CHAPTER 18

Den of Vipers

A MONTH AFTER the 1968 election, I attended the Republican governors’ conference in Palm Springs, California. In those days, I was a regular at such events, along with Jack Germond, Jules Witcover, David Broder, and a few other national reporters. Nothing much in the way of news ever happened, but the meetings provided a chance to gossip with politicians while relaxing with more than a few drinks.

The conference ended Saturday, December 7, 1968, but I stayed in Palm Springs that night to have dinner with Pat Hillings, one of my favorite California politicians. In 1950, Patrick J. Hillings at age twenty-seven had won the congressional seat vacated by Nixon when he ran for the Senate. For the next eight years, Hillings was Nixon’s man in the House of Representatives. He ran for attorney general of California in 1958 but was defeated in the Republican primary by Caspar Weinberger. I took it for granted that Nixon’s election meant that Hillings, only forty-five in 1969, would be a top White House aide. Consequently, over dinner that Saturday night, I was surprised when Hillings informed me he would not be joining the Nixon administration.

“Not a chance!” Pat told me. “Those teetotaling Christian Scientists don’t want any part of me, and I don’t want any part of them.” “What Christian Scientists?” I asked. “Haldeman and Ehrlichman,” he said, referring to two Nixon aides who had eclipsed him. I wasn’t aware of Bob Haldeman’s religion. I was barely aware of John Ehrlichman’s existence.

Hillings’s subsequent remarks are emblazoned in memory. “I don’t trust a man who never takes a drink. It’s worse than that. I know Dick Nixon about as well as anybody in politics, and I know his weaknesses. The Christian Scientists will bring out the worst in him.”

This seemed to me more than the complaint of somebody who had lost out in the power game, but I never dreamed how prescient Pat Hillings would prove.

         

ON SUNDAY, December 8, 1968, the day after my dinner in Palm Springs with Pat Hillings, I entered my room at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas and looked for the first time at the message I had picked up when I checked in at the front desk. It was from Bob Ellsworth, who said it was imperative to call him immediately.

I was in Las Vegas for a few days’ leisure time with my friend Joe Cerrell, now a Democratic consultant from Los Angeles, his wife, Lee, and some of their friends. The daily routine would be sleep late, eat a big breakfast, get a massage from the Dunes masseur, hit the craps and blackjack tables, go out to a lavish dinner with the Cerrell party, catch a big room headliner (Frank Sinatra) or a lounge act (Buddy Hackett), and return to the gaming tables until the early morning hours. While I pursued this sybaritic interlude, Geraldine was back in Maryland taking care of our infant son and three-year-old daughter.

But why was Bob Ellsworth calling? Robert F. Ellsworth had been a news source for me since his election to Congress in 1960, at age thirty-four, from the Kansas suburban area across the Missouri River from Kansas City, Missouri. He was a liberal Republican, a type in much greater supply then than today. Ellsworth combined his progressive agenda with a well-informed, muscular anticommunism in world affairs that especially appealed to me.

Bob was extremely well informed, and—to my delight as a reporter—extraordinarily candid. After an unsuccessful Senate bid in 1966, he joined fellow liberal Republicans Ray Price and Bill Safire on Richard Nixon’s staff, and became his campaign chairman. Ellsworth fell victim to the intrigue constantly swirling around Nixon, as the candidate’s law partner John Mitchell took command. But Ellsworth stayed on in a lesser position.

Now, one month after the 1968 election, Bob Ellsworth had learned my whereabouts from Geraldine and left word for me at the Dunes. When I reached him, Bob told me he had a big story for me. Mel Laird was going to be named secretary of defense. “Not Melvie!” I said, in shock. “Is this a trial balloon?” “No, it is hard. The decision has been made.” Laird had agreed on Friday night, Ellsworth related, and it would be announced Wednesday.

It is difficult for anyone who never has been a reporter to appreciate the adrenaline rush I felt when I heard this news. The consensus in Washington had been that Senator Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson of Washington state would take the Pentagon post as the high-profile Democrat that Nixon craved for his cabinet.

