TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, 1973 | DAY 3
Henry Kissinger with his briefing books en route to Paris peace talks, January 22, 1973
It was 9:35 a.m. Paris time, still the middle of the night in Washington, because of the six-hour time difference. Kissinger went around the room shaking hands before turning his full attention to the gray-haired man in the somber Mao suit. One of the founders of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Tho had spent ten years in French colonial prisons. He had devoted his entire adult life to waging guerrilla war. Behind his back, Kissinger nicknamed him Ducky as a way to make fun of his dour Marxist-Leninist persona. Ducky had lectured Kissinger frequently on the evils of American imperialism and the “heroic struggle” of the Vietnamese people. Today, however, he was on his best behavior.
“I changed a few pages in your Vietnamese text last night, Mr. Special Advisor,” Kissinger kidded his old sparring partner. “But it only concerned North Vietnamese troops. You won’t notice until you get back home.”
Tho laughed politely at the joke. Over the previous two days and nights, his aides had laboriously checked every detail in the draft, binding agreed texts with ribbons and sealing wax to prevent any unauthorized alterations. Humor was a standard Kissinger negotiating tool, a way of establishing a personal bond with an ideological adversary. In this case, he was also gently poking fun at North Vietnamese suspicions of American good faith and their paranoid obsession with security.
Permitting Communist troops to remain in South Vietnam following a full American withdrawal had been a crucial part of a hard-fought compromise that had opened the way to a final peace settlement. In return, Ducky dropped a long-standing demand for a coalition government in Saigon to replace the “puppet” Thieu administration. The Thieu government and Communist Vietcong would continue to administer areas they already controlled. There would be a cease-fire followed, within sixty days, by the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. troops and liberation of prisoners of war.
Kissinger had sent repeated signals to Hanoi, through both Moscow and Beijing, that the United States would not stand permanently in the way of a Communist victory. In contacts with Soviet and Chinese officials, he talked about the need for a “decent interval” of one or two years between a full U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the reunification of the peninsula under Communist rule. During his first trip to Beijing, in July 1971, he explicitly conceded that the Thieu government might be toppled in the aftermath of a U.S. pullout. “If the government is as unpopular as you seem to think,” he told the Chinese prime minister, Zhou En-lai, “then the quicker our forces are withdrawn, the quicker it will be overthrown. And if it is overthrown after we have withdrawn, we will not intervene.”
Kissinger and Tho had been on the verge of a deal back in October 1972, when Ducky agreed to a transitional period for South Vietnam, leading eventually to free elections and the return of American POWs. Determined to flatter his boss, Kissinger compared the breakthrough to Nixon’s visit to China and détente with the Soviet Union. “Well, Mr. President,” he told Nixon, “it looks like we’ve got three out of three!” To celebrate the occasion, Nixon invited his aides to join him for a steak dinner in his EOB office. “The P told Manolo to bring the good wine, his ’57 Lafite-Rothschild, or whatever it is, to be served to everyone,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. “Usually it’s just served to the P and the rest of us have some California Beaulieu vineyard stuff.”
The celebration was premature. When Thieu learned about the latest twist in the negotiations, he exploded. Allowing a Communist troop presence in the South—even disguised as Vietcong irregulars—would end up destroying his government. Thieu insisted there could be no cease-fire without a full North Vietnamese withdrawal. “Have you ever seen any peace accord in the history of the world in which the invaders had been permitted to stay in the territories they had invaded?” he asked Haig, who was sent to Saigon to placate him. For Thieu, the proposed peace accord was tantamount to “committing suicide.”
With the U.S. presidential election only a few days away, Nixon could not afford a public confrontation with a loyal American ally. More than twenty thousand Americans had been killed in Vietnam since he took over as president in January 1969, in addition to the thirty-six thousand who had died under LBJ. Any suggestion that their lives had been sacrificed in vain would undermine Nixon’s claim to be delivering “peace with honor.” From Nixon’s point of view, it was vital that any break with Thieu be postponed until after he had “crushed” McGovern and the Democrats. He could not risk the charge of betrayal.
Nixon assigned Kissinger the task of keeping everything “confused and fuzzed up” until after the election. Ordered to “bamboozle the bastards,” the national security adviser assured reporters that any last-minute glitches could be quickly ironed out. He held a televised press conference on October 26 to proclaim, “We believe peace is at hand.” Delivered in a thick, sententious German accent, it was a phrase that would soon return to haunt him. When he presented Ducky with the full list of Thieu’s demands, including a complete withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops, it became clear that the gulf between Hanoi and Saigon was insuperable. As everyone dug back in to their entrenched positions, Kissinger began to speak of both sides with hatred. The Communists in Hanoi were “tawdry, filthy shits” who “make the Russians look good.” Thieu was an “unmitigated, selfish, psychopathic son of a bitch.” In short, they were all crazy. “When you meet with two groups of Vietnamese the same day, you might as well run an insane asylum,” he complained.
For Nixon, the way out of the impasse was another round of bombings of the North, more intense than anything that had gone before. He ordered every available B-52, the heaviest bomber in the American arsenal, to join the fight. Knowing that Nixon was a football fan, the air force code-named the raids Linebacker II. For eleven days in succession excepting only Christmas Day, wave after wave of B-52s, supported by hundreds of tactical aircraft, pounded railroads, bridges, airfields, ammunition dumps, power plants, and SAM sites in the Hanoi area. Kissinger described the policy as “total brutality.” Each wave of B-52s was the equivalent of “a 4,000-plane raid in World War II.” Many of the same targets were hit multiple times, until there was nothing left to destroy. The North Vietnamese reported 1,624 civilian casualties; losses on the American side included fifteen B-52s, at $15 million apiece, and a further 90 killed or captured pilots. The raids were the culmination of an eight-year air war that had showered more American ordnance on North Vietnam than all the bombs dropped in all the theaters of World War II combined.
