Those who looked for more evidence to corroborate Kissinger’s portrait of the president found it. Almost from the beginning Kissinger had secretly had all his telephone calls, including those with the president, monitored and transcribed. The conversations gave Kissinger’s assistants enough information about the president to alarm them. Nbjon rambled, he made thoughtless remarks and suggestions about people and policy, he sometimes slurred his words as if he had been drinking heavily. His ignorance of important subjects suggested he was lazy and unprepared for the kinds of decisions which require throughtful consideration. His nasty references about the inferior intelligence of blacks revealed a deep prejudice. Like Kissinger’s personal view of Nixon, the existance of Kissinger’s clandestine monitoring sytem was a zealously guarded secret. The practice had begun simply enough in 1969, with a secretary listening to each of Kissinger’s phone calls and transcribing in shorthand. A special switch enabled the secretaries in Kissinger’s outer office to cut off the

that those who were closest to Kissinger believed he was serious about quitting. Acute worry But Secretary of State William Rogers was ready to go. He was disgusted with what he regarded as Nixon’s specious claim of executive privilege in withholding the tapes. In August, Kissinger was nominated as secretary of state. The appointment was confirmed in the Senate in September. Bv late October, after Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, had been fired, Kissinger’s anxieties about the presi-

proach to foreign policy he had regarded as hopelessly shallow and unsophisticated appeared to him now far more subtle and complex. Kissinger detected in Nixon a pragmatism which might conquer the ideological rigidities that had marked the politics of this coldest of cold war warriors. The 45-year-old Harvard professor took the job. Two aides Though Rogers, an old Nixon friend, had been named secretary of state, Kissinger was in control of most of the foreign policy and national-security

enough to reach these kinds of decisions alone. The national security adviser regularly ridiculed his chief’s intellect and ability. “You tell our meatball president I’ll be there in a few minutes,” he once snapped to a secretary who had summoned him to a meeting with Nixon. “Wasn't our leader magnificent on that,” Kissinger said sarcastically of Nixon’s early public statements on the war in Vietnam. The president deserved a B-plus or a C or even a C-minus, he would say. But to the president*

microphone on their telephone extensions. Early in 1970, the system became more elaborate and Kissinger began taperecording his telephone calls. An IBM Dictabelt machine, housed behind his secretary’s desk and hooked into his telephone, was automatically activated when the telephone receiver was picked up. Eventually, several Dictabelt machines were plugged into the phone system, ensuring that there were always standby recorders if one failed or r,an out of tape.

Kissinger took the moni toring very l seriously There were to be no slip

ups. Diane Mathews, one of the secretaries, was assigned to watch the Dictabelt carefully and signal one of the other women in the office to take shorthand notes if the belt ran out in mid-conversation.

The appointments secretary or Alexander Haig, then Kissinger’s assistant and only a colonel, listened regularly’ to important calls and took notes, especially if the conversations were with the president.

On some calls, the unsuspecting party might be talking simultaneously to Kissinger, Haig, a transcribing secretary and the appointments secretary. Private calls In his basement office in the White House, eight other phones were connected to Kissinger’s direct line with Nixon, to facilitate monitoring and transcripting, Haig rigidly enforced the rule that each day’s calls be transcribed and typed before the secretaries went home at night — until, eventually, a special night crew of secretaries was assigned the task of finishing the transcribing. Only Kissinger’s most personal calls with Nancy Maginnes, whom he later married, escaped transcription. The secretaries listened to her calls, however, and sometimes took notes, in case mention was made of a social engagement: Kissinger frequently' forgot such things.

Nixon was often on the phone with Kissinger for 15 minutes or longer. The president was repetitive, sometimes taking minutes to come to a point, or he might, suddenly shift to another topic without finishing whatever he had been discussing. During one call, the president drunkeniy relayed to Kissinger the Vietnam military policy of his friend Bebe Rebozo. Kissinger told his aides about the call, and for a while thereafter Haig referred to Nixon as “our drunken friend.”

During another call, Kissinger mentioned the number of American casualties in a major battle in Vietnam. “Oh, screw ’em,” said Nixon.

Kissinger took care to see that complete transcripts of his calls with the president were preserved in the personal records being accumulated for bis memoirs. , Despite his personal assessment of the president, the forces both of Kissinger’s personality and of circumstance combined to establish the relationship he desired with Nixon. As they drew closer, Kissinger became increasingly alienated from many of his own staff. Some who were disillusioned with both the Kissinger policies and his personality left his service, convinced that the problem was as much Kissinger as the president. He seemed to thrive on trouble, hysteria, fright, uncertainty. He raged at the secretaries. He appeared to take pleasure in humiliating his aides, once excluding his deputy, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, from a ceremonial picture-taking session with the words, “Not you, Hal, you’re not important enough.” Too sensitive Kissinger seemed singularly obsessed with his own prestige and image. If he had a long list of telephone messages, he would often call back Nancy' Maginnes first, then movie stars and celebrities, and then the president. He was enormously sensitive to criticism in the press; he assigned his aides the embarrassing job of heading off discreditable stories and lodging complaints about those that made it into print. The job was especially difficult because the offending stories were often true: Kissinger himself was, at times, the unwitting source. He let information slip as he courted many of Washington’s most influential journalists.

In Haig’s presence, Kissinger referred pointedly ers and a retinue of aides to military men as “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns for foreign policy. Kissinger often took

up a post outside the door-way to Haig's office and dressed him down in front of the secretaries for alleged acts of incompetence with which Haig was not even remotely involved. Another star Once when the air force was authorised to resume bombing of North Vietnam, the planes did not fly on certain days because of bad weather. Kissinger assailed Haig. He complained bitterly that the generals had been screaming for the limits to be taken off but that now their pilots were afraid to go up in a little, fog. The country needed gen-

erals who could win battles, Kissinger said, not good briefers like Haig.