Congressman Melvin R. Laird of Wisconsin loved power, exercised from the inner recesses of the congressional hierarchy. There had been no mention of Laird for any Nixon administration post, much less the critically important Defense portfolio. At age forty-five he had no managerial or administrative experience, only legislative.

Melvie was notorious for dispensing poison pills about his adversaries, and for a time I was on the receiving end. After I wrote about him in a mildly critical way, he spread the word in the Republican cloakroom that Novak was a hard-bitten liberal Democrat. But mutual acquaintances on Capitol Hill conjectured that Laird and Novak constituted a marriage made in heaven. And so it was.

He may have been my best congressional source ever. I relished private luncheons in his Capitol leadership office—a highball (“Let’s have a little shooter,” he would say), followed by the customary steak. Laird would dispense delicious political gossip, inside tips, and grand strategy. That provoked wisecracks on Capitol Hill about how amazing it was that Mel Laird found the time to write the Evans & Novak column.

My first impulse was to call Laird for details. But Ellsworth admonished me not to check the story with anybody—particularly not Mel, who would quickly inform Nixon to make it clear that he was not the source. Nixon was obsessive about leaks and might well announce Laird’s selection then and there. I would have to trust Ellsworth as a longtime reliable source.

Our next regularly scheduled column was Wednesday when Ellsworth said Nixon would announce Laird. But Nixon could speed up the announcement or the news could leak before then. I called Rowly in Washington, and he said we had to write a special column now for the next morning’s papers. An editor was called into the Publishers-Hall Syndicate offices in Manhattan, and our client newspapers were alerted that a major exclusive was on the way.

The column, a rush job with no chance for the interviewing that Rowly and I normally would do, stands up after four decades. Apart from breaking the news, the most important element in the column was a nuance that eluded many straight news reports on Laird’s selection. I wrote that Laird would be “a strong force for a quickly negotiated settlement of the Vietnam War.” From my many conversations with Mel, I knew he regarded the war as unwinnable. The importance of ending U.S. involvement is why, I think, he gave up a job he loved that would have stretched twenty years or more into the future for a thankless assignment that would not last more than four years.

Based mainly on what Ellsworth told me, I explained in the column what had happened to Scoop Jackson as defense secretary.

…[M]uch to the surprise of Nixon insiders, Jackson last week rejected the offer—thereby heeding the pleas of several Democratic Senators who warned him Nixon would use him as the scapegoat for reduced domestic spending. Whether Jackson agreed with that view or not, he did feel—and so informed Nixon aides—that liberal Democrats in the Senate would make his life miserable as Secretary of Defense.

Wire services reports credited the Evans & Novak column as the sole source of the Laird appointment. Many purchasers of our column, including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Boston Globe, ran our story on page one. The Washington Post started the column on page one until its reporting staff got its own news story, slipping our column back to the op-ed page. It was probably our clearest, cleanest scoop ever on a big story.

Celebrated as a mighty reporter, I would not have learned about the Laird appointment if Ellsworth had not called me in Las Vegas. So why do leakers leak? It can be to promote an idea or to prevent something from happening, for self-glorification or defamation of an enemy, or to curry favor with the reporter. In the case of Bob Ellsworth’s leak, it was none of the above. When I telephoned Bob in 2004 to ask permission to reveal him as the leaker after thirty-six years, he said he was just trying to help out a friend.

Laird got hold of me Monday to complain—obliquely, as was his style. He said I had nearly killed his aged mother when she learned the news without being alerted by her son. He tried to be jocular, but he was upset and our relationship cooled a little. Exclusive stories often cost the reporter.

         

THE TRANSITION FROM Johnson to Nixon was the second handover of power from one party to another that I had covered. The mood in Washington bore no resemblance to the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy eight years earlier. The arrival of the New Frontier had been a time of high excitement and anticipation. While there was widespread relief in 1969 that LBJ was leaving, not even Republicans were excited about what was ahead.

Inaugural week parties seemed pedestrian compared to Kennedy’s in 1961 or even the LBJ parties of 1965. I had attended a spectacular 1965 party hosted by the Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham at a huge tent on the grounds of her Georgetown mansion. In 1969 Mrs. Graham gave no party, but she did attend one that Geraldine and I hosted at our modest suburban home.