The “Christmas bombing” did little to change the basic outlines of the peace agreement that Kissinger had previously negotiated with Ducky. The few, largely symbolic, modifications to the original document made no difference to the overall balance of forces. But Nixon had shown that he was prepared to go “the extra mile” on behalf of his South Vietnamese ally. By his demonstration of massive American airpower, he could claim that he had bombed the Communists back to the negotiating table. He had also won vital breathing space for the government in Saigon. “Call it cosmetics or whatever you want,” Nixon had told Haig back in October. South Vietnam had to be given “a chance to survive. Not to survive forever, but they’ve got to survive a reasonable time. And if they don’t, everybody will say, well, goddamn it, we did our part.”
Both Kissinger and Le Duc Tho did their best to maintain a friendly, lighthearted tone at their final meeting. Kissinger joked that he hoped Tho would take him on a guided tour of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Ducky referred only obliquely to the destruction wrought by the B-52s in discussing the logistical problems posed by a proposed Kissinger visit to Hanoi. Damage to the airport runway in Hanoi would make it difficult for his plane to land.
“We must have been aiming at a different airport because we never hit the airport we want,” joked Kissinger.
“I thought you could land by parachute,” said Ducky.
The last point that needed to be settled was the question of U.S. economic assistance to North Vietnam as an incentive for respecting the peace agreement. After a final round of haggling with Tho, Kissinger agreed to an aid package of up to $4.75 billion. In the spirit of the occasion, he could not resist adding, “I give you my shirt, too.” A few minutes later, the two negotiators went through the pile of documents on the table, initialing each one by one. They then walked outside into the Parisian drizzle for a celebratory photograph. Nixon had repeatedly instructed Kissinger not to smile when photographed with Tho. But on this occasion, each man grinned broadly as he clasped the other’s right hand. To outside appearances, they were the best of friends.
Back in Washington, the trial of the Watergate burglars was about to resume in the U.S. District Courthouse, a mile down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. After nine days of hearings, Judge John J. Sirica was making little progress in establishing the truth. The questions that had intrigued Americans for months—who ordered the bugging of the Democratic Party headquarters and why—remained unresolved. The judge was sure of one thing only: the defendants, and at least some of the government witnesses, were hiding things from him.
It was a strange and perplexing case that had begun with a routine discovery by an alert night watchman at the recently completed Watergate office building. The ten-story office block was part of a complex of five buildings designed by a futuristic Italian architect on a triangular swath of land on the Potomac River adjacent to the Kennedy Center. The Democratic headquarters occupied the entire sixth floor with a balcony that looked northward, away from the river, across a dreary six-lane road. The residential buildings, by contrast, were distinguished by their swirling shapes and curving concrete balconies with spectacular views across the water. From the river, the complex resembled a giant cruise liner, a self-contained world with its own swimming pools, restaurants, post office, bakery, florist, and hairdresser. “A city within a city,” the developers boasted. The vaguely nautical architecture and upmarket clientele caused Washington wags to refer to the Watergate as “the ship of fools.” The Washington Post described the complex as “a glittering Potomac Titanic with no icebergs or steerage class.”
Criticized as out of keeping with Washington’s predominantly neoclassical architecture, the Watergate had quickly become one of the most sought-after addresses in the city, particularly for Republicans. Bob Haldeman had rented an apartment while waiting for his home in Georgetown to be redecorated. Other residents included several Nixon cabinet members and his secretary, Rose Mary Woods. The head of the president’s reelection committee, John Mitchell, and his wife, Martha, owned a lavish duplex with a marble entryway that spanned the seventh and eighth floors of Watergate East. The beehived, alcoholic Martha was hailed as a “media-age Marie Antoinette” for her tart observations on American politics delivered in a distinctive southern drawl. In Watergate social terms, however, she ranked below the “Dragon Lady,” Anna Chennault, who occupied the penthouse suite six floors above. The Chinese-born widow of the commander of the Flying Tigers fighter group from World War II was lauded in the press as “a figure of glamor and mystery,” the Republican “hostess with the mostest.” A diminutive, intimidating beauty, she employed a personal chef to prepare thirteen-course dinners for the Washington elite. As a Nixon fund-raiser, she refused to accept political donations for less than $500, considering them a “waste of time.”
Government exhibit in Watergate case showing the Watergate office building sandwiched between Watergate West (bottom center) and Watergate East. The Democratic Party offices were on the sixth floor of the office building with a balcony, opposite the Howard Johnson motel (bottom left). The Watergate Hotel is behind the office building. The Kennedy Center and the Lincoln Memorial are visible in the background.
Back in the Watergate office building, the security guard Frank Wills reported for duty at midnight on Saturday, June 17, 1972, for what was known as the graveyard shift. Soon after starting on his rounds, he noticed that a piece of duct tape had been placed across the latch to a door leading to an underground parking garage. Because the tape was preventing the door from locking, he dutifully removed it. Feeling hungry, he went in search of some take-out food from the Howard Johnson motel across the street. After leisurely finishing his burger and fries, he rechecked the door to the parking area. To his surprise, he discovered that the latch had been re-taped during the hour he had been away. Whoever applied the tape the first time was evidently still in the building and planning to exit via the garage. At 1:47 a.m., Wills called the police to report a suspected burglary in progress.
Three plainclothes police officers arrived five minutes later in an unmarked patrol car. As members of the so-called bum squad, they had been on the lookout for drug dealers in Georgetown when they were diverted to the Watergate. They all had long hair and were dressed in windbreakers and surplus army jackets. A trail of taped latches led them through back stairwells to the Democratic Party offices on the sixth floor. When they entered the office suite, guns drawn, they found five middle-aged men in suits and ties crouching behind desks and cubicle partitions. The burglars put up no resistance, instead raising their hands, which were covered with blue surgical gloves. “Five of the easiest lockups I have ever had,” one of the cops later remarked.
