The Yorba Linda Plumbers

Co-author on the beach near Provincetown

On vacation last month in Cape Cod, I had the opportunity for extensive meetings with Richard Nixon's last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, to discuss a book project we've been mulling for a while. You can probably guess the subject. O'Connor babysat Nixon's grandchildren, traveled with him to Russia and China, nursed him through a variety of crises and a couple of epic missteps, and held his hand when he died in 1994. I'll offer insights about 37 beginning at our first meeting in San Clemente in the spring of 1979 and ending when I oversaw his Yorba Linda funeral 15 years later. I also withstood his angry family and wrangled with the the feds over his tapes and other materials as Nixon library director and co-executor of his estate until 2009, two years after O'Connor and I had brought Nixon's wilderness-wandering black sheep of a private library into the federal system.

We have a lot to figure out when it comes to process and timing, focus and theme, what to include and leave out. What would even tempt us post-presidential Nixonites to combine our nearly 60 years of Nixonalia in one Nixo-narrative? We're married, for one thing, though that doesn't means it's wise to write a book together. I'll undoubtedly gain insights about gracious collaboration that will be useful in upcoming counseling sessions with couples being married at St. John's Episcopal Church.

All kidding aside, since we've been working together since the day after Labor Day in 1980, when she first buzzed me into Nixon's Foley Square offices under the eye of his Secret Services agents, I anticipate a joyful process of research and writing. We also look forward to reconnecting with the Nixon we knew and respected for his achievements and in spite of his massive failings. We spent tens of thousands of hours with him during the last 15 years of his life, when he had mellowed considerably without losing his keen interest in moderate GOP politics (which are now inoperative) and his desire to influence U.S. foreign policy, especially in China and Russia. There's no denying Watergate, the vulgar White House tapes, and his penchant for dirty tricks. But from the man who traveled the world without portfolio -- and after 1985, without Secret Service agents -- serving as an honest broker between his successors and their counterparts abroad, we gained a deep appreciation for the statesman who had left the world safer than he found it when he resigned in August 1974.

Nixon and Kissinger

Besides, Kathy and I have been doing the Nixon two-step for years, in speeches, at parties, and with friends. "Please," said a clergy buddy just last weekend over pasta in New York after our party of five had seen Tom Hanks and Courtney B. Vance in "Lucky Guy" (which beautifully evoked the 1980s New York we remember so well). "Please tell Nixon's last joke." Aw, shucks, I said. Demurring just for a moment can inspire the petitioner to order another bottle of wine, and so it was Saturday night. Many years ago, just a few months before Nixon died, he had taken Kathy, her assistant, and me to dinner at his hotel in Dana Point, California, where he'd encamped to finish what would be his last book. It was rewrite time, and Nixon and O'Connor had summoned me with my laptop. After a long day's work, he leaned forward in the booth in the disarmingly informal manner he assumed when out to dinner with friends and aides. "Bebe told me a new joke," he whispered. "Wanna hear it?" Did we ever.

Unindicted co-authors

But as for the joke, I''ll have to tell you later. Just to tantalize you, telling it properly required Nixon to speak in falsetto. It was naughty in the relatively innocent way of Depression-era elites. Men of his and Bebe Rebozo's generation called it bathroom humor, meaning that it was scatological but also that gentlemen did their best to keep it among themselves in their manly enclaves, whether the locker room or the Bohemian Grove. One of Kathy's stories is about waiting for Nixon outside the men's room at a hotel where he and Henry Kissinger were attending an event together. She could hear them joking in their growly baritones and teasing each other like little leaguers.

A little boy or girl resides in most of us, whether presidents or priests. Nixon was a wide-eyed naif when it came to sexuality, matters of the heart, and their mysterious nexus. History has yet to appreciate how much he enjoyed and craved the attention of intelligent, capable women, chiefly, of course, his beloved Patricia Ryan. Yet women flummoxed him. As for Pat, while he always loved and respected her, his profound introversion and selfish decision-making kept their relationship out of balance. Too many instructions to several generations of aides began with the words, "Call Mrs. Nixon and tell her that...." If his temperament and deepest desires were barriers to the fearful intimacy of mutual vulnerability, so too with millions of his overachieving mid-century cohort, for whom dirty jokes were a way of whistling past the bedroom door.

