Twelve years after their first forgettable meeting, Dick Nixon and Dick Helms became improbable partners in power. In disparate ways, they embodied the American power elite after World War II. One a gentleman, the other a self-made man. One a master of office politics, the other of attack politics. While sympathetic in their anticommunism, each was jealous of his power and zealous in defending it. In America’s most turbulent days since the Civil War, the new president and the incumbent spymaster needed each other: to defend the country and deter threats, to wage war and win peace, to manage dissent and master enemies. Yet their mutual mistrust ran deep. Helms, the patrician, could not help but condescend to Nixon, the striver, who could not help but put the spymaster in his place.
Helms endured the first insult even before Nixon had taken the oath of office. The president-elect had brought on Kissinger as his national security adviser, and it was Kissinger who delivered the slight. He told Helms that the president wanted to run the meetings of the National Security Council in a different way. Helms would open the NSC meetings with the Agency’s intelligence briefing but then leave before the NSC debated the policy issues. Helms didn’t care for the role of delivery boy, but he was too astute to object. “Helms accepted this directive with slightly raised eyebrows,” Kissinger observed.
“Actually, it was my idea,” said Morton Halperin, Kissinger’s staff director in 1969. Halperin was one those defense intellectuals like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Holbrooke who came into the federal government during the Vietnam War. With a PhD in international relations from Yale, Halperin was an assistant professor at Harvard, where he met Kissinger. In 1966, McNamara brought him on as deputy assistant secretary of defense, with responsibility for political-military planning and arms control. Under Nixon, Halperin became Kissinger’s point man on the NSC.
“My view,” Halperin said in an interview, “was the interagency process was distorted by having the CIA participate, pretending they were an analytic organization, but [were] actually bringing to bear their views about policy. I wrote the memo that Kissinger sent to Nixon creating the NSC system.… I thought that was the right thing to do [to exclude the CIA director]. So, I put it in [the memo]. And to my surprise, Nixon approved the document virtually verbatim.”1
Kissinger allowed that Helms’s position in the new administration was “delicate.” The president, he wrote in the foreword to Helms’s memoir, “regarded Helms as a member of the ‘Georgetown social set,’ which Nixon believed—not incorrectly—to be more sympathetic to Democratic administrations than to his own.”2 This was not quite fair to Helms, who attended his share of parties in Georgetown but never lived there or identified himself as a Democrat or a liberal. Nixon’s antenna for enemies in the CIA was sensitive. He still believed Agency leaks to JFK in 1960 had forced him to argue publicly against the Bay of Pigs operation that he actually supported. He wanted revenge.
Helms wanted relevance. Well versed in bureaucratic power plays, he appealed to his friend, Melvin Laird, the Wisconsin congressman whom Nixon had just named secretary of defense. Laird told Nixon that excluding Helms was a bad idea and wouldn’t help on Capitol Hill, where the director had friends.3 Nixon relented. The CIA kept its seat at the policymaking table.
By the time Nixon took the oath of office as the thirty-seventh president of the United States on January 20, 1969, the peace talks undermined by Anna Chennault were deadlocked and the opposition to the war still growing. Protest at presidential inaugurations was not unknown, but for the first time since 1861 when Confederate sympathizers attended the swearing in of Abraham Lincoln, the capital city was thronged with Americans who wanted to see the new president defeated on the field of battle. Some of the antiwar protesters wore Nixon masks, crinkly white disguises with the undeniable nose.
As the presidential motorcade came up Pennsylvania Avenue, with Dick and Pat smiling and waving, a crowd of young people surged down 12th Street toward the parade throwing rocks and chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win.” Nixon was infuriated by their contempt and heartened to see the protesters outnumbered by well-wishers. But when Nixon mounted the reviewing stand, observed Garry Wills, “his faced bunched up in its instant toothed smile, so circumspect, so vulnerable.” He had one thing in common with the kids jeering him, Wills noted. “He wore a Nixon mask.”4
Underneath Nixon’s masks were his multiple personas, crafted and displayed to the American people over the years, sometimes inadvertently. He was, alternately, a Red baiter, Ike’s understudy, a civil rights supporter, a sore loser, a Wall Street lawyer, and now a president who said, “Bring Us Together.” Two of the Nixons within the new president, however, were as yet mostly unseen: Nixon, the intellectual with ambitions to reshape geopolitics, and Nixon, the paranoiac willing to break the law to defeat his enemies. As CIA director, Helms would enable both.