A search of the burglars’ belongings revealed a walkie-talkie, two Minolta cameras, lock picks, pen-size Mace canisters, an assortment of electronic bugging devices, miniature radio transmitters, and wads of crisp $100 bills, many of them numbered sequentially. The arrested men all gave false names, but fingerprints revealed their true identities. Four of them were Miami-based Cuban exiles who had been involved in a variety of anti-Castro activities, including the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The fifth was a “security consultant” named James McCord who had earlier worked for the Central Intelligence Agency as an anti-bugging specialist. Further investigation established that McCord was “chief of security” for Nixon’s reelection committee. He had even been a bodyguard for Martha Mitchell. McCord reported to a former FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy, who was responsible for the committee’s “counterintelligence operations.” Liddy had also recruited Howard Hunt, whose name and White House telephone number were found in the address books of the Cubans.
And there the trail ended—at least for the time being. Months of investigation by the FBI had failed to uncover a White House link to the burglars higher than Liddy and Hunt, who were arrested and then released on bail in September 1972. But there were unconfirmed reports in the press that the defendants were receiving financial support and help with their legal bills in exchange for keeping quiet. The government also possessed evidence that Liddy had received $235,000 in campaign funds for his counterintelligence activities. It seemed to stretch credulity that nobody higher up in the campaign had any knowledge of how these funds were spent. Judge Sirica did not accept the prosecutors’ contention that Liddy was a rogue operator. He was a believer in the maxim “Follow the money.”
On the second day of the trial, Hunt changed his not-guilty pleas to guilty. This excused him from giving evidence in the case or even appearing in court prior to sentencing. The Cubans quickly followed the example set by Hunt, their onetime CIA superior for the Bay of Pigs operation, and also pleaded guilty. Suspecting a cover-up, the judge took the unusual step of questioning the four Cubans directly after sending the jury out of the room. They denied ever working for the CIA. They had agreed to take part in the Watergate operation after Hunt assured them it would help advance the cause of freedom in Cuba. “I will do anything to protect this country against any Communist conspiracy,” declared one of the defendants, Eugenio Martinez. Precisely how breaking in to the Watergate would forestall a “Communist conspiracy” the Cubans did not know. Exasperated, Sirica inquired about the source of the freshly printed $100 bills found in their wallets. “A blank envelope” that arrived through the mail came the reply.
“I’m sorry, I don’t believe you,” snapped the judge.
The son of an Italian immigrant, Sirica had been involved in Republican politics for much of his life. He had the reputation of being a tough law-and-order judge, nicknamed Maximum John by reporters for his harsh sentencing practices. Despite being reversed on appeal more often than any other judge, he had no qualms about stretching his legal powers to the limit when he thought that defendants were getting away with something. As the chief judge of the U.S. District Court, he had assigned himself the Watergate case, fully aware of the “political overtones.” He reasoned that it would be hard to accuse him of political bias if the facts of the case, as developed in the trial, proved embarrassing to the Republican Party.
Five feet six inches tall, he still looked like the professional welterweight boxer he had been in his youth. His pugilistic face and swept-back black hair made him appear younger than his sixty-eight years. Seated on a high dais beneath the emblem of an outstretched eagle, Sirica had a commanding view of the wood-paneled courtroom. A panic button hidden beneath his desk enabled him to summon marshals in case of an emergency. To his immediate right was the witness stand, flanked by an American flag and the jury box. In front of him were the defense and prosecution tables. A hundred or so spectators were crammed on benches at the back of the courtroom, mainly journalists who covered the trial on a daily basis. During breaks in the proceedings, the reporters surged through the double doors facing the judge, pushing each other aside as they sprinted down the corridor in search of pay phones.
Following the guilty pleas of Hunt and the Cubans, only two defendants remained in the courtroom. One was “the smart-alecky, cocky Liddy who seemed only to be amused by the fact that he might be going to jail for breaking the law.” The newly mustachioed lawyer took pride in his willingness to undergo extreme hardship in service of a higher cause. His loyalty to Nixon and the Republican Party was mingled with a defiant, contrarian nature. He had trained himself to endure pain by holding his finger in a candle flame until it burned. Growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the 1930s, he had idolized Adolf Hitler. Listening to Hitler’s speeches over the radio, he felt an “electric current” surge through his body communicating “a sheer animal confidence and power of will” that Liddy sought to emulate. He revised his views about the Führer following America’s entry into the war but remained fascinated by Nazi Germany. He took a special delight in shocking liberals. Building on his reputation as a gun-toting prosecutor in Poughkeepsie, New York, he ran for Congress on the slogan “Gordon Liddy doesn’t bail them out—he puts them in.” While he failed to wrest the Republican nomination away from the incumbent, he was a master at self-publicity.
Gordon Liddy, with newly grown mustache, leaves U.S. District Court in Washington after being charged with the Watergate break-in on September 25, 1972.
As the case officer for the bugging operation, Liddy had monitored events from room 214 of the Watergate Hotel, together with Hunt. He was in three-way communication by radio with the burglars on the sixth floor of the office building and another Cuban stationed in an observation post in room 723 of the Howard Johnson motel across the street. The first sign that something had gone terribly wrong came when the observation post reported some “guys wearing hippie clothes” on the terrace outside the Democratic Party office. “Four or five guys,” continued the transmission. “One’s got on a cowboy hat. One’s got on a sweatshirt. It looks like…guns! They’ve got guns. It’s trouble.” Liddy barely had time to order his men to abort the operation when a crackly voice murmured, “They’ve got us.” Liddy and Hunt fled the Watergate complex just as police cars were pulling up, sirens blazing. “Some people got caught,” Liddy told his wife when he got home. “I’ll probably be going to jail.”