There was even some bathroom humor in our day at the Nixon library. Pace Rick Perlstein and Jeb Magruder, 37 probably never gave direct orders to the White House Plumbers, authors of Watergate and co-destroyers of his presidency. But he was embroiled with library plumbers not once but twice -- and I'm not even talking about the acolytes of disgraced chief of staff Bob Haldeman who now control Nixon's private foundation in Yorba Linda. After 2009's Haldeman renaissance, triggered by his fellow operatives' hatred of John Dean, Kathy's 29 years of dedicated service to Nixon and his family were repaid with acts of such savagery and sadism that she lost interest in her mentor for a while. I give thanks that her ambivalence has dissipated to the point where she can separate her feelings about Nixon from all his Woodward and Bernstein-celebrated men and their enablers.

Nixon and Kathy in China, 1993

If Nixon had wanted his mid-level White House and campaign operatives in charge of his library, legacy, and estate, they would have been. When Kathy and I were working together in Nixon's offices in New York and New Jersey, we oversaw the original private library from architecture to museum cases. Precise historicity was not our ethic. Amid vaunting presentations about Nixon's peacemaking initiatives, we installed a polemical defense of his Watergate actions written by a young devotee of Julie Eisenhower and a video on the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates in which the eloquent Democrat never actually spoke. While I included the the most damning portions of the famous “smoking gun” cover-up tape from June 23, 1972, I wrote a script for the exhibit in which I did my best to exonerate Nixon of criminal motives. With a commercial filmmaker, I co-wrote a 30-minute museum orientation film, “In the Arena,” that presented Nixon in heroic hues and at least until recently was still being shown at the federal library. I brought in a camera crew one morning and peppered him with 70 questions. His businesslike answers ended up, along with earlier footage, in an interactive “Presidential Forum” feature.

Nixon dutifully reviewed the exhibit text and made some changes. He didn't care as much about the library as we did. He reminded me repeatedly that, for better or worse, his legacy belonged to historians, not factotums writing paeans in exhibits paid for by his rich friends. The artifact that really mattered to him was his birthplace, where a school caretaker and his family were living as we got started on the library. We returned it to its 1913 appearance with the help of some restoration specialists I knew in National City, California, where I’d been a reporter ten years before. Thanks to their good work and Nixon’s late sister-in-law Clara Jane Nixon, who for years had preserved a houseful of his parents Frank and Hannah’s own furnishings, house wares, and knickknacks, library visitors can enjoy an authentic glimpse of a turn-of-the-century southern California farmhouse, a three-dimensional snapshot of the working class, goat milk-drinking upbringing of which Nixon was so proud.

Over our many Mimi's lunches during the next 19 years, Clara Jane told me absorbing stories about the Nixon family and gently defended her husband, Donald, whose financial imbroglios had embarrassed his brother (and had continued into the 1980s, when I'd fielded Don's calls in Nixon's New York City office). As if to remind me that her husband wasn't the only Nixon brother who was subject to judgment, she missed few opportunities to say how offended she'd been by the bathroom language Nixon and his aides had used on the White House tapes.

2 BR, 1/2 bath

The first Yorba Linda bathroom emergency was our proposal to keep the toilet in his birthplace. The architects were convinced there’d been one in the house as Frank Nixon had built it in 1912, but Nixon disagreed strenuously. He told me that the family had used an outhouse at first, though he conceded indoor plumbing might have been installed by the time they moved to Whittier in the early 1920s, when he was nine.

He finally approved the john but not another of my and the architects’ schemes. Since the front of his family house faced away from the main library building, they wanted to pick it up and turn it around. The idea made sense to me but not the man whose father had built the sturdy bungalow 75 years before. It had survived multiple owners, suburban sprawl, brush fires, heavy metal teenagers, and the existential burden of being the spawning ground of the most controversial American politician of the 20th century. During Vietnam, vandals had torched Pat Nixon’s girlhood home in nearby Artesia. When I pitched the architects’ idea, he didn’t say a word; he just stared at me. “On the other hand, Mr. President,” I said, “we can leave it right where it is. I just wanted to let you to know what these guys were up to.”

