Let me preface my take on the Edwards trial with one general observation: Not all politicians are created equal. And not all are treated equally. Therein lies an issue deserving a much, much closer look: whether vulnerable Democrats, chiefly of the liberal persuasion, are targeted for destruction.  Or at least helped along to their doom by a double standard.

***

But first, the specifics of the Edwards case. He faces a potential $1.5 million fine, but, far more seriously, up to thirty years imprisonment. Thirty years. His crime? Not murder, not torture, not armed robbery, not stealing money from clients. No, his crime was his failure to report campaign contributions. While preparing for his second presidential bid, in 2006, he got caught up in an extramarital affair that produced a child. And, not exactly able to announce that fact or ask his sick wife to sign off, the wealthy Edwards turned to some wealthy backers to take care of the woman and the baby and hide the whole thing from Elizabeth Edwards and presumably everyone else. Two people gave him a total of $900,000.

When someone running for office receives money, or the benefit of money or services, that’s a contribution, and it must both be reported and be subject to restrictions on amount. Unless of course it has nothing to do with the campaign itself. Certainly, candidates receive ordinary income (such as fees for lawyering) that is not subject to those limits. And if someone gives a candidate a gift that is not used for the campaign, it is similarly not subject to campaign finance laws.

So, what’s the ill intent here—and the consequence for the public interest? If this were a bribe by someone seeking to influence Edwards as an office-holder, that would be one thing. If the money were intended to help sway voters to support Edwards, that might be valid cause for pursuing the case aggressively. But nothing about the two donors, both elderly (one has since died), suggests an attempt to gain illegal influence. In reality, both donors –the billionaires Rachel “Bunny” Mellon and Fred Baron—apparently liked and believed in Edwards and, when asked, were quick to aid him in a tough spot.

If it sounds like Edwards still needed to apply FEC rules and limits, consider this: Scott Thomas, a former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission testified that he did not consider that the payments would have come under his agency’s auspices—in part because they were not used directly for the campaign and did not free up any of Edwards’ own money to be spent on the campaign. And Thomas noted that the gifts from one of the donors continued after Edwards dropped out of the race, indicating they were not for campaign purposes. Unfortunately for Edwards, the ex-commissioner, a 37-year FEC veteran with great credibility on these matters,  was only permitted to testify without the jury present—and the jury may never get to hear from him.

In any case, one doesn’t need to in any way defend Edwards’ conduct to see that the matter is a bit complex, and the prosecution for a federal crime, and the prospective punishment, extraordinarily harsh.

The “Liberal” Media Loves to Sink Liberals

What’s this really about? The equal application of election law? Equal pursuit of actual corruption? An equal standard of sexual misbehavior and how it should be handled?  It’s hard to see any of these legitimate concerns front and center here.

What did strike me about this matter is that it seems to confirm a feeling that I have long had:  Progressive Democrats who get caught with their pants down appear to pay a steeper price in terms of impact on their career prospects—if not criminal prosecution— when compared to similarly compromised corporate-friendly Republicans.

Let’s consider the long list of Democrats before John Edwards who were wounded by accusations of sexual misbehavior: Gary Hart. Gary Condit (who was tied to the disappearance and murder of a young woman; although in the end it turned out he had nothing to do with it, he was ruined anyway because of an alleged dalliance with the young woman). Bill Clinton. Eliot Spitzer. Anthony Weiner. (I’m sure I am forgetting some.)

Republican politicians seem no less prone than Democrats to adultery and other common if frowned-upon behavior. But compared to the infamy visited upon those named above, how many of us recall all the GOP/Conservative Scandals? How often were these the topic of constant chatter on the major talk radio programs? Try David Vitter, Newt Gingrich, Jon Ensign, Dan Burton, Helen Chenoweth, Henry Hyde, Robert Livingston, Mark Foley, to name but a few. Several quickly resigned but the only one who, pardon the expression, went down after extensive coverage (and his own resistance) that I can recall was Larry Craig—whose public washroom behavior (and tone-deaf defense thereof) was pretty hard to ignore.

In fact, given the standard GOP claim to represent “family values” and morality in general, it would seem that shenanigans from that side of the aisle would warrant more attention—and graver consequences — if for nothing more than the inherent hypocrisy and cynicism.

We cannot ignore the decision-makers who decide whom to prosecute, partially in response to unstated political and other pressures. Nor should we ignore the role of the media (and supposed friends of the Democrats) in sealing their doom.

The New York Times, purported linchpin of the liberal media, hammered Bill Clinton and broke the Eliot Spitzer call-girl story.  Gary Hart was investigated by the purportedly moderate-liberal Miami Herald and Washington Post. Clinton was taken to the woodshed by Joe Lieberman and some feminists. Spitzer was quietly mugged, off-record, by his Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who was only too glad to capture the governorship himself  two years later.  In the case of Rep. Weiner, the saturation coverage made it difficult to recall that he had not actually had sexual contact with the women he was sending messages to. Nevertheless, he was assailed by prominent liberal blogs and cut off by Nancy Pelosi; his seat, a sure Democratic bet, went GOP in a special election.

The same cannot be said, in general, of conservative politicians or conservative media. Their tendency has been to largely ignore, or to understate, or to deflect attention from the Republican shenanigans and abuses.

So much for the notion of a “liberal” media showing favoritism to its own.  My experience is that the “liberal” label when applied to journalists is a red herring which distracts us from the fundamentally accomodationist nature of the corporate-owned media. But the liberal label is effective in pressuring journalists to prove they do not coddle liberals—by doing the exact opposite.

The media is, by nature, cowardly. It too seldom goes after powerful people over the actual business of governing because it is too hard to make the audience care. And it only goes after people for misusing their peckers when it senses that a mob is forming, that there’s blood in the water. Then it is all about going to the head of the pack.