Seated next to Liddy at the defense table was James McCord, who had led the break-in team that fateful night. Stocky and balding, McCord was as reserved as Liddy was flamboyant. His ramrod military bearing and gaunt, hollow cheeks suggested a man struggling with competing calls of duty, loyalty, and conscience. He had served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II, held the reserve rank of lieutenant colonel, and attended church regularly. He viewed himself as a superpatriot. He had resisted suggestions from his defense lawyers to depict the break-in as a clandestine CIA operation. The “CIA defense” might have provided a plausible reason for the bugging of Democratic Party headquarters, but McCord refused to shift the blame onto his former employer. He had worked for “the Company” for nineteen years as a security officer and was not about to betray it now. Back in December, he had sent an anonymous letter to his White House handler, warning that “every tree in the forest will fall” if the agency was made to take responsibility for the Watergate operation. “It will be a scorched desert,” he wrote, before switching metaphors. “The whole matter is at the precipe [sic] now.”
How close to the precipice the world would soon find out.
As Henry Kissinger was flying back to Washington from Paris that Tuesday morning, Jeb Stuart Magruder strode confidently to the witness stand in Judge Sirica’s courtroom. The deputy campaign director of the Committee to Re-elect the President had been summoned to testify in the trial of United States v. Liddy et al. As instructed by the bailiff, he raised his right hand and repeated the oath. “I swear that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”
The prosecutor, Earl Silbert, led the witness through a series of prepared questions. Looking younger than his thirty-eight years, Magruder made a good impression on the judge and jury. He “was as smooth as silk,” Sirica recalled later. “He did not appear flustered or nervous. He is a handsome man, well dressed, well spoken. If you wanted a model of the respectable, responsible, honest, young executive, Magruder would be perfect.” The former cosmetics salesman exuded an earnest Boy Scout’s demeanor. He wore a little American flag in the lapel of his conservative business suit.
Magruder acknowledged asking Liddy to conduct an “intelligence-gathering” operation to head off any potential trouble at the Republican National Convention in San Diego while insisting he do nothing “embarrassing or illegal.” After Liddy reported that 250,000 demonstrators were planning to show up in San Diego, the location of the convention was switched to Miami Beach. Asked about their personal relationship, Magruder conceded that there had been some friction. Their “management philosophies” were very different. Magruder was a team player; Liddy preferred working on his own. Magruder testified that he had 250 full-time employees working under him, plus another 2,000 or so volunteers, and was responsible for a $35 million budget. The implication was that he could not possibly keep track of everything his subordinates were doing.
Silbert asked the witness if he had given Liddy “any assignment concerning the Democratic National Committee.”
“No,” Magruder replied.
Had he received “intelligence information” or a “report of any kind” from Liddy concerning the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building?
“No.”
Had he ever authorized McCord to “establish a listening post and wiretap telephone conversations at the Democratic National Committee?”
“No, sir.”
Had he known about any illegal acts by McCord and the other Watergate burglars prior to their arrest on June 17, 1972?
“No, sir.”
“That is all.”
Without being aware of it, the judge and jury had just witnessed a federal crime being committed right under their noses. By lying about his role in the Watergate break-in after swearing to tell the truth, Magruder had committed perjury, punishable by up to five years in prison. In reality, he had served as Liddy’s direct superior in the Watergate chain of command.
The cherubic-looking man perjuring himself in front of Judge Sirica was a recognizable Washington type, the political aide dedicated above all else to self-advancement. He was a protégé of Bob Haldeman, who recruited him to serve as White House deputy director of communications following an undistinguished stint on the Nixon for president campaign in California. Even though Magruder had studied ethics at Williams College in Massachusetts, he seemed to lack firm moral principles of his own. His White House colleagues regarded him as a weak man easily swayed by others. He had majored in political science, but his real talent was marketing, particularly marketing himself. The presidential speechwriter William Safire called him “the Game Plan Man…He would reduce ideas and general orders to specific and often mechanistic Game Plans, with assignments, follow-ups, and analyses of results. He was eager, harried, confident, optimistic, and usually over his head.” If Haldeman created the machine that connected Nixon to the vast government bureaucracy, Magruder was the cog that kept everything running more or less smoothly.
As the campaign season approached, Haldeman decided he needed someone to keep an eye on the Nixon reelection effort, which operated separately from the administration. He arranged for Magruder to become deputy director of CREEP under John Mitchell, working out of a plush new office on the opposite side of Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Gordon Liddy showed up a few months later to fill the job of general counsel. Liddy struck Magruder as “a cocky little bantam rooster who liked to brag about his James Bond–ish exploits.” An exercise fanatic, he had a disconcerting habit of dropping to the floor and without notice performing a hundred push-ups. He boasted about his method for killing people with a pencil: Hold the eraser end in your hand and ram the finely sharpened tip into your victim’s neck, just above the Adam’s apple. Not too long after their first meeting, Magruder made the mistake of resting his hand on Liddy’s shoulder as he critiqued a legal brief drafted by his subordinate. Liddy did not appreciate the gesture. “Jeb,” he growled, “if you don’t take your arm off my shoulder, I’m going to tear it off and beat you to death with it.”
In the fight against the hippies and the Communists, Liddy firmly believed that the ends justified the means. He was deeply offended by the counterculture of the 1960s. “To permit the thought, spirit, life-style, and ideas of the ’60s movement to achieve power” in the United States, he later wrote, was as offensive to him as “the thought of surrender to a career Japanese soldier in 1945.” Images of “rioting, burning cities,” “attempts to close down the nation’s capital by mob violence,” and Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi haunted his dreams. Convinced that the United States “was at war internally as well as externally,” he had no qualms about breaking the law himself. “Spies in the enemy camp and electronic surveillance were nothing new in American politics,” but Liddy intended to go “far beyond that.” Faced with “a wartime emergency,” he was ready to risk “blowing the entire system.”
A Haldeman aide, Gordon Strachan, put the matter more simply when Magruder suggested that Liddy perhaps be reassigned. “Liddy’s a Hitler,” Strachan joked, “but at least he’s our Hitler.” Magruder understood that in addition to his legal responsibilities Liddy would be in charge of “dirty tricks,” reporting back to the White House.