There was a second latter-day Nixon plumber caper. Years before, when we showed him drawings the National Archives had prepared for a federal Nixon library in San Clemente, he was outraged to find that the employee restrooms were bigger than the public’s. He wrote to the Nixon foundation’s volunteer executive director, John Whitaker, a former advance man and White House domestic affairs adviser, and ordered a massive escalation in toilets and urinals in the public restrooms and a corresponding reduction in bowls for bureaucrats.

Even after the San Clemente plans fell through, over the years Nixon’s memo took on the authority of sacred canon. Our architects plumbed all its nuances. As a result, visitors to the Nixon museum never had to wait in line for its ample facilities, with their recessed lighting, marble counter tops, and terrazzo floors. In the basement, the tiny staff restrooms were done up in battleship grey tile and linoleum, with one stall each plus a urinal for the men that was set about eight inches from the floor for accessibility's sake. The appointments included lockers for the security guards.

On the library's opening day in July 1990, I was especially nervous about whether Nixon would feel we got his birthplace right. He said we had, although he suggested we rearrange some of the furniture, including the old piano he'd first learned to play by ear. We were flush with pride until he made a pit stop in the downstairs men's room in the brand-new library building. He emerged looking preoccupied and started slowly down the hall, stopped and looked over his shoulder, started walking again, and then put a hand on my arm so I’d turn to face him.

President George H. W. Bush, former Presidents Reagan and Ford, and their first ladies, along with a crowd later optimistically estimated by library marketers at 50,000, waited above in the burning sun for the dedication ceremony, but first Nixon had a burning question. “As I recall, at one point I may have made something of an issue about the restrooms,” he said. “But for God’s sake please tell me that’s not the only urinal in the goddamn place.”

Chuck Colson's Redirected Zeal

Mark Ellis on the conversion experience of Chuck Colson, who died Saturday:

[A]s Colson awaited arrest and prosecution for his Watergate involvement, Tom Phillips, then president of Raytheon, invited Colson to his home and witnessed to him about Jesus Christ.

“I left his house that night shaken by the words he had read from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity about pride,” Colson wrote in 2008. “It felt as if Lewis were writing about me, former Marine captain, Special Counsel to the President of the United States, now in the midst of the Watergate scandal. I had an overwhelming sense that I was unclean.”

After Colson left Philips, he got into his car, but couldn’t drive away. The conviction of the Holy Spirit came upon him and he began to weep, “I couldn’t (drive). I was crying too hard – and I was not one to ever cry.” “I spent an hour calling out to God. I did not even know the right words. I simply knew that I wanted Him. And I knew for certain that the God who created the universe heard my cry.”

At that pivotal moment, Colson was born again. “From the next morning to this day, I have never looked back. I can honestly say that the worst day of the last 35 years has been better than the best days of the 41 years that preceded it. That’s a pretty bold statement, given my time in prison, three major surgeries, and two kids with cancer at the same time, but it is absolutely true.”

The former counselor to the most powerful man on earth began to serve the King above every earthly king, which gave Colson’s life renewed purpose. From that day forward, he knew he belonged to Christ and he was “on earth to advance His Kingdom.”

And that he did, as a model of repentance and a prison ministry innovator whose work blessed the lives of tens of thousands of convicts and their families. Some were skeptical about the sincerity of his conversion, possibly because he seemed no less intensely results-driven than he'd been in politics. But grace had transformed Colson's priorities, not his temperament. Like St. Paul after he'd forsaken his persecution of Christians in favor of church-building, Colson was as zealous for Christ as he had been for Nixon. He even took on some of the trappings of the executive. When we hosted a Prison Fellowship donor event at the Nixon library, smooth-talking Colson aides arrived a day early wearing  blue blazers and PF lapel pins. They were as focused on pulling off a well-choreographed event for the boss as Nixon's factotums had been back in the day -- all the advance-man basics such as making sure the microphone was properly positioned and the drinking water in place, holding room properly arranged, and schedule double-checked.

