KISSINGER’S BACKBITING BEGAN almost immediately. Rogers was a corrupt “fag” who had some strange hold over Richard Nixon; Laird was a megalomaniac who constantly leaked anti-Kissinger stories to the press; Richard Nixon was a secret drunk of dubious intelligence.
There was a steady stream of invective from Kissinger, and his personal aides heard it all. At one time Kissinger told some of his staff that a prominent Georgetown columnist had confided to him that Rogers was keeping a house in Georgetown with a young male paramour in it. Kissinger went further one evening, Roger Morris recalls, telling some of his close aides that Haldeman had once hinted that Rogers and Nixon had “indulged” in the past. No one believed there was evidence for such remarks.
Morris and others whom Kissinger trusted, including Anthony Lake, found themselves enthralled as they worked on Kissinger’s private diary, which was transcribed and edited nearly every night. On some days, Morris remembers, Kissinger’s entries filled fifteen pages, not with high-level diplomatic strategy but with low-level gossip. “We caught glimpses of Nixon, Laird, Rogers, and Kissinger in action,” Morris says. “Nixon drank exceptionally at night and there were many nights when you couldn’t reach him at Camp David,” the presidential retreat in Maryland.
The diary was treated as if it were the most sensitive document in the government—which it may have been. Stored in an electronically wired safe in Kissinger’s office, along with materials from the secret negotiations with North Vietnam in Paris, it was a “gold mine of bureaucratic duplicity and maneuver,” Morris says. “When Henry went home at night, he didn’t discuss policy; he discussed the nature of people. He is really interested in personalities and their weaknesses; he analyzed issues and people the way a good boxer analyzes his opponent’s boxing style.”
Morris often listened in on Kissinger’s conversations with an obviously drunken Nixon. “There were many times when a cable would come in late and Henry would say, ‘There’s no sense waking him up—he’d be incoherent,’ ” he remembers. The young aide, frightened at the thought of a President who was not fully competent after sundown, often wondered what would happen if the Soviet Union attacked at night.
Morris did not mention such things to friends outside the White House. “It’s hard to explain,” he said later. “It’s a constant barrage. You go around taking it for granted that Nixon’s nuts. Henry and others go around wringing their hands for the President and saying Rogers is a fag. After a while, you lose your perspective. You don’t feel a sense of outrage. All of the things that you think about later—the drunkenness, the wiretapping—you’ve become inured to while in the White House. It isn’t a matter of constant moral torment when you’re there.”
Kissinger told his personal staff more than once about his first formal White House reception and his first meeting with Mrs. Nixon. Naturally, he said, he began to praise the President lavishly, but Mrs. Nixon leaned over and interrupted him, saying, “Haven’t you seen through him yet?” Morris recalls that Kissinger would tell the anecdote to the staff and joke about it, “as if to say, ‘This man is not stable.’ ”
“It’s a curious paradox about Henry,” Morris says. “Nobody schemed or planned about his enemies more than Kissinger—and yet nobody was as careless. He didn’t really conceal his contempt for all these people, except in face-to-face dealings.”
Colonel Pursley says that Kissinger and Haig would seek his support—and Laird’s—for a White House stratagem “by telling me, ‘We’ve got a madman on our hands.’ They’d always say that to me; it was a continual thing.”
Just how serious was Nixon’s drinking problem? Many of his former associates and aides, such as Charles W. Colson, dismiss its significance by saying that the President had a notoriously low capacity for alcohol, that he would slur his words and appear to be somewhat drunk after one or two highballs. Yet John Ehrlichman recalls that he refused to work on Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968 unless Nixon promised to stop drinking. “Nixon promised to lay off during the campaign and he did,” Ehrlichman says. “There were times when he got drunk—no question about it. But it wasn’t that frequent and he had a sense of when he was on and when he was off duty.”