Eager to please his White House bosses, the “Game Plan Man” accepted a scaled-down version of an intelligence-gathering plan first presented by Liddy in January 1972. The most outrageous elements of Operation Gemstone—including a proposal to hire prostitutes to compromise Democratic Party leaders—had been stripped out of the plan on Mitchell’s insistence. The budget was cut from $1 million to a quarter of a million. Whatever doubts Magruder felt about Liddy were swept aside by Haldeman’s demands for actionable intelligence against the Democrats. Magruder had also received a call from Colson urging him to take action on Liddy’s project. “Why don’t you get off your duff over there, Jeb, and do something instead of having these people running around getting up plans,” Nixon’s hatchet man barked, according to his own later recollection of the conversation. Under pressure on multiple fronts, the weak-willed Magruder flew to Florida to present the latest version of the Gemstone proposal to Mitchell, who was on vacation in Key Biscayne. According to Magruder, the head of the Committee to Re-elect the President signed off on “Gemstone III” after a perfunctory twenty-minute discussion on March 30. Without anyone giving much thought to the possible consequences, Liddy’s wild ideas had become part of the bureaucratic paper flow.
The new plan provided for “an initial entry” into Democratic Party offices in the Watergate. This occurred on the night of May 28. Liddy’s men succeeded in planting bugs in two of the street-side offices that could easily be monitored from the Howard Johnson motel across the street. Liddy spent the following week transcribing the private telephone conversations of Democratic Party officials on special Gemstone stationery marked “Exploitation May Compromise Source.” The intelligence “product” was deeply disappointing. One of the bugs, for which Liddy had paid $30,000, malfunctioned completely. The most compromising information involved Democratic aides arranging dates and sexual liaisons for themselves. A second break-in was planned for June 17 to improve the quality of the intelligence.
The arrest of the five Watergate burglars cemented the contempt that Magruder and Liddy felt for each other. As Magruder saw it, the would-be “James Bond had been exposed as a bumbling clown.” In the immediate aftermath of the fiasco, Liddy appeared deflated, even depressed, but quickly regained his bounce. He regarded Magruder as a wimp and a coward. When they crossed paths in the corridor outside Judge Sirica’s courtroom, Liddy greeted his former superior with a conspiratorial grin and ostentatious salute in full view of the assembled journalists. This alarmed Magruder, who was doing his utmost to minimize his ties with the noxious, fatally compromised Liddy.
As Magruder gave his testimony, Liddy rocked back and forth on his chair at the defense table, whispering to his neighbor, McCord. Liddy’s sarcastic commentary could not be heard by the judge or jury, but it was obvious to McCord that Magruder was perjuring himself. Magruder was obliged to pass the defendants on his way out of the courtroom. Sensing his discomfort, Liddy flashed another big smile and very obvious wink.
Chuck Colson had long marveled at Nixon’s political and physical resilience, his ability to come back “tougher and stronger” from every grueling experience. But as he sat with the president awaiting Kissinger’s return from Paris, he could not help noticing how tired he looked. The day-to-day pressures of Vietnam and Watergate were taking their toll. They were visible in the lengthening creases on his face, “the dark shadows under his eyes,” “the melancholy of his voice,” and the “specks of gray” that had recently appeared in his hair. It seemed to Colson that Nixon was “aging right before my eyes.”
The two co-conspirators treated themselves to a couple of Dubonnets on the rocks in Nixon’s hideaway office before being served the standard lunch of cottage cheese atop a slice of canned Dole pineapple. “How rough it’s been,” the president mused, staring into his drink. “No telling how long this peace agreement will last—a year, two years maybe, who knows. But we kept our word, we’ll get our prisoners home and well, the South Vietnamese—at least those poor devils will have a fighting chance.” He looked forward to being able to ram the peace agreement down the throats of his critics. “Kick them right in the balls,” he instructed.
Nixon’s customary lunch of cottage cheese and canned pineapple, photographed on his last day in office, August 8, 1974.
Nixon was still stewing over the latest affronts from Time. Rather than put him on the cover to mark his second inaugural, the newsweekly had chosen to give top billing to the erotic film Last Tango in Paris, which was about to open in New York after scandalizing Europe. Featuring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, the X-rated movie featured “frontal nudity, four-letter words, masturbation, even sodomy.” Hailed by some as a groundbreaking opus by the master Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, Last Tango had been denounced by conservatives as a crude commercial offshoot of the counterculture of the 1960s. In the opinion of one critic, it was a piece of “talented debauchery that often makes you want to vomit.” The puritan Nixon was predictably outraged. It did not take much prompting from Colson to reignite his loathing for his once favorite newsmagazine. He was so angry that he picked up the phone to remind Ron Ziegler to cut off all contact with “the bastards at Time…for the next four years I’m in office.
“Under no circumstances whatever is any call to be returned to Time magazine and nobody is to see them,” he instructed yet again. “Is that totally, absolutely understood and clear?” Without waiting for the press secretary’s reply, he slammed down the phone.
Later that afternoon, Nixon and Colson briefly turned their attention to another story from the front pages of the morning newspapers, occupying second billing beneath the banner headlines about Johnson’s death. By a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court had overturned state laws restricting a woman’s right to obtain an abortion during her first three months of pregnancy. The case was known as Roe v. Wade. Jane Roe was the fictional name given to the plaintiff who had filed one of the original lawsuits; Henry Wade was a district attorney from Dallas, Texas, who had sought to uphold a state law making abortion illegal except to save a woman’s life. Nixon was conflicted about the outcome. On the one hand, easier access to abortions would break up the family and encourage permissiveness. Girls did not have to worry about getting pregnant anymore: They could simply go to a doctor and get an abortion for $5. On the other hand, there were times when abortions were “necessary.”
He cited the first example that came to mind. “When you have a black and a white.”
“Or a rape,” Colson interjected.
“Or rape. You know what I mean. There are times.”