When I was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2004, Colson sent me a Bible with a gracious inscription and called to offer congratulations and blessings. He said he was sure I'd be a good evangelical preacher. While I sent him some sermons, I can't recall if he responded. I assume he found my big-tent Anglicanism to be a bit pallid. He and my church definitely differed on whether gay and lesbian people should be afforded full sacramental status. In one of his last columns, he continued to assert that homosexual relations were inherently sinful. Giving in to Nixonian hyperbole for old time's sake, he vowed not to be cowed into silence by those writing press releases for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, preposterously implying that its criticism of his statements about homosexuality was comparable to his being on an IRA hit list or receiving death threat during Watergate.

When he called in 2004, Colson told me that he was pleased that another Nixon associate had joined the ranks of the converted or ordained -- meaning himself, another Watergate figure, Jeb Magruder, who became a Presbyterian minister, and Jonathan Aitken, a disgraced British politician who was Nixon's friend and biographer and later wrote a book about Colson. (During his celebrated visit to the Nixon library in 2009, John Dean asked Kathy to be sure to tell me that he'd been an Episcopal acolyte.) I chose not to say that, of this quartet of Nixon Christian soldiers, I was the only one who hadn't been in the slammer. My call to ordained ministry hadn't to do with being loyal to Nixon to the point of criminality but to a considerable extent with being viewed as disloyal by members of his family.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.

Hat tip to Carolyn Dennington

The Missing Tapes

This article originally appeared on the Nixon foundation web site on Sept. 9, 2003.

After Richard Nixon’s death in April 1994, his family and the friends responsible for his estate dared to hope that a better place in history could be secured by the same fragile loops of coated plastic that had strangled his Presidency. Historians concurred that the Nixon White House tapes, when cross-referenced with the documentary record of the Nixon years, would offer extraordinary insights into the dynamics of Presidential decision-making. Nearly a half-century of partisan score-settling that has typified commentary about Mr. Nixon ever since the Alger Hiss case would finally give way to a flood of theses, dissertations, and biographies by students and scholars less possessed than their forebears by the ideological passions of the Cold War and Vietnam eras.

We did not think it would happen overnight. We assumed that working journalists would first cull the tapes for profanity and racial and ethnic references by the President and his aides, all of them uttered during private conversations. At least that assumption proved correct. Yet we trusted that the tapes would be eventually used to illuminate his deft policy-making in Vietnam, foreign affairs, and domestic policy and also to provide new perspectives on the scandal that destroyed his Presidency.
In retrospect, we proved to be especially naïve when it came to Watergate. Journalists and prosecutors had pushed hard for the release of the tapes during 1973-74 so we could see what they revealed about Watergate. What we never anticipated was that a generation later, journalists and scriptwriters would ignore the tapes when what they revealed about Watergate proved to be inconsistent with the conventional wisdom.

For instance, in July PBS broadcast a documentary featuring a charge by former campaign aide Jeb Stuart Magruder that President Nixon had personally approved the Watergate break-in in a phone call on March 30, 1972. Since the President was in the White House that day, such a conversation would have been caught on tape. The tapes show that no such conversation took place. Mr. Magruder’s statement was contradicted by other evidence as well, including his own conflicting statements over the years. In their rush to promote and amplify Mr. Magruder’s explosive charge, the producers revealed none of the contradictory evidence.

President Nixon would not have been surprised. Yet for a little while, we had dared hope it would be otherwise. The former President had long resisted the release of his tapes on the grounds that the National Archives had not fulfilled its court-mandated obligation to return to him tapes of personal and family conversations. Two weeks after his death, President Nixon’s son-in-law Edward Cox reached out to executors and attorneys for the Nixon estate. The accolades recently heaped on the late President by his eulogists and even by some in the media suggested that the era of harsh anti-Nixon commentary was over, Mr. Cox said, which meant that the expensive court battles should end as well. He said while the President had been right to fight to protect his and his family’s privacy, it was time for his executors to cut a deal.

Mr. Cox’s suggestion was a relief to many on the late President’s battle-scarred legal team as well as to those of us working on his staff and at his library. It was tantalizing to think that an era was dawning when discerning scholars would patiently comb the files and tapes and write balanced accounts of the Nixon years. In July 1995, we reached an agreement with the National Archives setting a timetable for opening the thousands of hours of tape recordings. Eight years later, over half the tapes have been opened to scholars at the Nixon Project in College Park, Maryland. The archivists themselves control the pace of the openings. Their painstaking work is sometimes slowed by new declassification rules and other factors. The Nixon estate has not formally objected to the opening of a single second of tape. A few years ago we even agreed to permit the archivists to sell copies of the tapes to the public earlier than the July 1995 agreement had stipulated.