In late January, Helms came to the White House for his first briefing with the president. He brought along two top lieutenants, Tom Karamessines and Cord Meyer. “We gave the President an overview of our most productive operations and closed with a discussion of more risky activity,” Helms said. He found Nixon affable and quick with pertinent questions. Helms invited the president to pay a visit to the Langley headquarters. “As we gathered up our papers and were making our way from the office,” Helms recalled, “the President—in what I later realized was a rare jovial moment—called out, ‘But don’t get caught.’”5
Rose Mary Woods had long worked right outside Nixon’s office, controlling access to the man she called “the boss,” but when Nixon moved into the Oval Office, Bob Haldeman claimed Woods’s territory. Haldeman, jealous of Woods’s influence, stripped her of job responsibilities and sought to move her out of the Executive Office Building altogether. Nixon refused. He let Haldeman prevail in practice, but he wanted to take care of Woods.
“She knew who everyone was, what their relationship to the President was, all the secrets of the past,” one former Nixon aide told Judy Bachrach, Washington Post columnist. “Who contributes ideas? Who contributes money? Who makes a big noise and couldn’t be counted on? And to have somebody like that when you’re not very good at it yourself is invaluable. And Nixon wasn’t very good at that.”6
Not long after taking office, Nixon gave three favored friends a present. Woods, speechwriter Pat Buchanan, and valet Manolo Sanchez received options to buy stock for a Miami real estate development in which Nixon had invested. Woods exercised the option to buy ten thousand shares at a dollar apiece and immediately sold them for two dollars each, netting ten thousand dollars.7
Woods had arrived in life. Born in a small town in northeastern Ohio, she now reigned in Washington. She moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of the Watergate complex. When she traveled with Nixon on his first trip as president, she returned to find that her apartment had been burglarized. The thieves took twenty-seven pieces of jewelry valued in excess of $5,000, including a pearl brooch with diamonds, three rings, four watches, and a diamond campaign pin emblazoned “N 68.”8 A few months later, Woods bought the apartment.
Woods was a woman out of style. At a time when birth control and feminism were redefining the lives of women, Woods occupied the most of traditional roles. She was a queen of the capital, at least among Republicans, but for those who didn’t like Nixon, she was just one more reason not to. She was selfless and seemingly subservient to a man at a time when more and more women wanted to be anything but.
Still, she knew Nixon best, better than Haldeman, who served his boss for a decade without ever really becoming friends with him. Woods knew the man. When Anna Chennault sought a cultural affairs job in the State Department, Woods scotched the idea. “This would be a disaster,” she told another Nixon aide. “The sooner we can keep her as far away as possible from the Administration—the better.”9
More than a secretary, Woods had become a kind of second wife to Nixon—“as protective as the second Mrs. Wilson,” wrote Garry Wills, referring to Edith Wilson, who controlled access to her husband President Woodrow Wilson after he suffered a crippling stroke in 1919.10 The comparison to an incapacitated president would prove prescient.
Cynthia Helms found a new home for herself and her husband, a two-bedroom apartment in the Irene, a charmless, ten-story apartment block in suburban Bethesda, Maryland. The members of the Georgetown social set that Nixon so resented might have dropped their troubled teenage children to see a psychiatrist in the Irene, but they never, ever would have lived there.
Mr. and Mrs. Helms felt right at home. “It suited our immediate needs as well as our tight budget,” Cynthia wrote in her memoir. Like Helms, she had come of age in the Depression and World War II and abhorred profligacy. They fit together like a pair of old shoes, she said. Helms had a reputation for being taciturn. Not with Cynthia.
“We talked endlessly about the news, friends and our mutual interests and my specific interests,” she said in her memoir. “We had mock debates about who had the more interesting day. He taught me to read a newspaper in a more discerning way and to question where the story was coming from.” She especially appreciated his thoughtfulness. Not long after they married, he asked, “What would you like to do today?” “I was dumbstruck,” she said. “I hadn’t been asked that in 25 years.”
Helms had his shortcomings as a husband, she admitted. He was useless in the kitchen, lousy at cards, and a menace to all peace-loving plants in the garden. Her teenage daughters thought he was a hilarious fuddy-duddy for shooing dinner guests out the door before the clock struck ten. “Don’t you people have a home?” he would cavil at friends who wanted to linger over dessert.11
In his long days at the office, Helms had to grapple with a daunting new reality. There were no more Tuesday lunches with the boss. His path to the Oval Office was blocked by the Praetorian Guard in the White House. “I was not a man for Haldeman and Ehrlichman,” Helms rued.12 He dubbed them “the Germans,” and it wasn’t a compliment.
Haldeman sensed an unspoken feud between the president and the director: “Helms, the aloof, aristocratic, Eastern elitist, and Nixon the poor boy (he never let you forget it) from a small California town.” But if there was a feud, it was mostly Nixon’s doing. In their infrequent encounters, Helms didn’t fight with the president. He ingratiated.