If we examine the case of Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, the contrast to Edwards’s treatment is startling. Sen. Vitter, a slavish advocate of oil industry and other corporate interests, broke the law prior to 2004 by patronizing prostitutes while a member of the House. The scandal broke after he had been elected to the Senate; he is still in the Senate. When it became public that his name was in the records of a Capitol Hill escort agency, Vitter put out a written statement of contrition, went into a week of seclusion, emerged and, with his wife (who happens to be a prosecutor), made a brief public apology, then refused to answer questions. He was never prosecuted due to the statute of limitations. The woman who ran the call girl ring he frequented, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, aka the “DC Madam,” was found hanged in what was labeled a suicide, after publicly saying that if anything happened to her, she most certainly did not intend to do harm to herself.

Had Vitter stepped down, the Democratic governor of Louisiana at the time would presumably have appointed a Democrat to temporarily fill his seat—an important factor in a closely divided Senate.

The hypocrisy of a “family values” politician like Vitter knows no bounds. When Vitter was in the House of Representatives he actually took calls from the DC Madam during roll call votes; later, Sen. Vitter expressed outrage over purported actions of the poverty group ACORN, where several staffers showed tolerance toward conservative operatives with a hidden camera who were pretending to be involved in prostitution.

So Vitter is still in the Senate, defending the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman, while Anthony Weiner, who was never accused of any crime, was forced to resign by howls of protests from all quarters, including the Democratic leadership who abandoned him in the face of the “inevitable.”

Ye Olde Honey Pot

The media—and hence the public—tend to focus more attention on failings in politicians’ private lives than in their public ones. We already know that politicians are all too human in their private tastes, which appear to have little cause-and-effect relationship to their conduct in office. But we continue to make personal rectitude the standard of fitness for politicians, rather than the actual policies they advocate—and the interests that shape their priorities.

Yet, paradoxically, it is exactly in their public actions and the policies they espouse that we may look for the roots of these selective scandals.  Could politicians with the “wrong public values” be targeted for a fall?

I find it instructive to look at the specifics of Edwards’ predicament, and the curious decision to prosecute in a federal court what was, while morally inexcusable, private behavior involving chiefly the wronging of a spouse.

-Edwards became enamored of a woman who approached him—and who was well aware that he was married, and how exposure of the affair could impact his future if it became public.

-The story came to the public in part with the help of the National Enquirer, the same paper that played a prominent role in Hart’s downfall in the run-up to the 1988 Presidential election..

-Edwards was, like Hart, a handsome, charismatic—and populist—candidate, a rare liberal hope in a party traditionally prone to nominating “system” moderates. His issues were poverty and income inequality, climate change, universal health care, and withdrawing troops from Iraq. When Rielle Hunter approached him in 2006 he was on a cross-country tour to help labor unions.  

-Hunter in some ways is reminiscent of other women who came forward to ruin or nearly ruin Democratic politicians with accusations of sexual improprieties—while personally profiting from their actions–including Donna Rice (Hart), Gennifer Flowers (Clinton) and Ashley Dupre (Spitzer). Meanwhile, some of those who turned on Edwards, notably his former aide Andrew Young and his wife, have by their own admission done well financially for doing Edwards in.

-Though Hunter was their entire case, prosecutors were sufficiently wary of her (or perhaps of drawing additional attention to her precise role in the matter) that they did not call her to the witness stand.

This investigative reporter smells a rat in Edwards’s downfall. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m not sure exactly who decided what, when, but consider that Hunter was down on her luck when she happened to bump into Edwards while he was in a hotel bar. The following excerpt is instructive. It comes from a book by Edwards’ former aide Andrew Young, now a prosecution witness against Edwards (The Politician):

The senator first met Rielle in early 2006 when he was in New York during a cross-country speaking tour with actor Danny Glover on behalf of hotel workers who wanted his help at union rallies. As she eventually told me herself, she saw Edwards in the lounge of the Regency, a five-star hotel on Park Avenue…..

By the time she saw John Edwards, she had lived much of her life on the edge of glamour, wealth, and enlightenment but was, at forty-one, divorced, unemployed, and living rent- free with a friend in New Jersey named Margaret “Mimi” Hockman.

When she made eye contact with the senator…she asked him if he was the candidate she had seen on television. After he identified himself, she said, “You’re so hot, but on television that doesn’t come through. You seem distant. I can help you with that.”…

Rielle …decided immediately that she would devote herself to helping him reach this potential. This assistance would begin later, after she arranged to bump into him on the sidewalk, where she would flirt some more.

What’s even more interesting is that Hunter wasn’t really in a position to do what she promised. Partnering with her roommate, the two had to recruit still others to execute rudimentary video and editing work. Soon she and her crew were traveling with the politician, filming him in cinema verite style for online “webisodes.”

Now, how about Hart? The Hart scandal had the flavor of an operation designed to remove an enormously popular, populist candidate from the race. (Hart was at the time the leading Democratic candidate, and well ahead of his likely Republican opponent, vice president George H.W. Bush, in match-ups.)

Hart was invited onto a boat with a ridiculously newsworthy name (“Monkey Business”), an attractive blond plopped in his lap, and a waiting photographer got the money shot. A private investigator provided journalists with a report saying that Hart and the blond, Donna Rice, appeared to have spent the night together.  Other reporters were given an anonymous inside tip. The story reads right like a thriller—or an intelligence op.  A bit like how Watergate became a sensation. (See our series on the downing of Nixon here.)

It is now common knowledge that Clinton was targeted by a well-oiled Right-Wing operation (not too far off from Hillary Clinton’s statement, seemingly wild at the time, that her husband was the victim of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy”). We never did learn quite enough about how someone with Monica Lewinsky’s modest credentials and unique charms (just the sort Bill Clinton was known to appreciate) ended up interning for him. On the surface, it all looks innocent enough, but I’ve seen enough hints, and, over the years, enough comparable scenarios, to wonder.

