Schools Of Watergate

Richard Nixon's operatives -- especially Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Dwight Chapin, and Don Segretti -- are the southern California angle on Watergate, having learned their dirty tricks in their pretend politics at USC and UCLA. Clancy Segal, then a left-wing editor at UCLA's Daily Bruin, writes about a primitive era of gentile and Jewish fraternities; getting beaten up by frat boys for dating the wrong women, just like in "Animal House"; his jailhouse interview with Haldeman, when the disgraced former chief of staff candidly admitted his festering resentment of "Jewish liberals" on campus; and a fascinating moment when Alexander Butterfield, another Bruin, chose for whatever reason not to deny that he was a CIA plant in the White House, ordered to protect the agency from Nixon's interferences:

Tall, handsome and bronzed, Alex gave me that old Sigma Nu smile while refusing to deny, "Write it the way you see it, Clancy. Remember, there was nothing personal." Meaning, he played the game and Bob and John simply were collateral damage to a larger scheme.

All The President's Felons

From a wide-ranging post at NixoNARA by historian Maarja Krusten, two reflections on Nixonian management. First up is an insight from one of Nixon's budget chiefs, industrialist Roy Ash, that should be noted by every tycoon who thinks she can use her CEO chops to make government work at last. It's excerpted from a 1988 oral interview with Ash conducted by Maarja's former National Archives colleague Fred Graboske:

After leaving government, I went out and talked to business groups. . . . many of whom thought, and still think, "Why doesn’t the Government run like business?” . . . I said, "Imagine your board of directors comprising your customers, your suppliers, your employees, and your competitors. Now, how are you going to run your business?"

And then this important reflection on CEO Nixon himself:

Nixon was an intelligent and well-read man, someone who might have made a good history professor, as David Gergen once observed. I can’t speak to what led to his darker side, the side that made him ask Fred Malek to undertake Jew counting at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I don’t know if in different circumstances, and absent the Vietnam war, he might have kept that part in check or not. As to his downfall, we may never know everything about Watergate. (A new book offers some startling allegations about the “third rate burglary” at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.) What matters is that he need not have covered up the portion of the Watergate story of which he was aware. It’s important to remember that it was a different age, when executives clung more tightly to managerial infallibility than they do now.

It's absolutely true that Nixon trusted his management system, and it helped destroy him. As one of our most profoundly introverted presidents, he organized his White House to make it easy to limit the number of people he would see. To get the information he so desperately needed about Watergate, he naturally turned to his coterie of aides, people such Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean, Chuck Colson, and Dwight Chapin -- all bound for federal prison.

Nixon wasn't blameless. Many of his aides thought they were doing what he wanted. But as Maarja suggests, he might've been more attentive to his own accountability and thereby saved his presidency if he hadn't been surrounded by men who were principally concerned with protecting themselves.

Strip Search

Politicians love to collect the original art of editorial cartoons in which they feature, and Richard Nixon's domestic affairs advisor, John D. Ehrlichman, although doomed, was no different. In February 1973, not long before Nixon fired him over Watergate, Ehrlichman wrote to Garry Trudeau asking for a Doonsbury strip parodying Nixon's relative disinterest in domestic affairs. The letter was released last month by the Nixon library. Read a blogger's sardonic take here.

I met with Ehrlichman many years ago at the library, when he was trying to enlist our support for a TV project on the scandal. He died in 1999. He always blamed Nixon for making the decision for which he went to jail: Over Labor Day weekend in 1971, sending burglars to get dirt on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Scholars Stanley Kutler and Rick Perlstein have also tried to pin the Ellsberg caper on the chief. After all, it's the Watergate mother lode. If Nixon had even known about it at the time, it would tend to put a criminal coloration on his Watergate actions and statements beginning in June 1972. But none -- neither scholars nor self-serving aides -- has actually made the case.

Rich, Arch, And Gays

TV critics irregular Ehrlichman, Nixon, and Haldeman

Some mornings former President Nixon would tell aides in his New York or New Jersey office that he just happened to see something fascinating or shocking on television while trying to find the news or a football game. We suspected that our still-overachieving boss didn't want anyone to think he was wasting his time. He did happily admit that he and Mrs. Nixon enjoyed watching "Murder She Wrote" and "Barnaby Jones" together.

By the late 1980s, he was urging us all to get C-SPAN, because for the first time he was able to watch uninterrupted senatorial hearings, think tank panel discussions, and other high capital dramas that for a politics and policy junkie such as him were the equivalent of pure heroin. (I had to tell him that because of the way his administration had set up the cable TV system, Jersey City, where I lived, hadn't yet let a cable contract, hence no congressional debates on Congress St.) And yet still, every once in a while, the easy availability of Carnegie Endowment seminars on U.S.-Russian relations notwithstanding, he'd tug on his lower lip with the end of his reading glasses and say, "I ran across the damnedest thing last night when I was trying to find the Mets game..."

In May 1971 in the White House, the President did the same thing with his aides Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. The White House tape recorder captured his synopsis of an episode of "All in the Family" which he'd just happened to run across. The first episode of Norman Lear's epochal sitcom had been broadcast to rave reviews four months before, which suggests that as culture mavens, RN and his aides were behind the curve.

And yet as the tape below discloses, Messrs. Nixon and Haldeman were wise to Lear's moves. Archie Bunker dressed like a slob, Haldeman noticed; that meant you weren't supposed to like him. The former football player in the bar turned out to be gay, the President noted; that meant the show was twisting your melon when it came to assumptions about how gay people looked and acted. Postmodernists ought to have a field day studying a critical analysis of a cultural expression being performed by the individuals who were essentially among the objects of the expression itself.