Politically, the two men were more compatible than Nixon assumed. When Allen Dulles died in January 1969, Helms escorted his widow, Clover, to the funeral service in Georgetown. Nixon sent a tribute: “He was a man who brought civility, intelligence and great dedication to everything he did,” the president eulogized. “In the nature of his task, his achievements were known to only a few. But, because of him, the world is a safer place.”13 Helms might have uttered the words himself.
Helms’s briefings to the National Security Council impressed Nixon, according to Kissinger. The president wanted to hear Helms’s policy views—or at least the CIA’s assessment of the consequences of various policy options. After one NSC briefing in early 1969, Nixon invited Helms to join him for lunch. “From that point on Dick Helms was an integral member of the NSC team,” Kissinger said.14
But the NSC team was not where Dick Helms cared to play. That meant Kissinger, not Helms, met regularly with Nixon, and for Helms personal meetings with the president were the coin of his realm. In the new administration, the national security adviser, not the director of Central Intelligence, served as president’s senior intelligence adviser.15 While professing admiration for Helms, Kissinger had effectively demoted the Agency from its traditional position as the president’s source for objective reporting and analysis on international affairs.
A more egotistical man might have objected. Helms went along, eyebrows barely raised. He used every means, no matter how humbling, to exercise influence. He fed Kissinger intelligence reports that he felt contained especially pertinent information, with notes politely suggesting they be passed to the president.16
“He was strong, and he was wary,” observed Kissinger. “His urbanity was coupled with extraordinary tenacity. He had seen administrations come and go and he understood that in Washington, knowledge was power. He was presumed to know a lot and never disabused people of that belief.” At the same time, Kissinger added, “I never knew him to misuse his knowledge or power.”17
When Nixon named General Robert Cushman, his longtime military adviser, as deputy director of the CIA, news reports quoted unnamed sources saying the president wanted a spy in Langley. Unfazed, Helms welcomed Cushman. The Agency was running a massive paramilitary operation in Laos, the remote landlocked country west of North Vietnam. Much to Helms’s chagrin, some congressmen were calling Laos “the CIA’s war,” as if the Agency wasn’t there on presidential orders. “I’m glad to see a military man here,” Helms told Cushman. “We’ve got a war in Laos and you’re in charge of it starting now.”18
The president demanded Helms focus on Vietnam. “Nixon would say, look don’t talk to me about this that and the other thing,” he recalled. In an early meeting of the interagency committee reviewing all CIA covert operations, Helms warned that if the United States wanted to head off a leftist victory in Chile’s 1970 presidential election, they had to come up with a plan soon.19 The president wasn’t interested. “There’s only one problem these days in the United States,” Nixon said, “and that’s in Vietnam.”20
Helms found Nixon difficult, if not damaged.
“He seemed to dislike and distrust persons who he supposed might not put personal loyalty to him above all other responsibilities,” Helms wrote in his memoir. “This obsession sometimes seemed combined with deep suspicion of people Nixon thought might consider themselves his social superior. Nixon never seemed to have shaken his early impression that the Agency was exclusively staffed by uppity Ivy Leaguers, most of whom lived in Georgetown and spent every evening gossiping about him at cocktail parties. The explanations for these attitudes, which in some cases seemed to blind his judgment, is best left to board-certified medical specialists.”21
Nixon returned Helms’s disdain with his own.
“At NSC meetings, he interrupted Helms frequently—sometimes gratuitously, often correcting him on some niggling point of fact or geography,” said author Chris Whipple. Nixon’s low opinion of the CIA’s workforce was also on display. “What are those idiots out in Maclean doing?” Nixon wondered aloud. “There are forty thousand people out there, reading newspapers.”22
Helms remained true to his OSS origins. He was first and foremost an intelligence collector, a role that Nixon could appreciate. With secrets, Helms had the means to win White House favor. The process began almost imperceptibly. In February 1969, Helms sent Kissinger an updated version of “Restless Youth,” a secret report on the antiwar movement that he had given LBJ in November 1967.
“In an effort to round out our discussion of this subject we have included a section on American students,” Helms wrote. “This is an area not within the charter of this agency, so I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive this makes the paper. Should anyone learn of its existence it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned.”23
In addition to domestic spying, Helms offered flattery. When Nixon returned from his foreign trip in March, Helms wrote him a little note varnished with admiration.