Message: If You Mess With the Establishment, Don’t Mess With the Ladies

The Spitzer story featured a cast of corporate kingpins angry at his actions as attorney general, and the GOP “dirty tricks” specialist Roger Stone. Exactly how Spitzer’s financial transactions drew federal attention has been inadequately explored, as has why so big a deal was made of his extracurricular activities (the central federal legal “issue” was that he arranged for a prostitute to cross state lines). As for Anthony Weiner, he was targeted by the late provocateur Andrew Breitbart  and fellow Right-wing activists who used fake email addresses and pretended to be underage girls.

Probably the most interesting thing is how many of these guys who went down—or in Clinton’s case nearly did—were messing with powerful interests. Excepting perhaps Clinton, they all had a streak of populism—going after bankers, and the one percent, and, in at least one case, the CIA. Hart and Edwards both had stirred class-conscious politics prominently into their broader messaging. Hart was on the investigative Senate committee that looked into CIA abuses in the 1970s, and became an outspoken critic of the excesses of the spy establishment—just as Richard Nixon was secretly battling the CIA, the Pentagon, and corporate interests at the time that the Watergate scandal began to undo his presidency. Weiner was a liberal and a close ally of the Clintons with an eye on the New York mayor’s office. Spitzer was a leading figure in targeting Wall Street, insurance industry and other corporate abuses. He was one big problem for some tough customers, and had his eye on the White House next.

Is all this worth another look? This reporter thinks so.

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GRAPHIC: http://images.politico.com/global/enquirer.edwards.jpg

That is total hogwash, as despite the risks, there has been a steady stream of credible witnesses to conspiracy. But don’t take our word for it.

Meet Nina Rhodes-Hughes. Tell us if she seems like a wacko. Her story is of being just feet away from Bobby Kennedy right as a second shooter pumped the candidate full of lead—from the opposite direction of where Sirhan Sirhan was, and after Sirhan had already been tackled.

It is no coincidence that this “someone who did talk” is living in Canada, and that her account is being provided by a Canadian paper. Imagine the Washington Post or New York Times treating her seriously.

Read all about it here.  To watch an interview with her, click on the image below. Then please come back here afterwards and use the SHARE buttons to tell your friends.

GRAPHIC:  http://www.vancouversun.com/news/6573082.bin?size=620x400s

Take the latest sequel to Japan’s March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which was deemed the “most serious nuclear crisis since Chernobyl” by NewScientist.  To this day the city of Fukushima is surrounded by a 20-kilometer (12.4 mile) dead zone.

On May 4, in an action hailed by anti-nuclear activists around the world, Japan announced that it was putting its last remaining operational nuclear power plant, located in the northern city of Tomari, on “recess.” The next day, five thousand demonstrators in Tokyo celebrated what one participant called a “historic” victory, in a country where some 30 percent of electrical power had been provided by nuclear reactors.

While pressure from activists undoubtedly influenced the government’s decision, a closer look at Japan’s nuclear power industry raises serious questions about the extent of the victory.

Japan Announces Big Nuclear Deal with Kazakhstan

Unmentioned by all but two news outlets was the fact that a day before the announcement, the Japanese government signed a deal with Kazakhstan’s state-owned nuclear giant, KazAtomProm, to begin supplying Japan with more nuclear fuel starting in 2013.

“Japan will take part in the implementation of 40 projects in Kazakhstan,” explained the Kazakh state-run news outlet, CaspioNet. “This applies to cooperation in the nuclear industry, mining and met allurgical complex, high technology, as well as mechanical engineering and gas-chemical industry.”

As for “projects” in Japan itself, the picture is a little murky, perhaps intentionally so. “The Japanese government never actually said it was going to turn off the lights on the nuclear industry at any point in time,” the Netherlands-based Nuclear Campaigner for Greenpeace International, Aslihan Tumer told WhoWhatWhy in an interview.

“What the Japanese government has been saying is that they’re going to restart it, eventually, once the safety checks are done, once they take local concerns into consideration,” said Turner. “So, they are not saying it is off the table right now.”

Japan’s newly strengthened ties to Kazakhstan come on top of the major foothold Japanese multinational energy corporations already have in that Central Asian country, which is four times the size of Texas.

Japan’s Nuclear Alliance with KazAtomProm

Known for its massive reserves of Caspian Sea oil and natural gas resources, Kazakhstan also possesses roughly 15 percent of the world’s known uranium supply, accounting for roughly one-third of current global production, according to the World Nuclear Association (WNA).

With no uranium resources of its own Japan, the world’s third biggest economy, has relied on the global market to fuel its nuclear reactors, trading mainly with Australia, Canada and, increasingly, Kazakhstan, according to WNA. In 2010, three Japan-based nuclear fuel corporations, Kansai Electric Power Company, Sumitomo, and Nuclear Fuel Industries Ltd, signed a deal with KazAtomProm to supply its plants with uranium.

A complex web of agreements across national borders links many of the biggest players in the nuclear industry. For example, in October 2006, the Japanese multinational corporation Toshiba purchased a 77-percent share of the U.S. nuclear company Westinghouse Electric for $5.4 billion. Two other companies were involved in the deal: Japan’s IHI Corporation, and U.S. multinational Shaw Group. Later, in July 2007, KazAtomProm paid $486.3 million for 10 percent of Toshiba’s stake in the jointly owned corporation, meaning it now owns 7.7-percent of the corporation formerly known as Westinghouse.

As a result of such deals Kazakhstan has a direct tie to the Fukushima meltdown. Investigative reporter Greg Palast explained in a March 2011 story: “One of the reactors dancing with death at Fukushima Station 1 was built by Toshiba. Toshiba was also an architect of the emergency diesel system.”

Eerily enough, Kazakhstan is still recovering from a nuclear tragedy of its own. The city of Semey, near the country’s northeastern border with Siberia, was formerly known as Semipalatinsk. From 1949 to 1989, a secret complex 93 miles west of the city was the site of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons tests.

History Repeating Itself?

“After a wave of popular protests, the Semipalatinsk site was closed in 1991. It had carried out 456 secret nuclear tests,” explained EuroNews. “However, the closure could not reverse the environmental damage to the region, which has more than a million inhabitants, most of which are villagers.”