Another Kissinger aide remembers, however, that Nixon always seemed to be “off” during the many weekends he spent at the Florida White House in Key Biscayne. On those weekends, Nixon spent an inordinate amount of time drinking martinis with two old cronies, Charles G. (Bébé) Rebozo and Robert H. Abplanalp. “To the extent there was a problem,” the aide recalls, “it was very real in Key Biscayne.” Kissinger’s main concern during those Florida trips, which were working weekends for the national security adviser and his staff, was avoiding social encounters with the Nixon entourage. “We always played hard to get for Nixon,” says the aide, repeatedly turning down invitations. On occasion Nixon himself would telephone with a request and Kissinger would go. One night when he did go, Nixon stopped an attractive woman as he left a Miami restaurant—after having a few drinks too many—and offered her a job in the White House. “She looks like she’s built for you, Henry,” the President said. The Kissinger aide heard about the encounter, not from Kissinger but from a Secret Service man. “This kind of thing made my veins hurt,” the aide remembers. “The President of the United States, drunk in a restaurant, making crude remarks and engaging in familiarity with a strange woman in a public place—all clearly attributable to martinis.” Nonetheless, “I didn’t think of his drinking as a real problem—although you sort of wondered what would happen if there was ever a nuclear threat.” Most of the time, “it was one of the things you knew about in terms of handling papers—‘Oh, no, this is not the time to get him to sign these.’ ”
Whatever the truth, Kissinger’s staff—who rarely saw Nixon—were convinced that they were dealing with a defective President, and Kissinger did little to reassure them. Halperin recalls that even in the early days of the administration Kissinger would return from a private session with the President and say, “Maybe the President has two hours every morning to spend kibitzing about foreign policy, but I’m much too busy for that.” Halperin got the distinct impression that Nixon “liked nothing better than to sit around every morning for several hours with Kissinger. For Nixon, this was a great thing. He was sitting with this distinguished Harvard professor, talking about the future of the world. And Kissinger would go up there every morning and disappear. And the appointments would back up, the work would back up—and he would come out two hours later, having had this seminar on foreign policy.”
The NSC staff sympathized with Kissinger’s plight, as he depicted it, in dealing with Nixon. They soon came to believe that the most closely held secrets in the White House did not deal with CIA operatives, communications intercepts, or satellite photography, but with the character of the man running the nation’s government. Nixon’s drinking was to be kept quiet at all costs; and so was his racism.
There seems to have been an unrelenting stream of anti-black remarks from the President during his first year in office. In his telephone conversations with Kissinger, he repeatedly referred to blacks as “niggers,” “jigs,” and “jiga-boos.” Some of the slurs were obviously results of Nixon drinking bouts, but NSC aides who monitored Kissinger-Nixon telephone calls came to believe that Richard Nixon, drunk or sober, was a racist. Far more disillusioning was their boss’s attitude; Kissinger also repeatedly made clear his contempt for black people. Yet there was a constant stream of Kissinger asides to his staff about Nixon’s racism.
One theme was that Nixon had always been a racist but did not know the correct derogatory words until he moved from California to New York in the 1960s. After Nixon had referred to blacks as “jungle bunnies” during one of his telephone talks with Kissinger in 1969, Morris recalls, Kissinger whimsically explained that Nixon had seen Hair while in New York “and gotten educated.” (One scene in the play consists of a recitation, put to music, of various derogatory and slang phrases for blacks, including “jungle bunny.”)I
The NSC staff aides understood what was acceptable behavior and what was not. They would join the laughter at Alexander Haig’s antics during the rare staff meetings that dealt with African issues. Morris recalls that when he would enter the Situation Room laden with briefing books, “Haig would begin to beat his hands on the table, as if he was pounding a tom-tom. It was all very manly—a locker-room mentality. Haig would make Tarzan jokes—‘Where’s your pet ape?’ or, talking about blacks, say, ‘Henry can’t stand the smell.’ ”
There were other comments. Sonnenfeldt would joke about the blacks in Washington moving into upper-middle-class white neighborhoods, Morris remembers: “He called them niggers, jigs, spades, or your dusky friends.” Another recurrent Sonnenfeldt complaint was that the African embassies in Washington were “taking all the good embassy spots; you couldn’t live on Sixteenth Street any more unless you wanted to have ‘dusky friends.’ ”
The racist joking invariably began whenever Morris sought White House action in the areas where he had major responsibility—Africa, AID, and the United Nations. “You couldn’t find three subjects less important [to Kissinger] and more the object of ridicule.”