It was our first inaugural party, beginning an annual event that continues into the twenty-first century. The onslaught of chauffeur-driven limos created a stir in our middle-class neighborhood. Among senior Nixon aides, Bob Haldeman, John Mitchell, and Chuck Colson were not invited; Bob Finch, Mel Laird, and Bryce Harlow were invited, and attended. I thought it was the best party of inaugural week, but that assessment may have derived from more consumption of Scotch than was fitting for a host.

         

ROWLY AND I had been performing in a variety of roles for Channel 5 WTTG, the Metromedia station in Washington, ever since Ed Turner tapped us for election night commentary in 1966. To begin 1969 and the Nixon administration, Turner crafted a new half-hour weekend program for us, The Evans-Novak Report, with us interviewing a major newsmaker. Turner, the WTTG news director, talked Metromedia into running the program on its other stations (in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Chicago) and sold its usage at a nominal fee to independent stations. That constituted a neat little jerry-built network of eighteen stations, just for Evans and Novak.

Turner would go on to be a big-time news executive, but there was nothing big-time about Metromedia in 1969 except for top-drawer guests that Rowly and I talked into coming on our show. Our program was taped early every Wednesday evening in the WTTG studios in northwest Washington to leave enough time for tapes to be airmailed to subscribing stations for broadcast on Saturday or Sunday. Our four-day-old tapes were competing with Meet the Press and other network interview programs that were broadcast live. Maybe news moved more slowly then, but I cannot remember being beaten or overtaken by events.

I have found television executives to be among the least imaginative people, but Ed Turner was a notable exception. Only thirty-three years old, he grafted onto The Evans-Novak Report the first innovation in TV news interview programs since Lawrence Spivak had produced the basic format a quarter of a century earlier. Ed noted that all these programs failed to explain to viewers what the guest had said or failed to say.

Time led the “Television” section of its February 28, 1969, issue with a review of our program called “The Empty Chair Approach.” The show contains, said Time, “one new wrinkle,” which it went on to describe.

…[D]uring the last 2½ minutes of the half-hour interview, the guest is excused, and the two inquisitors tear apart what he has said—and not said.

The format calls for subject to leave the set during the last commercial break. Then the camera pans past his empty chair and the two interviewers sum up whatever news they may have coaxed from him and expose any equivocations. Robert Finch, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, was on his way out but still within earshot when Evans commented on the subject of federal welfare standards, “we got a lot of gobbledygook.”

Novak (the saturnine-looking one) observed that Democratic National Chairman Fred Harris was “trying to carry water on both shoulders” in discussing whether the old-line politicians or the new black groups should represent the party in Georgia.

After cataloging other insults to guests, the magazine concluded:

The empty chair approach offers an obvious advantage to the interviewers, who can demolish a guest for inconsistencies, evasions or even outright untruths, without having to do it to his face. If it seems rather unfair, the fact is that TV’s panel interviewers only occasionally offer that sort of candid criticism while the guest is still around to fight back.

Rowly and I were delighted to have our own TV program, but we regretted that this would end our appearances on Meet the Press. Rowly thought we should give Larry Spivak advance notice, and we ended up as luncheon guests of the Meet the Press creator at his apartment in the Sheraton Park Hotel.

Spivak came across on television as hard-boiled, but he was really a warm gentleman of sixty-eight years. He told us how much he would miss Rowly and me on his program but said he would welcome us back when we returned. He added: “It won’t be that long. Metromedia is not the kind of organization that will stick to a program like this.”

He was right. If a Metromedia program did not bring in money, it was off to the slaughterhouse. The Evans-Novak Report simply did not produce enough cash. Ed Turner fought hard to save his and our creation, but the gods of Metromedia killed the program early in 1970 after one year.