“Local oncology centers are screening tens of thousands of patients, trying to detect and treat tumors at early stages…Infant mortality here is five times higher than the average or developed countries. Embryonic defects are widespread, and cancer strikes teenagers as well as adults,” the report continues.

The nuclear tragedies at Chernobyl, Semipalatinsk and Fukushima have not proved a deterrent to the global nuclear industry’s ambitions. “Japan hasn’t used the Fukushima disaster as an opportunity to push for renewable energy or energy efficiency,” said Tumer. “Instead, it has used the time since the disaster to push for the restart of nuclear reactors.”

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Graphics:   Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Notes: (1) Although these excerpts do not contain footnotes, the book itself is heavily footnoted and exhaustively sourced. (2) To distinguish between George Bush, father and son, George H.W. Bush is sometimes referred to by his nickname Poppy, and George W. Bush by his, W. (3) Additional context can be found in the preceding chapters.

Before you read this third and final installment, please read the first and second installment.

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CHAPTER 11

Downing Nixon, Part II: The Execution

If, as it appears, Watergate was indeed a setup, it was a fairly elaborate covert operation, with three parts: 1) creating the crime, 2) implicating Nixon by making him appear to be knowledgeable and complicit in a cover-up, and 3) ensuring that an aggressive effort would be mounted to use the “facts” of the case to prosecute Nixon and force him from office. The third area is where Lowell Weicker was absolutely indispensable.

The very day after Dean went to see Nixon to deliver his “cancer on the presidency” speech, Weicker, preparing for the hearings, received a visitor.

According to Weicker’s memoir, the visitor was Ed DeBolt, a Republican national committeeman from California. “DeBolt opened my eyes wide,” Weicker writes, “In sum, what he said was that many people in California politics considered Nixon to be a ‘chronic gutter fighter.’ If that had reached the East, I didn’t know about it.”

As presented in the memoir, this visit played a major role in convincing Weicker that Watergate might be more serious than he had understood— and that it would have been in character for Nixon himself to have sanctioned the break-ins.

At a minimum, Weicker comes across as oddly sheltered, having missed a good two decades of acclaimed Herblock cartoons characterizing Nixon as a gutter fighter, beginning with a 1954 comic showing him crawling out of a sewer. Indeed, by 1973 Nixon had been widely represented as a political smear artist.

In fact, the DeBolt-Weicker story turns out to be more complicated than the senator indicates in his memoir. In a 2008 interview, DeBolt told me that it was actually Weicker who called and summoned him, and that Weicker knew DeBolt was not merely a party activist from California, but a Washington insider. During the 1972 campaign, DeBolt had been one of the Nixon campaign’s key operatives. By the time Weicker called him, in March 1973, DeBolt was a high-ranking staffer for the party—on the payroll at Poppy Bush’s RNC.

“He called me up one day—he knew where I was because he had my phone number at the RNC—and he asked if I would come see him for a few minutes,” recalled DeBolt, who served as the RNC’s deputy chairman for research and campaigns. They met in the Senate cafeteria.

DeBolt said that he characterized Nixon to Weicker as a complicated individual, a mix of good and bad: “I liked [Nixon] . . . He was very, very smart, and he really cared about me and the staff; he just didn’t show it . . . I would see this man who knew so much but he was more insecure than my puppy. So, I always felt sorry for him. I just think he got in over his head.”

The most curious aspect of DeBolt’s interaction with Weicker was that when he responded to the senator’s summons, he found him sitting with a prepared list of detailed questions, based on information that only someone high up in the White House or RNC could have known about DeBolt. “I don’t remember volunteering a whole lot of stuff. He had a list in front of him, of questions, and he was going down the list and checking them off. He was clearly asking questions that his staff had put together . . .”

In Weicker’s memoir, he suggests that DeBolt’s purported revelation about Nixon’s “gutter fighter” reputation caused him to spring into action. One thing he did, according to DeBolt, was to enter a part of DeBolt’s comments into the committee records.

After DeBolt’s visit, the senator excitedly called his staff and met with them over the weekend. His press secretary, Dick McGowan, started to devote “enormous amounts of time” to the scandal. McGowan, who, intriguingly, would himself later go to work for Poppy Bush, would turn Weicker’s office into what he called “a gold mine” of information. At times, reporters were stumbling over each other as they waited for their daily handout. Many of the “exclusives” that appeared in the media were from the Weicker team’s own investigation.

On March 29, barely nine days after he had met with Nixon and recommended having Dean testify, Poppy called the White House with an even more urgent request. As recounted in Haldeman’s diaries, the purpose of Bush’s call was to get the president to start talking about Watergate publicly:

George Bush just called. It [i.e., disclosure] must be from the President at the President’s earliest possible convenience. This is the most urgent request he has ever made of the President . . . This is an outgrowth of conversations he’s had with Gerry Ford and Bryce Harlow . . . He doesn’t necessarily have solutions but feels that this political advice . . . is of the utmost urgency. [emphasis added]

Poppy Bush was almost frantic to get Nixon’s ear—again claiming to be carrying input from influential Republicans. And his message was always the same: it’s urgent that you confess White House misdeeds.

DeBolt, who worked at the RNC from 1971 to 1973, said he found Bush’s presence at the party’s helm bizarre. “I wondered how in the heck Bush got to be RNC chairman,” he said. “He had been a flop in everything he had done, and he had nobody at the RNC who was rooting for him—nobody. [The order to install Bush] came directly from Nixon, and we always wondered about that.”

And who had the best access to intelligence overall in and between the FBI, the White House, the RNC, and the reelection campaign? One guess. “Dean got copies of every single report,” DeBolt recalled. “We were led to believe that Dean was keeping us out of trouble; he was checking on stuff, for Nixon.”

Over at the Capitol, on April 10, 1973, Weicker received another visitor. It was Jack Gleason, previously of the Townhouse Operation, who was no longer associated with the White House. He came now with words of caution. Someone—Gleason cannot recall who—on the White House staff, figuring he would pass along the information to Weicker, had told Gleason that the senator was going to be implicated for allegedly accepting a Townhouse transferred campaign donation and not reporting it.