Kissinger repeatedly made clear his lack of respect for the intelligence of blacks. When the State Department appointed C. Clyde Ferguson, a black law professor from Rutgers University, special relief coordinator during the Nigerian civil war, Kissinger asked fatuously, “Do you think he’ll understand the cables?” Morris also recalls a disturbing conversation between Kissinger and Senator Fulbright. It was the spring of 1970 and the White House gave a reception and dinner for ambassadors, most of them black, who were in Washington for a meeting of the Organization of African Unity. Kissinger asked Morris to join him at the dinner, and as Morris and Kissinger were strolling from their basement offices they bumped into Senator Fulbright, also on his way to the party. “Henry walked up to him and initiated this racist conversation,” Morris says. “He asked: ‘I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like?’ And Fulbright said, ‘You never know who’s going to be at your table.’ It was amazing to me that Henry would say such outrageous things in public; this was in a crowded hallway with lots of people coming and going.”
Sometimes the racist comments seemed almost surrealistic in the context of the White House and its foreign policy. After the Biafran rebellion collapsed in January 1970, Morris briefed Kissinger on the prospect for continued bloodshed between the victorious Nigerian troops and the defeated Ibos of Biafra. Morris explained, in response to Kissinger’s question, that the Ibos of Biafra were more Negroid in appearance and the Nigerians tended to be more Semitic. Kissinger, Morris later wrote, was visibly surprised and confused. “But you have always told me the Ibos were more gifted and accomplished than the others. What do you mean ‘more Negroid’?” Earlier, there had been a brief moment of panic when Ronald L. Ziegler, the White House press secretary, who knew and cared little about Africa and its civil wars, began a briefing by announcing he had a statement to read on the “Niggerian” war. Whether out of embarrassment or ignorance, none of the press commented on the slip, Morris says.
In February of 1970, when Kissinger and his staff were working in Key Biscayne, the President, at play with his friends Rebozo and Abplanalp, telephoned ship-to-shore with a request about the foreign policy paper they were drafting. “Make sure there’s something in it for the jigs, Henry,” Nixon said. A moment later, Morris recalls, Nixon asked again, “Is there something in it for the jigs?” Kissinger said yes. A few months earlier, when Secretary of State Rogers received good press coverage during a trip to Africa, Kissinger had been distraught with jealousy and anxiety. There had been a soothing telephone call from Nixon, also overheard by one of the NSC aides: “Henry, let’s leave the niggers to Bill and we’ll take care of the rest of the world.” The remark became common knowledge to Morris and his colleagues.
Another strong feeling that Nixon and Kissinger shared was animus toward Laird. Early in the administration, Nixon would occasionally flip through the morning newspapers, criticize many of the stories, and wonder who was responsible for leaking them—the perennial White House obsession. Alexander P. Butterfield, a retired Air Force colonel whom Haldeman had hired as one of Nixon’s personal aides, was in charge of writing staff memoranda about Nixon’s wishes. The NSC people called these documents “Butterfieldgrams.” One morning Haig summoned some of the younger staff to read a series of Butterfieldgrams based on Nixon’s perusal of the morning papers. “It sent us all into hysteria,” Morris says. “He would read the Times or the Post and he would go through story by story and identify the leaks and every leak was Laird’s. This is Nixon looking through the paper and thinking out loud and Butterfield was taking these things down. They were on separate pieces of paper that came through Henry: ‘I see this goddamn, cock-sucking story about troop levels. This is Laird again. The son-of-a-bitch up to his old games. What’s he trying to do?’ Next page. ‘Henry, what is this goddamn, cock-sucking story by Beecher? Is this Laird? It must be Laird. It’s Laird, isn’t it?’ Next page. ‘What is this editorial in the Post? I’ve seen this before—it’s the same kind of reasoning. You know who this is—this is Laird.’