         

ON APRIL 21, 1969, Nixon nominated Congressman Donald Rumsfeld of Illinois as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)—the antipoverty program that was the heart of LBJ’s Great Society and had been attacked by Nixon and other Republicans in the 1968 campaign. But the OEO was retained under the “Moynihan Doctrine.” Democrat Pat Moynihan, brought into the Nixon White House as a Cabinet-level counselor, had convinced Nixon to follow British practice of a conservative government retaining the social initiatives of its liberal predecessor.

When he resigned from Congress, Don Rumsfeld was thirty-six years old, a protégé of Minority Leader Jerry Ford, and seen as his eventual successor. But the congressional Old Guard detested Rumsfeld as an arrogant know-it-all. An ambitious Rumsfeld felt he had run out of string on Capitol Hill after four terms, though he required the upgrading of the OEO post to cabinet status to come on board.

“Stay in touch,” Rumsfeld wrote me November 4, 1968, after a favorable column by me. I paid Rummy a visit in his new office in the Executive Office Building next door to the White House. He greeted me in the outer office and introduced me to his new assistant, a pleasant-faced young man of twenty-seven. It was Dick Cheney. I recall few of the hundreds of assistants I have met through their bosses, but I remembered this one—and also what Rumsfeld told me. He would, in effect, follow the Moynihan Doctrine, not only retaining the Great Society’s antipoverty program but keeping it largely as the Democrats had conceived it. He would shock former colleagues on the Hill, fighting a veto for governors on poverty proposals. He was influenced by Paul O’Neill, a brainy civil servant inherited from the Kennedy-Johnson administration (and denounced by the conservative weekly Human Events as a liberal intruder in the Republican administration).

         

ONE SENIOR NIXON aide who paid no attention to the president’s prohibition on contacts with Evans and Novak was National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger. Immediately after the 1968 election, Rowly began cultivating Kissinger (and his illustrious young staff that included Al Haig and John Negroponte) as major sources for our column. I don’t recall Rowly ever writing a word critical of Kissinger. Negative comments in the column (increasing as the years passed) about Kissinger’s détente policy all came from me. I assumed that Rowly blamed the criticism on me when he talked to Henry, but I did not realize until more than thirty years later that he could attribute to me a column that I had not even seen.

The Evans & Novak column published on April 5, 1973, reported that former NSC staff members of Kissinger’s, who was now secretary of state, were being blackballed by Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman at the White House in their quest for high State Department positions. There was nothing in the account critical of Kissinger, but he did not want his relations roiled with the powerful Haldeman. On the morning the column ran, Kissinger called Evans from California to protest, as I learned in the summer of 2006 from a surreptitiously recorded White House telephone tape.

“Why don’t you check your columns with me?” Kissinger demanded. Instead of defending his column, Rowly took the Novak default position. “That was a product of my partner’s reporting exercise,” he replied. “Yes,” Kissinger replied, “but why not check it? Good grief, you call me often enough.” Later in their conversation, Evans pressed home his point: “Well, listen, I’m telling you the truth that my partner did most of the work on this, and he is now in Japan. And if it is not a fair portrayal, I’d like to correct it. And I’m sorry.”

But Rowly was not “telling you the truth.” Not only did I not do “most of the work” on the column, I had not even seen it at the moment Kissinger and Evans were talking about it. When either Rowly or I was abroad, the traveling partner did not see in advance the columns written in Washington by the other partner. The April 5 column was written while I was in Tokyo on an Asian reporting trip.

Rowly never mentioned to me his conversation with Kissinger. I wonder how often he used this ploy?

         

ROWLY AND I had no contact at all with the two most powerful Nixon advisers: Attorney General John Mitchell and Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman. Neither had any interest in talking to reporters or returning their calls. Perhaps Haldeman as an advertising agency account executive hawking Black Flag insecticide never learned that avoiding the press did not guarantee safety from press exposure. But some of Haldeman’s colleagues, especially Bob Ellsworth, were eager to talk about what was happening at the White House. On April 2, 1969, the Evans & Novak column reported:

…[S]ome of Haldeman’s critics felt he and his young crew-cut lieutenants, termed the Beaver Patrol behind their backs because of Boy Scout tendencies, had emphasized petty intraoffice efficiencies while neglecting vital policy coordination between government departments.