Based on the tip from Gleason, who himself still assumed that Townhouse had been authorized from the very top, Weicker said that he concluded Nixon was trying to set him up. Sometime later, he contacted the special prosecutor’s office and urged that it investigate Townhouse.

Even if Gleason was, as he asserts, trying to do the right thing, someone inside the White House was using essentially the same information for a different purpose: seemingly not to frame Weicker but rather to anger him. Or to give Weicker the impetus to set that moldy would-be scandal, Townhouse, back in play.

Cranking up the volume further, a few days after Gleason’s visit, an anonymous source inside the White House tipped off reporters about illegalities in the 1970 Weicker campaign and suggested that the reporters talk to Gleason. The goal seems to have been to make Gleason the fall guy, but more important, to further prime the pumps for the revival of Townhouse in the news.

Meanwhile, John Dean took the step that would land him in the history books: he publicly switched sides.

Ostensibly operating solely in his own interests, Dean broke with Nixon, purportedly because he worried about facing possible prosecution and hoped to secure a deal for himself. This defection enabled Dean to become the virtual guide for both prosecutors and senatorial committee members. When he became the witness for the prosecution, Dean brought with him the noose with which to hang Nixon. Now he would “tell all” about the things Nixon “had done”—creating the charge that would ultimately drive the president from office. Dean informed the special prosecutors that Nixon was involved in a cover-up. He also told them about the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. And he kept on talking.

Will the Real John Dean Please Stand Up?

To this day, thanks in part to his bestselling book, Blind Ambition, John Dean lives in memory as an ambitious and self-absorbed young lawyer who got caught up in Nixon’s scheming and then, from some combination of self preservation and guilt, blew the whistle. As a result, Dean became something of a hero on the left—and years later an MSNBC pundit and outspoken critic of the George W. Bush administration. He even wrote a bestselling critique of W. called Worse Than Watergate.

But the widely accepted characterization of Dean as a misguided underling whose ambitions led him to participate for a period in Nixon’s depraved schemes does not comport well with the actual facts of his life. John Wesley Dean III was wired—and sponsored—from the get-go.

Dean was the son of an affluent Ohio family, and his early years were shaped by military values—including following orders—not doing one’s own thing. He graduated from Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, where he roomed with Barry Goldwater Jr., and became lifelong friends with the Goldwater family, which had close ties to the Bushes. (Barry Goldwater Jr. was in the wedding party in 1972 when Dean married his second wife, Maureen. And Barry Goldwater Sr. would play a crucial role in pushing Nixon out by publicly calling for him to go—an important signal from a party elder.)

Dean attended two colleges in the Midwest before coming to Washington. There he married Karla Hennings, the daughter of a recently deceased Democratic senator from Missouri, and met Robert McCandless, who was married to Karla’s sister. McCandless was from the oil-rich state of Oklahoma and had learned the ways of the Capitol on the staff of Senator Robert Kerr, the Oklahoma oilman and friend of the Bushes who was long regarded—after Texas’s Speaker, Sam Rayburn—as the power behind Lyndon Johnson’s rise.

After graduating from Georgetown Law School, Dean took a job with a Washington law firm. He was soon accused of conflict of interest violations because he had allegedly been negotiating his own private deal relating to a broadcast license for a new television station after being assigned to prepare an identical application for a client. The firm fired him for this transgression, and despairing of being hired by another law office, he turned to his brother-in-law for advice. McCandless suggested that he find another job fast, before his status as unemployed became too apparent, and preferably a job where his firing might not come up.

Dean used his connections to a Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee to get a job as the committee’s chief minority counsel. William McCulloch, a representative from Ohio who was Dean’s boss on the Judiciary Committee, said of him: “He was an able young man, but he was in a hell of a hurry.” When a National Commission on the Reform of Federal Criminal Law was created in 1967, Dean was appointed associate director. In 1968, Dean volunteered to write position papers on crime for the Nixon campaign. After the inauguration, he got a job with Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, an Arizonan and protégé of Barry Goldwater; presumably Dean’s longtime friendship with Barry Jr. did not hurt. Among other things, his government work dealt with antiwar demonstrations and wiretapping laws.

In little over a year, in July 1970, when John Ehrlichman became the president’s chief domestic adviser, and his job as the president’s lawyer opened up, Dean moved in. It had been a dizzyingly steep climb, from ousted law firm associate to counsel to the president of the United States in four short years.

Egil, or “Evil,” Krogh?

How exactly did John Dean get onto the White House staff ? He was brought on by Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr. Friends of Krogh dubbed him “Evil Krogh,” as a joke, insisting that it was the exact opposite of a man of formidable rectitude. In fact, Krogh was a complex figure.

A longtime friend of John Ehrlichman’s and a former member of his Seattle law firm, Krogh brought into the White House not just Dean but also Gordon Liddy. And he approved the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—an act whose exposure would seriously damage Nixon.

Although Dean joined the president’s staff in July 1970, records show Krogh trying to get him into the White House, even on a piecemeal basis, months earlier. As early as March 2, Krogh arranged daily White House access for the outsider. A memo dated March 2 says: “John Dean . . . will be coming to the White House every day until approximately November 1970. I would appreciate your issuing him a White House pass for that reason . . . Bud Krogh.” On March 24, Krogh shifted gears, including Dean on a list of four people he was recommending for “personnel recruitment.” It is not clear how Krogh knew Dean or why he became so determined to bring Dean into the White House—or whether he was told to do so. “He has been one of my closest confidants in developing Congressional strategy,” Krogh wrote to Haldeman. Krogh ultimately got Dean hired without a background check.