The conversation turns from Archie Bunker (just like Meathead, RN keeps calling him Arch) to a dialogue on homosexuality that has made this tape segment the talk of the internet. The three men exhibited assumptions and anxieties about homosexuality -- I understand why they get up to that, but it shouldn't be glorified -- that were typical of their generation. The President, for instance, had been born in 1913. I'm surprised how few commentators and bloggers have pointed out that the chat occurred 38 years ago, just as gay liberation was picking up steam. George Carlin and Monty Python were still getting laughs with routines based on the same cultural stereotypes being indulged in the White House. By the same token, on another occasion President Nixon predicted that we'd have gay marriage by 2000, making him more progressive than the majority of California voters in 2008.

Fourteen seconds of the conversation have been bleeped by the National Archives on the grounds either of national security (doubtful in this case) or potential embarrassment to a living person. My guess is that the President and his aides were discussing national figures (not, the usual speculation to the contrary, J. Edgar Hoover, who is dead) or colleagues who were or may have been gay or lesbian.

Perlstein And The Ellsberg Break-In

This post originally appeared on The New Nixon on July 14, 2008.

Although I haven’t quite finished the massive Nixonland yet and had promised author Rick Perlstein I’d withhold substantive comment until I had, I’m sorry to have to note that, like at least one important scholar before him, he has fudged the available record in an apparent effort to pin President Nixon with foreknowledge of the September 1971 break-in at the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. That break-in was the opening act of Watergate, and so there is probably no more important question than whether RN knew about it in advance. Perlstein made a small but telling compromise in telling his version of story.

A former Pentagon official, Ellsberg had leaked to the newspapers the Defense Department’s massive study of the decisions in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations to deepen U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Mr. Nixon, who along with Henry Kissinger was passionate about secrecy during that time of war and complex diplomatic maneuvers involving Moscow and Beijing, created a leak-plugging unit in the White House that called itself “the Plumbers.” Fearing that Ellsberg might leak again, the Plumbers asked the CIA to prepare a psychological profile of him similar to the ones it routinely did on international figures. When the agency provided an assessment that the White House considered inadequate*, the Plumbers were authorized by White House aide John Ehrlichman to undertake covert operations, which led almost immediately to a burglary at the Beverly Hills office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, who had been treating Ellsberg.

Did the President know in advance? Here’s what Perlstein writes (p. 584):

It was time, the Plumbers decided, to plan a black-bag job. Ehrlichman brought the proposal to the president. “[Bud] Krogh should, of course, do whatever he considered necessary to get to the bottom of the matter,” the president replied, to learn what Ellsberg’s motives and potential further harmful action might be.” His only complaint was that the plan wasn’t aggressive enough.

Obviously Perlstein wishes the reader to infer that the plan brought by Ehrlichman was the burglary — but his own sourcing makes clear that he has overreached. A footnote sends the reader to Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years by J. Anthony Lukas, which has this passage:

Ehrlichman says he kept the President up to date on Plumbers’ activities and “invariably when they made recommendations jointly or severally, the President concurred. His only criticism of their effort was that it was not vigorous enough.” After Krogh recommended that some Plumbers personnel be sent out to “complete the California investigation of Ellsberg,” Ehrlichman says he told the President about this. Nixon — after discussing it with Hoover — said that “Krogh should, of course, do whatever he considered necessary…” So Ehrlichman told Krogh he should do “whatever he considered necessary.”

As Lukas recounts, only then did Krogh send Ehrlichman a memo, dated Aug. 11, proposing a “covert operation” to examine Ellsberg’s medical records, which Ehrlichman approved in writing. There is no evidence that Ehrlichman or anyone else talked to the President about a break-in in advance — no secretly recorded tape, no document. Indeed Ehrlichman himself, in his memoir Eyewitness to Power, doesn’t contend that he told RN about it in advance. He does write that he asked the President to give general approval to the idea of the Plumbers acting in an investigatory capacity since the FBI was dragged its feet when it came to Ellsberg. He wrote that he learned about the break-in only after it had occurred and told the President about it the following July, during a walk on the beach in California (conveniently not subject to taping).

As far as the tapes are concerned, one substantial piece of evidence suggests strongly that RN didn’t know about the break-in when it occurred or even for some time afterwards. In a Sept. 8 conversation, a week after the Fielding caper, Ehrlichman tells RN, “We had one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about.” Although on p. 584 Perlstein basically says RN ordered it, he is diligent enough to include the comment from the tapes ten pages later.

Mr. Nixon contended that he learned about the Ellsberg job in the spring of 1973, and so far no one has produced any evidence to the contrary (beyond Ehrlichman’s charges, by which he sought to transfer responsibility for the Aug. 11 green light from himself to Mr. Nixon, whom he surmised sent the go-ahead through Chuck Colson or some other agent). It’s a vital question for any complete and accurate Watergate narrative, since RN’s critics have long asserted that when he acquiesced in the Watergate coverup in June 1972, it was to prevent people from learning about the Plumbers’ other illegal activities. But if he didn’t know about the Ellsberg job at that time, his contention that there was a national security dimension to his Watergate statements and actions during June 1972-March 1973 is much easier to defend credibly.

When he published his otherwise indispensable book of Watergate tape transcripts, Abuse of Power, Stanley Kutler edited one transcript to make it appear as though RN had had foreknowledge of the Fielding job. He fixed the problem in the paperback version. Perlstein now has such an opportunity as well.

*The original version of this post erred in saying that the CIA refused to provide a psychological profile of Ellsberg.