“My dear Mr. President: After hearing you this morning and reading incoming reports from Western Europe, may I say what a remarkable personal tour de force you achieved on your trip.… I feel compelled to tell you that your approach to the real world is a most reassuring one. I do not mean to sound gratuitous; I just want you to know how I see it. Respectfully, Dick.”24
When Nixon took up his offer to visit the Langley headquarters, Helms was effusive. Nixon told an auditorium full of Agency personnel that their work was difficult and sometimes in conflict with the country’s values. Nonetheless, he declared, he would always support them. Afterward, Helms took his pen in hand.
“My dear Mr. President,” he wrote. “Again, I want to thank you for visiting the Agency Friday. From the standpoint of our people, it was everything that one could have desired. I know you could sense the lift in morale even while you were on the premises. Your warm friendliness has brought nothing but glowing remarks, even from those ‘cynics’ who believe they have seen it all.… Your words about me were humbling. I need not assure you that I will do everything I can to justify them.… Respectfully, Dick.”25
After the event, Helms also thanked his security staff by name, including Office of Security veteran James McCord, for their work during Nixon’s visit. “The arrangements were flawless; the security first-class without being intrusive,” Helms wrote. A copy went into McCord’s personnel file.26
Helms didn’t mind serving as the butler of intelligence. He thought it part of the job.
“It’s easy for intelligence people to forget that they’re really a service organization,” Helms told one of his biographers. “That they’re really there to assist in the policymaking process through other people. [I tried] to give the President, Vice President, and the cabinet the impression that the agency was there to be useful, to be of service, to be helpful. I did my damnedest, as a result of demands placed on the agency … to see to it they were carried out and the agency put its best foot forward and the papers were produced in a timely fashion.”27
In the White House, Kissinger felt well served. Helms, he said, “never volunteered policy advice beyond the questions that were asked him, though he never hesitated to warn the White House of dangers, even when his views ran counter to the preconceptions of the president or his security advisor.”28
Early in his first term Nixon asked the Agency to prepare an assessment of the Soviet Union’s mammoth new nuclear missile, known as the SS-9, which the United States had identified by satellite surveillance photos. Bigger and more destructive than any missile in the U.S. arsenal, the SS-9 worried the Nixon administration. The strategic question was whether the Soviet Union was seeking a so-called first-strike capability in which their military superiority would enable them to dictate political outcomes. The practical question was whether the multiple warheads packed into the SS-9 had individual guidance systems that would enable them to disperse and hit multiple U.S. missile silos. The answer was crucial to the administration’s case for an antiballistic missile (ABM) system to deter a Soviet attack with the ability to shoot down its missiles. If a score of SS-9 missiles could distribute nuclear warheads to sixty different U.S. targets, the case for the multibillion-dollar ABM system was stronger. If twenty missiles could only hit twenty targets, the missile defense system might be optional, if not unnecessary.
Analysts from the Directorate of Intelligence said no, the multiple SS-9 warheads did not have individual guidance systems, and no, the Soviets did not seek so-called first-strike capabilities to launch a surprise attack on the United States. Both positions contradicted Defense Secretary Laird. In the White House, aides griped, Where did the CIA get off making policy?
Helms told his staff that Pentagon officials had accused CIA officers of undercutting Laird’s position on the Georgetown cocktail circuit. He directed his subordinates to take no public position, pro or con, on the ABM issue. He said “responsible quarters”—meaning the Pentagon and the White House—charged that the CIA’s estimates were biased. At the same time, he made clear he did not share that view.29
The differences of opinion were bitter, Helms recalled, “as difficult a policy problem as I have ever faced.” The safety of the American people, as well as government contracts worth billions of dollars, turned on the CIA’s analysis.
The question of whether the Soviet Union sought a first-strike capability came up again in a National Intelligence Estimate intended to serve as the U.S. government’s best information on the SS-9. The NIE reiterated the Agency’s view that the Soviets did not have first-strike plans. Laird and Kissinger demanded that Helms remove the offending passage. He relented. When he felt it absolutely necessary, Helms would accommodate himself to Nixon’s demands.30
“To many observers, inside and outside the agency, it seems that Helms had buckled under pressure,” said an official biography. Never before had a cabinet secretary forced a change in the Agency’s finished product. Helms felt the revision was tainted by the administration’s desire to build a missile defense system, but acquiesced, he said, because no intelligence service should “assume it has achieved absolute wisdom.” Helms didn’t want to stake the Agency’s reputation on one issue.31 In Nixon’s administration, where dissent was often equated with betrayal, Helms had to proceed carefully if he was ever going to gain the president’s confidence.32
He made progress by making allies. Kissinger admitted that he originally “leaned towards the more ominous interpretation” of the SS-9’s capabilities. Then he had his staff review the CIA’s work. Helms, he realized, was right.33 Kissinger was impressed. “He stood his ground where lesser men might have resorted to ambiguity.”