Krogh had begun his work for Nixon by helping with the inauguration, then was made an adviser on the District of Columbia. Quickly, though, he maneuvered himself into far heavier fare. He became liaison to the FBI and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), a precursor to the DEA. And soon he went even deeper. “We sent [him] . . . to work with the BNDD and the CIA to try and buy off some of the heroin labs in the Golden Triangle,” Ehrlichman said. Charles Colson confirmed to Len Colodny that Krogh was “carrying large amounts of money over to Southeast Asia to pay off some of the drug lords. That had to be Agency work.” Colson also wrote: “What I remember is that there was a CIA contact, that Krogh dealt with … The CIA liaison to the White House, by the way, also dealt with Hunt all through the Watergate period—one of the very suspicious and unexplored aspects of the CIA’s involvement.”

Krogh had been a student of University of Washington law professor Roy Prosterman, an expert in the design of agrarian reforms intended to blunt Communist incursions. Prosterman designed the “Vietnam pacification program,” which had aspects of land redistribution but became best known for its association with the Phoenix Program, an operation in which thousands were assassinated. Krogh traveled to Vietnam prior to Nixon’s election, ostensibly to assess land reform programs in association with Prosterman. Under Nixon, though Krogh’s White House job involved domestic policy, he went back to Vietnam for the BNDD, purportedly to address the growing drug addiction of American troops. The BNDD also sent John Dean to the Philippines, and that’s where he was when the Watergate break-in took place. Dean’s wife Maureen got a job in 1971 with the BNDD, organizing the new National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse despite what Maureen describes in her memoirs as a lack of relevant experience.

Krogh served four and a half months in prison for his role in the Ellsberg job, went back to legal practice, and now lectures on legal ethics.

Intelligence Czar

John Dean seemed to love the role of intelligence czar. As private investigator turned White House gumshoe Jack Caulfield would recall, “I saw a desire [on the part of Dean] to take greater chances as [Dean] saw the potential rewards. And the key to the ball game was intelligence—who was going to get it and who was going to provide it. Dean saw that and played the game heartily . . . I was getting my instructions from Dean . . .”  What made Dean so successful was his ability to protect himself legally and otherwise, and to disassociate himself personally from those very intelligence activities. When, on March 21, 1973, he famously told Nixon that there was a “cancer on the presidency,” he began his description of the whole Watergate episode to the president by putting the onus on Haldeman, rather than himself, as the person who originated White House intelligence operations.

DEAN: It started with an instruction to me from Bob Haldeman to see if we couldn’t set up a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence operation over at the Re-Election Committee. [emphasis added]

NIXON: Hm-hmm.

Next, Dean denied any involvement in intelligence and claimed he decided to rely on someone else:

DEAN: Not being in this business, I turned to somebody who had been in this business, Jack Caulfield.

Eventually, Dean continued, G. Gordon Liddy, counsel to the Committee to Re-elect the President, was assigned responsibility as in-house expert on intelligence operations because he “had an intelligence background from the FBI.”

So, Dean added, “Liddy was told to put together this plan, you know, how he would run an intelligence operation.”

Was told by whom? Dean doesn’t say, but according to Liddy, he “was told” by Dean himself.

Thanks to post-Watergate reporting by several journalists and authors— reporting that failed to gain wide circulation or was aggressively attacked by Dean and others with a vested interest in controlling the story—we now know the following:

• In November 1971, it was Dean who actually recruited two private eyes to do a walk-through of Watergate. Jack Caulfield, a former New York City cop, relayed the order to Tony Ulasewicz, who had worked for Nixon in the past. “Dean wants you to check out the offices of the DNC.” Ulasewicz complied and simply walked through the offices as a visitor, casing out the location of desks, who sat where, and any other useful information.

• In January 1972, it was Dean who encouraged Liddy, counsel to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, to set up a “really first class intelligence operation,” which led to Operation Gemstone, an intricate plan consisting of several potential clandestine operations, each one named after a precious stone. These included eavesdropping on—and infiltration of—Democratic campaigns. Liddy recalls in his autobiography, Will, that it was Dean who “encouraged him to think bigger” because previous intelligence operations had been “inadequate.” Liddy, at Dean’s prodding, incorporated eavesdropping on—and infiltration of—Democratic campaigns.

• In April 1972, it was Dean—not Mitchell or Haldeman—who was reportedly the instigator of the break-in at the DNC. Dean ordered Jeb Magruder to ask Liddy: “Do you think you can get into Watergate?” Magruder belatedly admitted this to reporters Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin: “The first plan [ for a break-in] had been initiated by Dean,” he told them.

• In June 1972, according to an account offered by Robert F. Bennett— E. Howard Hunt’s boss at the CIA front Mullen Company and himself later a U.S. senator—it was Dean who offered Hunt hush money during the Watergate cover-up. Nowhere in the literature of Watergate has it been suggested that President Nixon knew anything about such an offer by Dean to Hunt so early in the game.

On June 23, 1972, Dean prompted what became the key evidence of a “cover-up” by Nixon: the so-called smoking gun tape. Dean told Haldeman that money found on one of the burglars had been traced to a Mexican-Texan money trail and “our problem now is to stop the FBI from opening up a whole lot of other things.” In other words, Dean convinced Haldeman to discuss the cessation of an investigation, a piece of lawyerly advice that would become part of Haldeman and Nixon’s infamous smoking gun conversation leading to charges of obstruction of justice and cover-up.

Ironically, if anyone was blocking (and monitoring) the investigation, it was John Dean. When FBI director Pat Gray refused to curtail his investigation into the money trail, Dean insisted on sitting in on every one of the FBI’s witness interviews of White House staff. Gray, in his memoirs, concluded that Dean was central to “hatching the plot that would eventually drive Nixon from office.”

Carefully reviewing the accumulated facts, it appears that Poppy Bush and John Dean were not serving Richard Nixon’s interests at all. Far from advising the president and advancing his interests, they appear to have been skillfully engineering a series of crucial events whose only outcome could be devastating for Nixon—and then audaciously urged him to take responsibility for those very events.