Yet the reading room at College Park is not clogged with listeners. Officials say about five people a week come in to listen to the tapes. Even for dedicated students of Presidential decision-making, taped conversations are sometimes too much of a good thing. Listening to and transcribing tapes is expensive and laborious. All 4,000 hours of Nixon tapes would fill about 480 500-page volumes, and that’s without any annotations. Our best source for accurate, thoughtfully annotated transcripts of important taped conversations from Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon White Houses is the project underway at University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Still, it will take experts many years to complete transcripts of relatively few selected conversations.

Yet even when transcripts are available, journalists with an interest in Watergate tend to overlook them unless they bolster the conventional wisdom. Our first disappointment came in 1997 with press coverage of the first book containing extensive transcripts of the newly-released Watergate tapes, Abuse of Power by Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Kutler published selected transcripts that actually confirm President Nixon’s own account of his actions during Watergate. In suggestive, sometimes misleading annotations, Dr. Kutler tried his best to explain away his transcripts’ exculpatory flavor. The transcripts themselves ultimately received little if any notice from reporters and reviewers in spite of the insights they offered into the state of mind of a President overseeing a war in Vietnam, peace negotiations in Paris, and a political campaign at home.

To paraphrase Sen. Howard Baker’s famous question, the keys to understanding Watergate are what the President thought and when he thought it. Though critics ridiculed his assertion that he acquiesced in a limit on the Watergate investigation because of national security, the tapes show he was telling the truth. Some of the burglars had also worked on a team, called the Plumbers, that had investigated Daniel Ellsberg after he stole top-secret Vietnam files, the Pentagon Papers, and gave them to the newspapers. Mr. Nixon was dismayed to learn in the spring of 1973 that the team had performed a 1971 break-in at the office of Dr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, Louis Fielding. But in June 1972, when the Watergate break-in occurred, he was still operating on the assumption that the Ellsberg investigation had been above board. He thought Dr. Ellsberg had put American fighting men at risk, and he considered his right to investigate him inviolable, as well as unrelated to Watergate. So he blithely approved his White House counsel John Dean’s plan to limit the investigation – only to revoke the order two weeks later after the FBI complained.

The tapes for the rest of 1972 reveal that he thought the burglars should be accountable for Watergate but not for investigating Ellsberg – exactly the distinction he said he had kept in his mind all along. Again and again he counseled his aides to avoid a Watergate cover-up. On June 30, he said, “I think the best thing to do is cut your losses in such things, get the damn thing out.” On July 19, he said, “You know, I’d like to see this thing work out, but I’ve been through these. The worst thing a guy can do, the worst thing – there are two things and each is bad. One is to lie and the other one is to cover up.” On September 18, he said, “The cover-up is what hurts you, not the issue. It’s the cover-up that hurts.” On October 16, he tells chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, “I just want to know whether [Appointments Secretary Dwight] Chapin or you guys were involved in Watergate….I don’t want anybody to lie about Watergate, do you know what I mean?…If we are, we’ve got to admit it, you know what I mean, because I have said it and I’m out on a limb.” As for his mentality about national security, when Haldeman reminds him on June 30 that the same crew had done earlier work for the White House, the President barks, “You mean in the Pentagon Papers? What the hell is the matter with that?”

Yet upon the publication of these transcripts, no paper carried the headline, “Tapes Show Nixon Pressed Aides To Avoid Cover-up.” Instead, Dr. Kutler claimed that the tapes showed that Mr. Nixon had actually known about the Fielding break-in at the time it occurred. In fact, the tapes Dr. Kutler himself transcribed and published strongly support Mr. Nixon’s contention that he had not learned about it until the spring of 1973. These dates are vitally important – perhaps the most important in the whole Watergate saga. If in June 1972, the President had known the Plumbers had an earlier break-in under their belt, then his acquiescence in Mr. Dean’s suggestion to limit the investigation indeed seems questionable. But if he was not yet aware of the Fielding job, the tapes make abundantly clear that he was making a careful distinction between Watergate, which he considered wrong and fair game for prosecutors, and the Plumbers’ Ellsberg work, which he considered his legitimate purview as a wartime commander-in-chief. Perhaps that’s why so many of his critics persist in claiming or implying that he “must have known about Fielding” and so had to order the Watergate cover-up in order to cover up the White House role in the earlier burglary as well.