Talk about the Supreme Court decision was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Henry Kissinger, who had just arrived from Andrews Air Force Base. In the space of thirty-two hours, the national security adviser had flown twice across the Atlantic, wrapped up a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese Communists, and met three times with the South Vietnamese foreign minister. After mounting a desperate rearguard action, the Saigon delegates had finally bowed to the inevitable. Everything was finally in place for the formal signing ceremony in Paris in four days. Sidelined by Kissinger during the secret negotiations, Secretary of State William Rogers would sign the document on behalf of the United States, together with the representatives of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Vietcong.
“Congratulations,” Nixon told Kissinger magnanimously. “You were right and I was wrong. You kept saying that Thieu would cave.”
The president had spent much of the last two days debating the appropriate backdrop for his long-awaited announcement of an end to America’s war in Vietnam. One option, reserved for special occasions, was an address to Congress. Another was a simple televised address from the White House. In the end, Nixon rejected the Congress option. He did not want to give congressional critics of the war more television time or compete with LBJ’s forthcoming lying in state in the Rotunda. “The more I think about it, the announcement is so powerful it doesn’t need any damn backdrop,” he informed Ziegler. “I could do it in the men’s room.”
As important as the choice of venue was the small American flag emblem that Nixon inserted into his lapel. It was a gesture born out of a mixture of patriotism and cussedness. He had recently seen a movie called The Man that featured a manipulative secretary of state with an American flag pin attempting to oust the nation’s first black president. Haldeman reported that the same device had been used to identify bad-guy Republicans in The Candidate, a political satire starring Robert Redford. Appalled, Nixon announced that he intended “to wear the flag, come hell or high water, from now on.” He encouraged the staff to follow his example.
At 10:01 p.m., Nixon addressed the nation live from the Oval Office. Nearly a hundred million Americans tuned in to hear the president announce that an agreement had been initialed to “bring peace with honor in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.” He delivered the ten-minute speech in the solemn news anchor voice he reserved for special occasions, stressing phrases like “the right kind of peace” and “let us be proud.” His even, well-modulated tones were difficult for impersonators to imitate, so they focused on other idiosyncrasies, such as the brooding eyes and flapping jowls. At the end of the address, he paid tribute to LBJ for enduring “the vilification of those who sought to portray him as a man of war” when his true goal was “a lasting peace.”
After bidding good night to the television audience, the president met his wife and daughters in the third-floor Solarium. He was particularly pleased by a comment from his daughter Julie, who had watched the address on CBS, one of his media bêtes noires. According to Julie, the CBS commentators—Dan Rather, Marvin Kalb, and Eric Sevareid—all looked “sick” with envy at the successful outcome of the long diplomatic battle. This was confirmation to Nixon that he had “really stuck ’em in the groin.”
Half an hour later, he was urging Colson to go on the attack, in a telephone call from the Lincoln Sitting Room. “I just hope to Christ that our bomb throwers are out.” He was particularly stung by criticism that his peace agreement was unlikely to last. “Did the Treaty of Versailles last? What about the Metternich treaty?” he asked angrily, referring to the treaties that ended World War I and the Napoleonic Wars. “What lasts?” Nixon made clear he would resist appeals from some members of his staff to reach out to his political enemies. If he was sent any more memos proposing national reconciliation, he would “flush ’em down the goddamn john.” On the other hand, he was glad that he had mentioned Johnson in the speech, a bipartisan gesture that had been widely praised, even though LBJ never did “a goddamn thing for me, as you know.”
“It was a beautiful touch, Mr. President,” Colson agreed. “Really what you did was to bring credit to yourself by giving him credit. Because he stood against the same critics.”
Henry Kissinger, too, was effusive in his praise for “a real gem” of a speech. “The overwhelming reaction is ecstasy,” he told the president in a late-night telephone call. “It just kills the bloody liberals…You’ve wrapped it all up on terms that every one of them thought was impossible.”
Kissinger had often sat with Nixon in the Lincoln Sitting Room. He imagined the scene: the president “solitary and withdrawn, deep in his brown stuffed chair with his legs on a settee in front of him, a small reading light breaking the darkness, and a wood fire throwing shadows across the room.” Classical music, perhaps Tchaikovsky, was playing softly in the background. “He was talking to me, but he was really addressing himself,” he wrote later.
On occasions like this, Kissinger understood that it was his job to tell the boss what he wanted to hear, tapping into both his sense of history and his sense of grievance. “Meez-ster Preh—zee-dent.” He rolled the elongated syllables around in his throat, his ponderous tone paired perfectly with his German accent. “Vot you have accomplished runs counter to vot zeh intellectual establishment of zis country has been preaching for thirty years. Your success is almost more painful to zem dan…”
“They’ve got to change, goddamn it. The intellectual establishment is important to this country.”
“But zey don’t vont to change.”
“Then let’s build a new establishment.”
Together, Nixon and Kissinger had pulled off some of the most stunning coups in American foreign policy since World War II. As the president’s secret emissary to Beijing, Kissinger had paved the way for the dramatic opening to Communist China that had defined Nixon’s first term in office. They had then played the “China card” to put pressure on Moscow to sign a nuclear arms limitation agreement. For all the criticism they had endured over Vietnam, they had ultimately found a way to extricate America from a horrific misadventure that Nixon had inherited from his two Democratic predecessors. They were partners, but also rivals. While Nixon respected Kissinger’s exceptional negotiating skills and brilliant mind, he could not abide sharing the credit for all these diplomatic breakthroughs. Kissinger should never be allowed to forget his subordinate status. His job was to implement policy, not to determine what the policy should be. The title of peacemaker should deservedly go to Nixon himself, not to Kissinger.
The president suspected his assistant of being behind a series of articles and press leaks that boosted Kissinger at Nixon’s expense. Influential commentators had somehow got the idea that Kissinger was the adult in the room restraining a trigger-happy commander in chief. As he shuttled between world capitals, the national security adviser had become a personality in his own right. His jet-setting image was enhanced by paparazzi images of him arm in arm with well-known actresses like Candice Bergen, Raquel Welch, and Jill St. John. But Kissinger’s Rolodex did not only include beautiful women. In the name of promoting a bipartisan foreign policy, he reached out to Democrats, academics, and journalists, many of whom were fixtures on Nixon’s enemies list. It seemed to Nixon that Henry could never resist a request for a meeting or a press contact that would cast him in a positive light.