J. Anthony Lukas, in a 1976 review of Dean’s book Blind Ambition for the New York Times Book Review, wrote: “Dean was one of the sleaziest White House operatives, a compulsively ambitious striver who pandered to his superiors’ worst impulses, largely engineered the cover-up of their activities, turned informer just in time to plea bargain for himself, got sprung from prison after serving only four months and then signed a contract to write this book.”

Neighbors and Friends

In the spring of 1973, as Dean began cooperating with prosecutors, Weicker decided he wanted to meet Dean. In his memoirs, the senator describes the origins of their strategic alliance this way: “Through one of those loose Washington connections—an associate of mine who knew an associate of Dean’s lawyer—I began trying to set up a meeting with Dean. Like everyone else in Washington, I had lots of questions for him.” That Weicker had to go through intermediaries seems strange, because all he had to do was open his front door. Sometime in the spring of 1973— records do not reveal whether it was before or shortly after their first meeting—John Dean and Lowell Weicker became neighbors, living in townhouses in Alexandria, Virginia, across the street from each other. (In 1974, when Dean wanted to move to California but was having trouble selling his house, Weicker bought it.)

Nevertheless, two weeks before the Watergate Committee hearings were scheduled to start, about the beginning of May, the lawyers arranged a meeting between Dean and Weicker at the Rockville, Maryland, home of Dean’s lawyer Charles Shaffer.

The moment Dean got Weicker’s ear, he went way beyond simply telling Weicker what he knew. He was laying it on triple thick—being unnecessarily dramatic, as if to ensure that Weicker “got it.” The senator would have to be wearing industrial-strength earplugs and blinders not to.

During the meeting, according to Weicker’s memoirs, Dean dramatically (and quite unnecessarily) pulled Weicker into another room to “speak privately.” “Are you sure you are able to handle the dirt the White House is planning to hit you with?” Dean asked. Weicker listened carefully.

“Are you worried about the White House being able to accuse you of improper campaign contributions?” Dean continued. “They have every intention of using the material as blackmail.” Dean was referring to the Townhouse money, and he was letting the senator know that he knew Weicker was a recipient. If this was an effort by Dean to inflame Weicker even further, it succeeded. Weicker, who had already been warned by Jack Gleason, was now snorting with anger at Nixon.

As odd a coincidence as Dean’s ending up living across the street from Weicker was his legal representation in this period. In his memoir, Blind Ambition, Dean says that he contacted an outside lawyer for advice and that the man happened to refer Dean to Charles Shaffer, with whom Dean was already acquainted: “I had met Charlie once, on a duck-hunting trip to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, many years earlier.”

As a young lawyer, Shaffer had worked on the staff of the Warren Commission. This made him yet another of a growing list of people associated with the JFK scenario or “investigation” who show up in Watergate.

Dean’s cocounsel was Robert McCandless, who had been his brother-inlaw while both had been married to sisters. McCandless was the mentor who had guided Dean when he got in trouble with his law firm and rebounded with a job on Capitol Hill.

After Watergate, McCandless would partner with Bernard Fensterwald, who had represented former CIA officer and Watergate burglar James McCord—the one whose botched door-taping ensured that the burglars were discovered. Fensterwald would make an unsuccessful attempt to become chief counsel of the House committee investigating assassinations; his bid was adamantly opposed by the committee’s vice chairman, Representative Henry Gonzalez, sponsor of the first resolution calling for an assassination inquiry.

At the time he became cocounsel for Dean, McCandless resigned from the law firm Burwell, Hansen and McCandless, which handled the business of several CIA proprietaries, seemingly independent firms that were actually run by, and for the benefit of, the agency. His firm’s CIA ties are cited, among other places, in a book coauthored by former CIA officer Philip Agee.

Some years after representing Dean, McCandless went on to represent Haiti’s military junta. McCandless has denied having CIA connections.

Hays Gorey, a special correspondent for Time, was invited into a Dean strategy session with his lawyers, and soon wrote impressed dispatches about the earnest convert. Gorey wrote: “His youthful appearance showing no sign of ordeals past or to come . . . John W. Dean III exudes confidence like a Dale Carnegie graduate. He is clear of eye, strong of voice, steady of hand. His self-assurance may be justified, for Dean is the only major Watergate witness who is both able and willing to tell a lot.”

Soon, Weicker and Dean were the best of friends, sharing walks, even dinner. As Jack Gleason put it, “Weicker was Dean’s drinking buddy.” Through his weeks of preparation, Weicker seemed thrilled at the prospect of having such an exciting witness as Dean. And when Dean took the witness stand at the Senate Watergate hearings, in late June 1973, he was eager to be helpful. His first day of testimony had been devoted mostly to reciting a 245-page “opening statement.” As he would later reflect in Blind Ambition, “The squealer’s fear was still very much on my mind . . . I realized . . . how difficult it would be to give a convincing account of my motivation.”

Never arrogant, often humble, always appearing to be sincere, Washington’s “Golden Boy,” as the press quickly dubbed the fair-haired whistleblower, was highly conscious of his image. At times Dean would take a deep breath before answering a question, he wrote, “to make it look as if I were thinking.”

One of the questions made him particularly nervous. It came from Senator Herman Talmadge: “Now, after all those facts were available to you, why did you not, as counsel to the President, go in at that time and tell him what was happening?”

“Senator,” Dean responded, “I did not have access to the President.” Dean quickly gauged that this was a weak response, and shifted tack. “I was never presumptuous enough to try to pound on the door to get in.”

Talmadge was still incredulous.

Dean, feeling suddenly vulnerable, tried blaming the access problem on a remote, inaccessible president; and when that didn’t work, he shifted blame onto the president’s aides, claiming he’d been told his reporting channel was to Haldeman and Ehrlichman. And when that didn’t work, he tried “another angle.” He actually blamed himself. “Senator, I was participating in the cover-up at that time.”

That worked. During the break, McCandless told him that that one sentence went a long way to winning the senators’ confidence.