“This particular batch was about five or six sheets like this and all of them were about Laird and Nixon treating his Secretary of Defense as a sort of foreign government out to get him. The level of suspicion between those two men was a source of constant amazement to us.” But not to Kissinger.
The national security adviser did not try to restrain the President’s suspicions about bureaucratic enemies and leaks. He shared them. He had a private fear, too—that an outsider would somehow get access to the confidential files of the Nixon presidency and produce a documented memoir before he was ready to write his own.
By September 1969, his NSC staff had grown to 114 members and secretaries. One addition was particularly important to Kissinger: that of Peter W. Rodman, a former student of his. From the moment Rodman arrived, some of Kissinger’s aides realized that his mission was to assemble and prepare documents for Kissinger’s memoirs. “He indexed everything that came in,” according to Morris. Later, Morris became convinced that another Rodman mission was to be ready to “evacuate the personal files” within hours if Kissinger ever felt that he was on the verge of being forced out by Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Even as early as 1970, Morris says, Rodman was routinely shipping the files Kissinger considered most valuable to Nelson Rockefeller’s estate at Pocantico Hills, New York.
The Rodman-collected papers were the only complete set of both official and unofficial documents in existence. By mid-1969, Kissinger had begun to shield many of the backchannel materials from the NSC file system pending his personal review. Jeanne W. Davis, the NSC official who was in charge of the files, said later that she was unable to estimate the volume of Kissinger documents that were not on file inside the system. Those not filed included the typed notes and transcripts of Kissinger’s telephone conversations, his diaries, and the backchannel communications that Kissinger wanted to keep private even from Nixon. Many of the backchannel documents, it should be noted, dealing with such subjects as the SALT negotiations and the secret Vietnam peace talks, were left on file, at least in part, with Davis inside the White House.
Kissinger realized quickly that his effectiveness in controlling the bureaucracy would depend on how well he stifled the flow of information. Early in 1969, Halperin recalls, Laird informed the White House that he could accept a pending treaty barring the installation of nuclear weapons on the seabed—one of the administration’s first arms control issues—if five relatively minor modifications were made. “Henry decided to see Gerard Smith and sell him on the changes as if they were his changes.” It was an obvious attempt to demonstrate his bureaucratic clout to the new director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. “As they began going through the proposed changes item by item,” Halperin says, “Smith said at one point, ‘I see you have the Laird paper.’ ” Kissinger was mortified, but managed to joke in telling his staff about it later.
“The key point in this,” Halperin says, “is that Henry didn’t understand the way the system worked: that everything was passed around; that people didn’t like to conduct foreign policy as if it was a conspiracy.” Laird had naturally given Smith a list of his proposed changes at the same time he sent them to the White House. “This is the way government works. No one likes surprises. But Henry didn’t understand this in the beginning and later it led him to cut everybody out of everything. The lesson learned was to do it all in the White House, because everybody in the bureaucracy passes things along.”
For all his sniping at Laird, the most consistent target for Kissinger was William Rogers. Morris recalls that Kissinger and Haig would repeatedly speculate about Rogers’ relationship with Nixon. “Most of this was done to deprecate the general lack of ‘manliness’ of Rogers’ communications” to Nixon about the EC-121 incident and the plans to escalate the Vietnam War. “Henry felt that there was something between Rogers and Nixon that he could never equal—some critical tie that would enable Rogers to get to see Nixon at a key time and say, ‘Fire Henry,’ and Nixon would. Henry would always say, ‘He’s got something on him.’ ”
Kissinger’s anxiety about Rogers’ friendship with the President was heightened by the fact that the Secretary of State and his wife were among the very few administration officials invited to dinner in the private quarters of the White House. There were not really many such evenings, but they were evenings of agony for Kissinger, as one close aide describes them. Kissinger, who was never invited to the family quarters in his first years in the White House, would pace back and forth in his office on the nights that Rogers was upstairs, not leaving until the Secret Service reported that the guests had gone. On those few occasions when Kissinger did not immediately agree with the President on a foreign policy issue, the aide recalls, Nixon would use Kissinger’s anxiety to force acquiescence. “I guess I’ll bring Bill Rogers in on this,” was all the President had to say.