The major point of the column, however, was to reveal the emergence of “an obscure aide named John Ehrlichman, purposefully assuming direction of domestic policy.” I wrote that Ehrlichman was eclipsing Haldeman by seizing the policy reins. That was wrong. I was only as accurate as my sources, and my sources were inaccurate in this case. Ehrlichman and Haldeman were not competitors but more like Hindenburg and Ludendorff governing Germany at the end of World War I. Nevertheless, this was the first journalistic effort to come close to who was really running the government under Richard Nixon.

Haldeman wrote in his diary on April 7:

Press trying to build up idea of internal feud: E[hrlichman] vs. me. Hard to sell, but Evans and Novak giving it a try, to great glee of some White House staff. [Ellsworth?]…

Long session tonight with Larry [Higby, Haldeman’s deputy] and [Dwight] Chapin [Nixon’s appointments secretary] about Haldeman image. They’re concerned by Evans and Novak and other adverse publicity, feel we need to get our line out, and that I have to move more into public eye. Problem is to define first the exact view we want to project. They had some good ideas, had put in a lot of time and thought. Also [speechwriter] Bill Safire working on general suggestions. Probably do need to do something to avoid letting the “von Haldeman” concept become firmly entrenched.

This entry reflects the perpetual meandering talk about public relations in the Nixon White House, exposed by the invaluable, posthumously published The Haldeman Diaries. Little was done about the “Haldeman image.” He made no appearances in 1969 on any Sunday television program. The only instance of putting him “more in the public eye” that I can find was his appearance as a guest on April 23 on Breakfast with Godfrey (where I was present). He said and accomplished nothing.

I am amused to think of Haldeman spending a whole evening with two “Beaver Patrol” members, Chapin and Higby, vainly seeking a way to counter the Evans & Novak column. They probably never considered the simple expedient of Haldeman answering one of my phone calls and maybe inviting one of us to lunch in his West Wing office.

Am I suggesting a news source could buy off Novak with a hamburger in the White House? No government official or politician can secure immunity from a reporter by helping him out. Even my most important sources—such as Mel Laird and Wilbur Mills—were not immune from an occasional dig. Still, Bob Haldeman was treated more harshly because he refused any connection with me. He made himself more of a target than he had to be by refusing to be a source.

         

MEL LAIRD INVITED Rowly and me over to the Pentagon for lunch on March 20, 1969. He flashed the same crooked grin familiar from simpler days on Capitol Hill. Henry Kissinger, the new national security adviser, in private conversations with colleagues had already called Laird “devious” (which fit the old saw of being called ugly by a frog). I learned over the next hour just how devious Laird could be. He had dispensed political morsels to me in our Capitol luncheons. But now at the Pentagon, he provided a whole feast.

Laird laid out his plan for removing U.S. troops from Vietnam. The clumsy old phrase “de-Americanization” was changed to “Vietnamization,” but in fact the whole concept was changed. Nixon’s original plan had been to prepare South Vietnam’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to take over military duties from the Americans after ongoing talks in Paris, orchestrated by Kissinger, had agreed on mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese regular troops.

Now, Laird revealed to us, the Americans were being replaced by suitably equipped and trained ARVN forces no matter what Kissinger accomplished in Paris. Ready or not, here we go! Laird indicated Kissinger did not like it and the generals were deeply apprehensive, but it was going to happen anyway.

On an easel in Laird’s office was a large chart hidden from view by a cover. Cautioning us that this was really off the record, the secretary briefly removed the cover before hiding it again. I got a glimpse of a detailed plan to replace, unit by unit, U.S. with ARVN troops.

Laird ignored the Paris peace talks. Mel appreciated that the Communists would agree to nothing less than a unitary Vietnamese state under one-party Communist rule. Thus, Laird understood—and tried to get Nixon to understand—that his primary mission was to end not the Vietnam War but U.S. participation under the most favorable conditions for the anticommunist Vietnamese.