On another occasion, when Haig was leaving for a trip to Cambodia, Kissinger escorted him to a staff car, where reportwatted. As Haig bent to get into the automobile, Kissinger stopped him and began polishing the single star on his shoulder. “Al, if you’re a good boy, I’ll get you another one,” he said.

Haig bore silently any resentment he felt. He had always been able to avoid friction with his superiors. In the Johnson Administration his tireless work and smooth, easy manner had impressed his influential bosses at the Pentagon. Haig had come highly' recommended to Kissinger, who had installed him in the White House basement as his military aide at the start of the Nixon Administration.

One of Haig’s early assignments was to prepare the daily National

Security' Council intelligence report, which was based on vast amounts of information that flowed into the White House situation room. His access to virtually every piece of intelligence that reached the White House was unique, and he quickly' acquired a superior knowledge of each National Security Council project and component. He handled the immense volume of paperwork adroitly, sometimes placing his own memos on top of the stacks that went to Kissinger. As he became more confident, he sometimes rewrote memos submitted to

Kissinger by other members of the staff. On other occasions he sent memos back to their authors with instructions that Kissinger wanted them done differently. No-one knew for sure if the desired revisions reflected the preference of the President, Kissinger or Haig. As Haig asserted his growing managerial role on the staff, others who saw themselves as the brightest stars in the Kissinger constellation of aides were eclipsed. Though some resented Haig, few questioned his authority. He had complete access to Kissinger, and Haig assured his colleagues that he was acting in their own interests.

If it happened rarely that someone balked at having his memo rewritten, Haig would explain that he was merely tailoring it to suit the idiosyncrasies of its recipient. It was better for all concerned, said Haig, that he deals with “those shits”

— Kissinger. Haldeman and the rest. He claimed no political ambitions. “I’ve got to get out of here." he would remind Kissinger's civilian aides — back into the real army, away from this temporary duty that could only screw up his military career. Still, the key to Haig's ascent was Kissinger, because Haig, now his deputy, was almost indispensable to him. He provided order, discipline, predictability. Without Haig there would be chaos. "It is clear that I don’t have anybody in mv office that I can trust except Colonel Haig." Kissinger told a senior F. 8.1. official in 1969 as he reviewed the wire-tapped conversations of several other aides.

l uo rivals

Richard Nixon was also an admirer. If the president stopped by the National Security’ Council office and found Kissinger gone, he would sit talking with Haig. Sometimes Nixon called Haig to his office to discuss military questions which Kissinger was unable to answer or which he had bucked to his deputy.

Nixon began to test Haig, making vague negative comments about Kissinger, expressing concern that Henry was off on his own or that he was not following policies and procedures they had agreed upon. He wanted Haig’s opinion. Delicately, Haig managed to defend Kissinger, at the same time making it clear that his ultimate loyalty was to the president. Kissinger began to be obsessed about what Haig and Nixon said to each other when they were alone. Kissinger regarded him-

self as a conservative in foreign-policy matters, but Haig, be observed, was a Rignt-vv inger. And Kissi nger was concerned that Haig might establish a private relationship with the president that would diminish his ovv n influence over Nixon in foreign affairs. Gradually Kissinger concluded that he had handed Haig too much power. Haig was devious, duplicitous. he sometimes said now Kissinget worried that Haig spied on him for

the Pentagon and. worse, for the president. Kissingers insecurities concerning his deputy finally reached such a pitch that he called n one of his secretaries. Julie Pineau, to ask her who was the most impressive person she had met on the job. Who w'as the best member of the National Security Council staff, the most competent? He was relieved, visibly, when she named Winston Lord, a Kissinger favourite. When he was around Kissinger, Haig took great care not to flaunt his relationship with Nixon. He

was determined to succeed with both men. Io Kissinger and his Sides. Haig sometimes re fcrred to the president aan iniwient.v weak ma' who lacked guts He joked that Nixon and Bebe Re bozo had a homosexual relationship. imitating what he called the president s limp-wrist manner. And around the men he cultivated in the Pentagon and t lii Whit <■ 11 ■ u - Haig implied ’hat K -- nger was too often fie barriei to definitive ini', taty action He complained about Ki- * ger’s tantrums, hi- dishonestv. hi- di-i irganisa. ion. his e luctanee to offend the weak-livered eggheads h.» had associated vv nh in academia Xixon'- tie«-<l 1 hese men thought Haig trusted them, because he was willing to share such harsh judgments with them. Kissinger was certain that Haig’s interventions had delayed a settlement with North Vietnam, but in January, 1973. Haig became vice-chief of staff t the army, after Nixon had promoted him over 240 higher-ranking officer*. Four months later, the departure of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman from ihe white Houss both caught up in the growing Watergate •■can dal. underlined the chang ing realities of the second Nixon administration — for Nixon, for Kissinger for Haig. As the president's popu larity, his pov. er and his grasp on his office declined, Kissingers was rising. It was no longer lie who needed Nixon, Kissinger told his aides; now it was Nixon who needed hint. Next: A “bonfire" solution to the Watergate bombshell. “The Press” and the New Zealand “Herald.” 1976.

*The president's two principal aides were "‘‘idiots” and “Nazis” Kissinger said. What kind of man would surround himself with such imbeciles?'

'He seemed to thrive on trouble., hysteria., fright. uncertainty. He appeared to take pleasure in humiliating his aides.'

‘‘Sometimes I get worried. The president is like a madman.'