Another personal aide says that Kissinger repeatedly submitted memoranda to the President compiling the alleged sins of Rogers in the State Department. He would telephone the President later, saying that he “couldn’t take it any longer,” and threaten to resign if things weren’t changed. Nixon would join in the game and placate his national security adviser by promising to talk to Rogers and straighten it out.
Occasionally the two officials became locked into petty battles. Late in 1969, for example, Kissinger and Rogers had a dispute over who was first with the idea of publishing an end-of-the-year report to the public on foreign policy. Lake, Morris, and Winston Lord were writing a comprehensive report for Kissinger when, as Lake remembers it, “suddenly this huge document—some 400 pages—comes over from State. There was stunned disbelief that they had done it.” Rogers, in turn, was not notified of the Kissinger effort until he was out of the country on an official visit to Africa.
Indeed, Rogers seemed always to get the bad news while he was away from Washington. Richard Pederson, the State Department Counsel and one of Rogers’ most trusted aides, recalls that he and the Secretary of State spent hours one night in the secure code room of the United States Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, reading the text of the Kissinger report as it was filed, in code, page by page from the State Department. “The White House blanketed everything we were doing,” Pederson recalled. “Rogers was very unhappy with it.”
The next step was a meeting of proxies in Key Biscayne. Lake and Morris represented the NSC, and two of Rogers’ aides represented the State Department. William Satire, the White House speech writer, also participated. Lake recalls “one of the main arguments was not over substance, but over how many times Henry’s and Rogers’ name would appear as heads of committees in the second chapter of the report.” Safire helped to negotiate the dispute and was also involved in the editing of the combined reports.II
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Kissinger intrigued not only against Cabinet members but also against his own staff, among them Helmut Sonnenfeldt. One aide thought Kissinger was convinced that his old friend Sonnenfeldt was a double agent—although, the aide says, it was never clear for whom Kissinger thought he was spying. Kissinger repeatedly routed parts of classified documents to Sonnenfeldt, and let it be known to others on the staff that some materials were being kept away from him.
Nixon might rant and rave about real or imagined enemies, but Kissinger went a step further. Once, during a high-level meeting on the SALT negotiations, Kissinger humiliated Sonnenfeldt before half a dozen of his peers among the government’s experts on the Soviet Union. As one participant recalls the incident, Sonnenfeldt had come to the meeting wearing a back brace—the result, Sonnenfeldt explained, of tension and overwork. At one point, a paper clip on Kissinger’s desk fell to the floor, perhaps accidentally, and Sonnenfeldt bent over and picked it up. A few moments later, the clip fell again, and again Sonnenfeldt laboriously reached over to retrieve it. Some of the participants noticed the interplay—with trepidation. When the clip fell for a third time, it was clear to everyone that Kissinger had deliberately pushed it off his desk. Sonnenfeldt picked it up. “Everybody looked at Kissinger and he said, ‘Some of you may wonder what Sonnenfeldt does here and now you know.’ Everyone laughed sort of nervously, but it was not done in good fellowship. If anybody else had done it, it might have been funny, but given Sonnenfeldt’s reputation as Henry’s hatchet man, it was humiliating,” the participant felt. “The important point is that Henry did understand what people thought of Sonnenfeldt. It was terribly embarrassing.”
Another factor that undoubtedly militated against Sonnenfeldt was his repeated insistence on having direct access to Nixon. Donald R. Lesh, a Foreign Service Soviet specialist who came to the NSC as Sonnenfeldt’s assistant, recalls that as a senior adviser to Kissinger Sonnenfeldt considered himself a senior adviser to the President. Late one afternoon in the spring of 1969, Eagleburger privately summoned Lesh over to the White House Situation Room. Following Eagleburger’s instructions, Lesh did not tell Sonnenfeldt where he was going but simply pretended to be leaving for home. Once in the White House, he was literally locked into the Situation Room with a recently arrived note from the Soviet Union and a typewriter. Kissinger wanted him to assess the note and prepare a secret analysis. Sonnenfeldt was not to be told. And he was not.III
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There was also discernible malice in Kissinger’s day-to-day badinage with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. His aides never saw Kissinger lose his temper in the face of rudeness from the two men, but he made others pay—and Haig was one of his prime targets. Lynn recalls that Kissinger would often work Haig over, saying, for instance, “Al, how many times do I have to tell you things? Why didn’t this get done?” Haig “would stand there with his jaw muscles twitching, saying nothing, in the classic military manner.”