What Laird revealed to Rowly and me did not resemble the new administration’s public statements. On March 19, Laird told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the United States planned no troop pullout “at the present time.” Five days later, under a Washington Post headline of “Secret Laird Plan Will Allow Early Troop Pullouts,” our column began:

Working behind an essential curtain of secrecy, the new Administration has now developed an anti-war strategy which is all but certain to start significant withdrawals of U.S. forces from Vietnam within six months….

Laird now talks about equipping the South Vietnamese to handle both the Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars, with steadily declining combat aid from the U.S.

Administration spokesmen declared there was not a shred of truth to our column, but it was Evans & Novak at our best. The first troop withdrawals were announced officially in June, giving us a six-week beat. Thanks to Laird, we also were proved correct on longer-range predictions. We wrote that “save for heavy equipment, logistical support, and Green Beret troops—most U.S. combat forces could be withdrawn by the summer of 1970.” When I arrived in Saigon in April 1970, most were gone

         

ROWLY AND I, heeding the advice of columnist Joe Alsop, Rowly’s friend and mentor, each took at least one foreign reporting trip annually (more for Rowly). My 1969 trip was for three weeks to seek signs of the Soviet empire unraveling by reporting from Eastern Europe.

Rowly, who had superb intelligence contacts, made available to me a special service the CIA then provided select journalists. Prior to every overseas trip, I would go to Langley, be ushered into an antiseptic room, and briefed on the countries I was visiting. Although this service gave me useful detail, I sometimes found the CIA’s findings contradicted by subsequent reporting.

Such was the case with Czechoslovakia in 1969. The CIA’s analysts insisted to me that the Soviet intervention of 1968 would fail in a short time and Moscow would release its hold. I stopped in Munich on the way to Prague for a briefing by Radio Free Europe’s analysts, and they took seriously the Brezhnev Doctrine, with Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev declaring the Kremlin’s determination that no nation could throw off the yoke of communism.

The pessimists were correct. The sources I had met on my first visit to Prague in 1967 seemed personally diminished in 1969 by the Soviet intervention. They felt that they had lost the fight for freedom, with no hope for a foreseeable reversal.

Dan Morgan, a young correspondent for the Washington Post, was responsible for the most memorable moment of my 1969 visit to Prague. He introduced me to Emil Zatopek, symbol of the triumph and the suppression of the human spirit in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. I am a hero worshiper who, in my line of work, has found few heroes to worship. Zatopek, the greatest distance runner of all time, was a global sports icon and a national Czech hero. He had been promoted to colonel in the Czech army by 1968 and lived a comfortable life coddled by the Communist state. When the moment of truth came in the Prague Spring, he chose freedom and abandoned security to support the anticommunist revolt and oppose Soviet intervention. Zatopek was cashiered from the army, expelled from the Communist Party, and faced criminal punishment when I met him in 1969.

When Dan Morgan led me into a basement café in Prague to meet Zatopek, I was thrilled to meet this paragon of sports and patriotism—age forty-six but looking much older. Would he, I asked, consider leaving Czechoslovakia? I quoted him in an Evans & Novak column from Prague: “My place is here to the bitter end.” That led me to conclude the column with this final paragraph:

That end will be bitter, indeed, in the opinion of the liberals until the day, far off if it ever comes, of a liberalization of the Soviet regime itself. A former commentator for Radio Prague, prohibited now from writing or broadcasting, told us with typical Czech irony: “I see the Russians relenting—about 20 years from now.” It was the most optimistic prophecy we heard in Prague.

My radio commentator’s accuracy was uncanny. It was twenty-one years before freedom came to Czechoslovakia when Communist rule ended with the Soviet Union’s breakdown and the bloodless “Velvet Revolution” in Prague. Emil Zatopek paid dearly, forced into six years at hard labor in the country’s uranium mines that produced raw material for the Soviet nuclear weapons program. He was a true hero.

         

WHEN NIXON HAD been in office for eight months, issue 59 of the Evans-Novak Political Report, published on September 10, 1969, offered this analysis:

We continue to note a strange contrast between the President’s apparent state of euphoria and specific difficult problems—Vietnam, the economy, the tax bill—that are piling up. We find increasing sentiment among Republicans that Mr. Nixon must devote far more personal attention to the details of specific issues.