The president had been particularly irritated by an interview his aide had given to an Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, who asked him to explain the reasons for his “incredible movie-star status” and popularity. Rather than deflect the question, Kissinger appeared to revel in his stardom. “Being alone has always been part of my style,” he was quoted as saying. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse.” The image of the slightly pudgy professor riding into Moscow or Beijing on a white steed was greeted with a mixture of hilarity and outrage by his White House colleagues. As far as anyone knew, he had never mounted a horse in his life. More important, the role of lonely hero facing down America’s enemies was one that Nixon reserved for himself. As John Ehrlichman commented acerbically, “If there was a Lone Ranger handling foreign affairs, the President would have cast Henry, I suspect, as Tonto.” Although Kissinger insisted he had been misquoted, the damage was done.
“Make the point to Henry that he doesn’t make the decisions,” a furious Nixon instructed Haldeman. “Henry should stop having interviews alone.”
But still the leaks and flattering profiles of Kissinger continued. The more praise that was showered on Henry, the madder Nixon became. When Time magazine revealed in mid-December that Nixon and Kissinger would share its coveted “Man of the Year” title, the president became almost “white-lipped in anger.” He told Haldeman to instruct the White House switchboard to block telephone calls from Time to Kissinger, an order the chief of staff declined to implement. He was even more angry when he read a James Reston column in The New York Times on December 31 that alluded to a split between the president and his national security adviser. If Kissinger resigned, Reston reported, he would be free to “write the whole story of the Paris talks and why they broke down, and this would probably be highly embarrassing to Mr. Nixon.” Given Reston’s reputation as the éminence grise of Washington reporters, Nixon assumed that the story had been planted by Kissinger himself.
“I will not tolerate insubordination,” he shouted at Colson down the phone from Camp David. “You tell Henry he’s to talk to no one, period! I mean no one. And tell him not to call me. I will accept no calls from him.”
On Nixon’s instructions, Colson ordered the Secret Service to make a log of Kissinger’s phone calls. The logs quickly revealed a call that Kissinger made to another columnist, Joseph Kraft, on January 2 at a time when he claimed that he “wasn’t talking to anyone.” Two days later, Kraft published a blistering piece criticizing “the murder-bombing” of Hanoi. “Dr. Kissinger remains perhaps the only instrument for effective foreign policy available to President Nixon,” Kraft concluded. “But he has been compromised and everybody in town knows it. Unless he gets a new mandate from the President—the kind of mandate he can only get by being made Secretary of State—he should probably resign in the next year.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” exclaimed Nixon, after reading the Kraft article and learning about his earlier phone conversation with Kissinger. “That’s unbelievable.”
When Colson explained that it was only possible to track Kissinger’s outgoing office calls, not the incoming, Nixon demanded that his home phone also be monitored. “The FBI is to keep the log on his phone. All we want to know is who the hell he calls.”
Privately, Nixon had decided that he would soon part ways with his grandstanding national security adviser. After the “lonesome cowboy” interview he told Colson that he was counting the days until Henry returned to academia. “It’s not good for a man to stay too long in that position,” he confided. “Time for him to get back to other things.” Kissinger, too, understood that his usefulness to Nixon would dwindle rapidly once Vietnam was wrapped up. As the second term of the Nixon presidency began, he was thinking about accepting an offer of a visiting professorship at Oxford. He complained to his friends about being “stabbed in the back” by the “public relations geniuses” at the White House.
Nixon’s concerns about Kissinger went beyond the daily newspaper headlines. Even more important to him was the judgment of history. His decision to install a White House taping system had been motivated in large part by their rivalry. He wanted to be able to demonstrate that he, not Henry, was the author of the most important foreign policy initiatives of his presidency. That meant compiling—and controlling—the primary source documentation.
The president was aware that Henry was keeping his own record of meetings and telephone conversations that could one day compete with the record that Nixon was assembling. Kissinger aides listened in to his phone calls and took shorthand notes, pressing a mute button on their extensions known as a “dead key” to avoid interfering with the conversation. White House wags were soon referring to the Kissinger archive as the “Dead Key Scrolls.” As Nixon’s suspicions of Kissinger grew, he instructed Haldeman to “physically move” the secret scrolls into the president’s own files. It was yet another order that the chief of staff chose not to fulfill. He wanted to avoid an open rift with Henry.
Interspersed with the denunciations of Kissinger for suspected disloyalty were expressions of solicitude for the psychological strain under which he was operating. For insights into Henry’s “suicidal complex,” Nixon recommended that Haldeman read a book by his former doctor, Arnold Hutschnecker, called The Will to Live. Nixon had found the book helpful back in 1951 at a time when Hutschnecker was treating him for insomnia and stress. An Austrian-born internist and psychotherapist, Hutschnecker had made a specialty out of studying the mental stability of political leaders. For him, the issue was not curing neuroses—many of his prominent patients were neurotic in some fashion—but putting them to good use. He believed that outstanding leaders were driven by “inner aggression,” which he defined as an obsessive need to prove oneself, frequently resulting from “childhood experiences of inferiority and helplessness.” Such men should be helped to find a way to channel the “lust for power” in a positive rather than negative direction. The willingness to talk to a psychiatrist was an important first step.
Nixon “wants to be sure that I make extensive memoranda about K’s mental processes and so on for his files,” Haldeman recorded on December 8. Playing amateur psychiatrist, John Ehrlichman speculated that Kissinger “wants subconsciously to flee rather than fight,” and was maneuvering to blame the president for the possible failure of the Vietnam peace talks. Nixon urged his aides to boost the morale of the temperamental national security adviser until a peace agreement had been concluded.