Haig learned the lessons of the Nixon White House fast. He was deferential to Kissinger in his presence, Morris recalls. “He stood to Henry as Henry stood to Nixon. But behind Henry’s back, Haig called him pussy-whipped and cock-crazy. He would always say that Henry’s got his mind in his pants—talk about him beating off” in the privacy of his office.IV Like many others on the National Security Council staff, Morris came to dislike and fear Haig. “Al was the ultimate special assistant,” he says. “There’s a whole culture in the Defense Department and in the White House. The special assistant sits in front of the door and, like the priest telling the villagers what the gods did that day, he’d tell us the gods are venal and woman-crazed. The essence of all this was betrayal.”
Haig also complained repeatedly about the President. After Nixon had him promoted from colonel to brigadier general in 1970, Haig described himself to John Court more than once as nothing more than a “gold-star” general, rewarded with verbal praise instead of Army promotions. By late 1972, Haig was nominated for promotion to full four-star general, the highest military rank possible in peacetime.
Lynn recalls that during the days when he was thinking of resigning from Kissinger’s staff, Haig would be sent over to buck him up. “Al would work me by telling me seamy stories about Henry and the President,” Lynn says. “He had enormous cunning and subtlety. He presented a kind of primitiveness on some of these issues and he mastered Henry. He came to feed a lot of Henry’s conservatism.” As months went by, Lynn says, he and his colleagues “came to realize that he was dangerous—and he got more dangerous.”
Kissinger’s reliance on Haig was a constant topic of conversation among the ambitious men in the National Security Council. Sonnenfeldt often theorized to other staff people that Kissinger wanted Haig around to testify in his defense at a war-crimes trial. Sonnenfeldt’s thesis was that Kissinger’s real fear was of a reaction from the right, and thus Haig was needed to testify to Kissinger’s patriotism. When Haig began putting his own covering memoranda on NSC documents going from the staff to Kissinger’s office, there was pandemonium, Lynn says. “All of us bitched about that, but Henry wanted Al’s views.”
By mid-1969, Kissinger and Haig were heavily involved in the wiretapping—and bound forever by what they knew about each other. Both men thought they were being wiretapped too, and Kissinger began having his personal office telephones swept for taps.
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It was inevitable that the NSC staff would emulate their superior and begin to leak. It was almost innocent at first, the goal being not to thwart the Nixon-Kissinger policies but to further them. Morris acknowledges that he and Lake “began to leak in a major way late in ’69 or ’70,” to Joe Kraft, the columnist, and to a number of reporters on the New York Times, including Hedrick Smith, Anthony Lewis, Peter Grose, Benjamin Welles, and Neil Sheehan, a neighbor of both Lake and William Watts. Morris recalls being in Lake’s living room when Lake told a reporter about the Nixon Administration’s hard line on Vietnam. “It was done pretty casually,” Morris remembers, “although Tony was against the position. Leaking was almost a matter of habit.”
Morris also talked to some Washington Post reporters and to Elizabeth Drew, then of the Atlantic magazine. Others leaked to columnists, including Evans and Novak. “Were these national security violations?” Morris asks. “I don’t think so. Mostly we were planting stuff on stories we were interested in.” Other NSC members told reporters about specific decisions taken by specific aides, Morris adds. “Who’s doing what to whom.” When Haig put a covering memo on one of Sonnenfeldt’s studies, shifting its position more closely to that recommended by the Pentagon, Sonnenfeldt promptly leaked the Haig memo to the New York Times. “This is the last time that son-of-a-bitch will put a cover memo on my stuff,” Sonnenfeldt told Morris.