Equally elusive has been any evidence that Mr. Nixon knew in advance about the June 1972 Watergate break-in — until Mr. Magruder’s star turn on the July 30 PBS documentary, Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History. Mr. Magruder said that during a meeting in Key Biscayne, Florida with the late John Mitchell, then Mr. Nixon’s campaign manager, he had heard Mr. Nixon’s voice, coming over a telephone held by Mr. Mitchell and approving a plan by G. Gordon Liddy for a break-in at the Watergate. In making the charge, Mr. Magruder contradicted statements he had made in his 1974 memoir and in taped interviews with scholars in 1988 and 1990. When we asked the program’s publicist, Colby Kelly, about the discrepancy with the Magruder memoir, she wrote back that he had freely admitted the contradiction and “explained that it was written before he went to prison and he was hoping for a pardon.” Yet the interviews in which he also contradicted his new charge were given long after Mr. Nixon had lost his pardon power. Indeed fingering the boss would have enhanced his chances for a pardon from subsequent Presidents. Asked about the contradiction in July, Mr. Magruder didn’t mention pardons but said that he had never been asked a direct question about Mr. Nixon’s involvement, which is also untrue.

When a source appears this conflicted, changing his story and wrapping inconsistencies in more inconsistencies, responsible journalists back off. Mr. Magruder, a retired Presbyterian pastor, may still be seeking expiation. Such speculation increased in mid-August when he was arrested, booked, and jailed near his home in Columbus, Ohio after police said he was lying drunk on a sidewalk and refused an officer’s request to get up, a charge his attorney denies.

Mr. Magruder’s arrest did not attract the same nationwide publicity as his accusation against President Nixon, which the PBS program’s promoters released in advance to selected reporters to bolster viewership. It is hard to avoid the impression that PBS and the show’s London-based producer, Carlton Productions, did not want to try too hard to test their source’s shaky memory. They did not report, for instance, that John Mitchell’s friend and aide, Fred LaRue, had attended the March 30, 1972 meeting during which Mr. Magruder now says he heard the President’s order. Mr. LaRue says that the telephone call never took place. Ms. Kelly, the publicist, did not respond to two e-mails asking if producers had reached out to Mr. LaRue, whose number is in the phone book. Mr. LaRue says he was never contacted.

In response to a Nixon library statement noting that Mr. Magruder’s statement was also contradicted by the White House tapes, Ms. Kelly wrote, “I know the producer investigated this and felt that the issue was more complicated than your statement allows.” But when we asked her when the producer had consulted the White House records, she didn’t reply. National Archives records show that no one associated with PBS, Carlton, or the documentary had visited. In the script for the program, the producers failed to point out that White House tapes and logs make clear that the Mr. Nixon said nothing all day about the Key Biscayne meeting and participated in no telephone calls with Key Biscayne or anyone in the meeting.

A PBS spokesperson, Carrie Johnson, also declined to respond to questions about whether Mr. LaRue or the tapes had been consulted.

Washington Post Watergate reporter Bob Woodward likes to call Mr. Nixon’s tapes “the gift that keeps on giving.” But it’s unfortunate that when the tapes could help President Nixon, his critics withhold the gift of the benefit of the doubt. Ironically, the Post lent its name to the PBS/Carlton production. During Watergate, the Post said that it always insisted on two sources before printing a Watergate accusation. The rule must no longer apply. Offered a chance to double-check Mr. Magruder’s charge, the Post’s documentary team excused its source’s obvious confusion, overlooked Mr. LaRue, and ignored the tapes. Was pinning the momentous burglary on President Nixon just too hard to resist? Whatever PBS’s motives, its program demonstrates that the real story of Watergate, the scandal sparked by our nation’s argument with itself over Vietnam, remains to be told. Whenever the true inquirers are ready to role up their sleeves, the tapes are waiting.