Shying away from face-to-face rows, Nixon avoided confronting Kissinger with his suspicions directly, assigning unpleasant tasks to Colson or Haldeman. For his part, Kissinger was always at his most obsequious when meeting or talking with the president. His tone of voice would change from matter of fact to subservient when he received a phone call from Nixon. He learned how to ape the speech patterns of his boss, throwing in cusswords and epithets calculated to please him. He was the only White House staff member who could match Nixon’s ability to dredge up obscure historical references and parallels. As they agonized over China and Russia, they would veer off into discussing whether the United States should have formed an alliance with Germany at the end of World War II to counter the rising Soviet menace. This followed on from their long-running debate about the merits of various Wehrmacht generals, a subject that fascinated Nixon, having read Churchill’s multivolume history of the war.
At the heart of their odd-couple relationship were two very different personalities. Nixon was a loner who defined himself in relation to his many enemies. “Never forget, the press is the enemy,” he lectured Kissinger after the temporary breakdown in the Vietnam peace negotiations. “The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard a hundred times and never forget it.” A longtime practitioner of the politics of division, he fed off other people’s hatred. Kissinger, by contrast, was one of the world’s most accomplished networkers. As a refugee to the United States, he had a natural desire to assimilate and fit in. He worked hard at wooing and winning over the very elites that Nixon despised. This did not prevent him from assuring Nixon that he “needed no instruction at all” about the nature of the enemy, particularly concerning “professors.” The Harvard professor of government was adept at talking to different audiences out of different sides of his mouth.
They were both outsiders, but outsiders of a different kind. Kissinger was a Jew whose family had been driven out of Germany by the Nazis. Nixon was the son of a pious Quaker mother and a struggling California grocer. Kissinger was driven by a desire for approval, Nixon by a yearning for revenge. Kissinger used self-deprecating humor to make fun of his interloper status; Nixon lashed out at the elites who attempted to exclude him. Kissinger detected a sensitive soul beneath the president’s tough-guy facade. He wrote later that he was “touched” by the “vulnerability of a man who lived out a Walter Mitty dream of toughness that did not come naturally.” He saw in Nixon a “strange mixture of calculation, deviousness, idealism, tenderness, tawdriness, courage, and daring” that “evoked a feeling of protectiveness among those closest to him—all of whom he more or less manipulated, setting one against the other.” It took one insecure, exceptionally complicated outsider to understand the dreams and neuroses of the other.
Vietnam had been a draining experience for both men. The war had poisoned American politics, causing rifts not only between left and right, young and old, but within the White House itself. It had created a climate of paranoia that fed on itself, with aides suspecting each other of leaking damaging information to the press. When The New York Times began publishing a classified history of the war known as the Pentagon Papers in June 1971, Kissinger exploded. “This will totally destroy American credibility forever,” he raged. “No foreign government will ever trust us again.” The president needed little persuading that draconian action was necessary. According to Haldeman, “Henry got Nixon cranked up, and then they started cranking each other up until they were both in a frenzy.” This in turn inspired the creation of a “special investigations unit” to track down leakers of government documents. The team set up shop in a warren of offices on the ground floor of the Executive Office Building known as Room 16. Because they were charged with plugging leaks, unit members jokingly affixed a sign to the entryway that read simply, “Plumbers.” Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were among the first recruits.
A former Kissinger aide named Daniel Ellsberg had already come under suspicion as the man who supplied the Pentagon Papers to the Times. Ellsberg had helped run the CIA rural pacification program in South Vietnam but had returned home disillusioned. His top secret security clearances enabled him to obtain an assignment from the Rand Corporation to assemble an official history of the war. He went into hiding after the FBI showed up to interview him, turning up later on the CBS evening news to accuse the U.S. government of responsibility for millions of deaths in Vietnam. As a suspected leaker, Ellsberg became an early target of the White House Plumbers. In one of their first forays into illegal activity, they broke in to the office of his psychiatrist in Beverly Hills in an attempt to gather incriminating material. The seeds of Watergate were sown.
National Guard troops resting in the corridors of the Executive Office Building while on standby during Vietnam War protests in May 1970 to prevent demonstrators from attacking the White House.
The domestic and foreign policy dramas quickly became intertwined. The toxic legacy of Vietnam bled into Nixon’s handling of the Watergate scandal and vice versa. Massive antiwar protests spawned a bunker mentality inside the White House—an atmosphere of “Us against Them,” in the phrase of Howard Hunt—that led directly to Watergate. Distracted by Vietnam, Nixon paid little attention to the gathering legal storm during the weeks that followed his reelection. By the time he began to focus on the events unfolding in Judge Sirica’s courtroom, his ability to influence them was already much diminished.
Nixon reluctantly acknowledged that the Vietnam negotiations had turned Kissinger into “the hottest property in the world.” He sensed an opportunity for a public relations campaign that would “give no quarter whatever to the doves.” The results, however, were deeply disappointing. Why was the administration’s “big gun” failing to emphasize the message “peace with honor”? Why was no one building up RN the way that JFK had been built up by acolytes like Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger? Why did Kissinger mention the commander in chief only three times in his most recent press briefing when he mentioned him fourteen times back in December when everything was falling apart? Why no references to the president as a “profile in courage”?
“Henry kept saying we’d kill the critics,” Nixon grumbled to Haldeman. “We haven’t done that at all.”
But still there was light beckoning him on through the darkness. At the end of January, the Gallup public opinion poll recorded a 68 percent approval rating for Nixon, the highest of his presidency, a fourteen-point gain in two weeks. Three out of four Americans endorsed his handling of Vietnam. The “silent majority”—the hard hats, the people of supposedly “limited intelligence,” the voters out in the boondocks—had stood with him and become even more numerous. Perhaps, just perhaps, he could escape the political bunker in which he had been trapped for the last four years. If all else failed, he would certainly be vindicated by history—assisted, of course, by his tapes.