The newsletter went on to relate how Nixon had backed away from his announced firm stand against inflation, then added this paragraph (underlined so that our readers could not miss the significance):

We continue to feel that Nixon’s ambivalence on this subject (as well as Vietnam, desegregation, etc.) is giving his Administration a blurred image at best, raising doubts about the Government’s direction, intentions and, most damaging, competence.

Three days later, September 13, President Nixon was not happy with what he read in his morning news summary, which included a report on the September 10 edition of our little newsletter. The White House summarizer called it “some of the most negative comment on the Administration to date.” Thanks to William Safire’s account of the pre-Watergate Nixon administration (Before the Fall), we know that the president fired off written instructions to White House communications chief Herb Klein: “1. Get some tough letters to these guys from subscribers. 2. Be sure they are cut off [from contact with the White House].”

“Klein did neither,” Safire wrote. “His routine refusal to carry out these ukases are why Old Hand Klein was not in close, and why he emerged from the ruins with his reputation intact.” Indeed, while colleagues went to prison, Klein returned to a senior executive position with the San Diego Union, where he remained into the twenty-first century.

Bob Ellsworth and John Sears, two Nixon aides who were prime sources for me, both left the White House in 1969. Just as Klein forfeited being “in close” with Nixon by refusing to carry out Nixon’s madcap schemes, Ellsworth and Sears did not help themselves by being on good terms with journalists.

Sears told me Ellsworth had gotten in the doghouse with Haldeman and Mitchell, dating back to the 1968 campaign when Mitchell replaced Ellsworth as campaign manager. It continued into the White House, Sears continued to me:

Those kind of things never get any better. The longer people are together in a situation suspicious of each other, people tend to get more and more suspicious of each other and then they forget why they started to get suspicious of each other…. It was easy for them [Haldeman and Mitchell] to come around [and] say, “Hell, Bob, we don’t have an awful lot for you to do. ‘X’ is doing this, ‘Y’ is doing that. Where do you fit in here?”

The men on Nixon’s dark side were about to run out of the government one of the president’s most able supporters after only a few months in 1969. Kissinger came to the rescue. He arranged for Nixon, who never liked to fire anyone, to send Ellsworth to Brussels as the U.S. ambassador to NATO in April—removing him from this den of vipers for one of the best jobs in government.

John Sears stayed on at the White House six months longer than Ellsworth, but was not so fortunate. Mitchell was determined to be done with his brilliant young former law partner, complaining that Sears drank too much and talked too much to the press. What I think really bothered him was that Sears was not afraid of John Mitchell.

By the early summer of 1969, Sears later informed me, “I felt I didn’t have any effectiveness. I had outlived my usefulness.” He was never fired but in October left voluntarily—not dreaming at age twenty-nine that a man of his intelligence, charm, and ambition never again would be on a government payroll. I asked whether he saw the president before he left. “No, he was embarrassed. I did ask to see him once when I had decided to go. I was refused the opportunity. I am sure he was embarrassed.”

Could Richard Nixon not bear to face a valuable young lieutenant who had resigned? Sears later sat in the small conference room in our expanded little suite of offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, eating a sandwich lunch with me, and talking about Nixon:

He can be a very tough guy as long as he doesn’t have to see the other guy. In personal relationships, he has a good bit of cowardice because he can’t do things they can do. He can’t make small talk. He can’t talk and derive a result that’s satisfactory. He doesn’t want to get involved in confrontations with people.

He’s supposed to be [a] hard, tough politician, and he can’t take what another politician is saying about him. He’ll sit there and act really strong, hard, tough. He’s not. He’s saying all those things to convince himself, also to convince the people [in the room], because that’s part of convincing himself. That’s part of the reason he doesn’t like to see a whole lot of people.

These words, never published until now, are a corrective to the White House tapes and the Haldeman diaries, pored over by historians who conclude that Nixon was a tyrant in embryo. Based on Sears’s assessment, Nixon was a fraud—a make-believe tough guy.