Eagleburger, who was not only involved with press leaks for Kissinger but had past experience with them as a special assistant to Nicholas de B. Katzenbach when he was Under Secretary of State in the Johnson Administration, knew what was going on. He once warned Morris: “I know you leak like a sieve and be careful.” Kissinger also realized that his staff was leaking. “Henry would kid me on things that he didn’t worry about,” Morris says, “especially if it was favorable to the President. ‘I see you’ve been talking to the press again,’ Kissinger would say. He would often kid about James Doyle of the Washington Star. ‘Well, your friend Doyle didn’t get the story right. Next time make sure he’s sober.’ ”V
Morris thinks that despite the leaks, the National Security Council staff “was not as disloyal at our worst as they thought. Most of the staff supported the war.” By late 1969, only a handful of the staff had begun to dissent: Morris, Watts, Lake, and, to some extent, Lynn. And even they kept the important secrets secret.
But by then too, the constant bureaucratic intrigue and personal betrayal in the National Security Council were taking their toll. “There was a dawning recognition that this was a frightening place,” Lynn recalls. “It was like walking into a room with a bad odor. After a while you get inured. You realized that this is not the way the government should work. I had to do a lot of things out of loyalty to Henry that I preferred not to do—the secrecy, the confinement of activities to certain people, the centralization of power. Henry used to kid me a lot. He used to say, ‘You’ve got too much integrity.’ ”
Lynn, the Pentagon “Whiz Kid” who came into the Nixon-Kissinger White House with as much ambition as anyone, resigned from the National Security Council staff in 1970. So did William Watts, the young aide from the Rockefeller campaign. “I came down really full of idealism,” he says. “It was a very exciting thing; an extraordinary chance. Starting on day two, it was a process of steady disillusionment and enormous unhappiness.”
I. John Ehrlichman has a simpler explanation. He says “jungle bunny” happens to be one of Rebozo’s favorite derogatory phrases for blacks.
II. In his 1975 book about the Nixon Administration, Before the Fall, Safire described the rivalry over the two papers this way: “. . . [W]hen State officials saw the Kissinger-NSC 40,000-word white paper, they decided to join their own effort to this quality product. . . .”
III. Despite the constant competition, Sonnenfeldt and Kissinger shared many values: Both were refugees from Nazi Germany and both were virulently anti-Communist. Both were also inveterate social climbers. Sonnenfeldt was never able to get close to Nixon, and a number of National Security Council aides recall with pleasure Sonnenfeldt’s distress when Nixon, while on his February 1969 trip to Europe, went up to Sonnenfeldt and, clearly assuming he was a member of an official airport welcoming party, made small talk about the weather “you’re having here.”
IV. Morris soon learned that Haig had a double standard on sexual innuendoes in the White House: What was permissible in discussing Henry Kissinger would not do at all when it came to the President. Sometime late in 1969, a group of academics, including a team from Duke University, came to a NSC staff meeting to discuss a new technique in parapsychology, constructing abstract models of the personalities of world leaders. Theoretically, the verbal models—or machines, as the academics called them—could be used to simulate and predict the behavior of, for example, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Some of Nasser’s weaknesses, notably for women, could be factored into the model. Lack of relevant data, the scientists explained, prevented them from building certain machines—there was nothing, for instance, on Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union. But they could construct machines for such men as Ian Smith of Rhodesia and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. At this point, Morris exclaimed, “Look, it isn’t the unpredictability of foreign governments that concerns us as much as it is the unpredictability of American government. If you could build us a Nixon machine, it’d be better.” To Morris’ surprise, nobody laughed. In fact, no one said anything at all. A few days later, Haig summoned Morris to his office and asked him to explain why he’d chosen to accuse Nixon in front of a group of nongovernment academics of having a voracious sexual appetite. Morris quickly denied making any such remark, and explained that the only sexual comments had been made about Nasser. As for Nixon’s sex life, Morris said, “Al, I think the guy is like a carrot.” Haig remained serious, and warned Morris that the remark—whether it had been made or not—could get back to Haldeman and Ehrlichman.
V. Doyle, who later served as a press aide to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and as chief political correspondent for Newsweek magazine, is in fact a very light drinker.