When Weicker took center stage, the first thing out of his mouth was a speech alluding to a plot against him. In his memoirs, Dean would attribute the outburst to what he had earlier sprung on Weicker at that meeting in Shaffer’s house, “when I informed him of a White House strategy to ‘neutralize’ him . . . with Jack Gleason’s 1970 Town House Operation.” Dean concluded that Weicker was “still piqued about what I had told him.”

The hearings were going well, and Dean now suggested something that might make them go even better. “I might also add,” he said, “that in my possession is . . . a memorandum that was requested of me, to prepare a means to attack the enemies of the White House. There was also maintained what was called an ‘enemies list’ which was rather extensive and continually updated.”

Weicker asked for copies. Dean said he would supply them.

“The press went crazy over the enemies list,” Dean later recalled.

The Burning Bush

Finally, it was time for the man behind the curtain to take his bow. The man was George H. W. Bush.

But first, a bit of anonymous leaking. On July 11, someone informed the Washington Post that Senator Lowell Weicker was a recipient of money from the murky-sounding Townhouse fund. Weicker, as expected, went bananas. On July 12, the senator was quoted in the Washington Post as admitting having received the money, but indignantly asserting that he had done nothing wrong and that he had properly reported the money.

That evening, Weicker took a call. It was RNC chair Poppy Bush on the line. Poppy thought Weicker might like to know that he, Poppy, had in his possession some receipts from Townhouse—including some relating to Weicker.

Actually, Poppy confided, he too was on the list. He seemed to be suggesting: We’re in this together.

Then the chairman of the Republican Party put an odd question to the freshman senator: “What should I do with the receipts?” Bush asked. “Burn them?”

Now Weicker knew the game: the White House was setting him up. “Destroying potential evidence is a criminal offense,” Weicker would later write in his memoirs. Here, he felt sure, was the head of the Republican Party, calling for his boss, Richard Nixon, trying to knock out the man who represented the biggest threat to the president.

Outraged, Weicker told Bush that under no circumstances should he even think about burning any documents. Then Weicker got in touch with a federal prosecutor.

Bush denied the story, but Weicker stands by it to this day.

As head of the Republican Party, Bush should have taken the receipts to the party’s lawyer months earlier, when Gleason had turned them over, and asked for advice, thereby invoking lawyer-client privilege.

Though Weicker says he knew a trap when he saw one, and told Bush so, he saw a fake trap—the one he was supposed to see. And he did exactly what was expected. Had Weicker thought it through, he would have realized that this rash act by Bush hardly served Nixon’s interest. It was too obvious, too aggressive, and too certain to provoke ire. If Bush was looking out for Nixon, he was doing so in an awfully reckless fashion, especially for a man noted for his prudence. He was making Lowell Weicker mad, not just at him but also at the president. And what had been for Watergate investigator Weicker an opportunistic crusade with an edge of authentic outrage over Republican abuses in the White House was now becoming personal. Now Weicker’s own political survival was at stake. Now it was Nixon or him.

As the nation’s eyes fixed on the televised hearings, Lowell Weicker emerged as a veritable bulldog against Richard Nixon. In the course of two months, and with help from John Dean, he revealed that Nixon had an enemies’ list, that the White House was trying to embarrass the senator with false Townhouse fund allegations, that Nixon was connected to both the Watergate and Ellsberg break-ins, that Nixon was a participant in a cover-up.

Weicker made an emotional speech during one of the hearings about how the Nixon administration had “done its level best to subvert the [Watergate] committee hearings.” He stated that Republicans were appalled by “these illegal, unconstitutional and gross acts.” Republicans, he insisted, “do not cover up . . .” He received cheers and applause. Weicker was riding high.

It was one of the defining moments of his life. Indeed, when I called him in 2008 and tried to share with him what I had discovered about the true background of Watergate, he wouldn’t hear of it. “You are talking to somebody that, having spent a major portion of his political career and life on this investigation, I really don’t like to be told by other people what was going on,” Weicker told me.

Butterfield: The Icing on the Cake

The man who actually came bearing the knife with which Richard Nixon would commit political hara-kiri was not Bush or Dean or Weicker or Hunt. It was an obscure figure named Alexander Butterfield, a Nixon aide who supervised White House internal security, which included working closely with the Secret Service and coordinating the installation of Nixon’s secret taping system.

At first Alexander Butterfield seemed hesitant when he sat down with staff members of the Watergate Committee on July 13. “I was hoping you fellows wouldn’t ask me about that,” he purportedly said when questioned about the possible existence of such a White House taping system. Then he proceeded to describe it in detail.

Nixon wanted to tape conversations for the historical record. Butterfield obliged and found technicians to install tiny voice-activated microphones. “Everything was taped,” he told his astonished listeners, “as long as the President was in attendance.”

Within days of Butterfield’s revelations, this previously obscure White House security officer became another Watergate hero, a man who followed his conscience. As New York Times contributor A. Robert Smith wrote two years later, “It was Friday the 13th and Butterfield had put the Senate investigators on the trail of the ‘smoking pistol’—hard evidence of impeachable behavior, preserved on tape—that would force the President to resign.”

Why had Butterfield done it? In the Times, Smith wrote that “Butterfield’s testimony was… remarkable for a man who, in 20 years of military service, had been taught to follow orders rather than pursue higher ideals.”

The thrust of the Times piece was that Butterfield had changed. But there were hints that there might be more to it—that Butterfield might still be following orders, just not ones from the commander in chief.

Buried toward the end of the article was brief mention of allegations that Butterfield had been in the CIA, followed by Butterfield’s denial. Butterfield said that his only contact with the CIA had been when he was in the Air Force. From 1964 to 1967, as militar y aide to Defense Secretar y Robert McNamara, he had been in charge of “rehabilitating” Cuban survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion—the same work that various sources have said Hunt and McCord performed. Yet left unmentioned was the involvement of just such Cuban survivors in Watergate, and in Nixon’s downfall.

Years later, Butterfield admitted that immediately prior to joining the White House staff he had worked as the military’s “CIA liaison” in Australia. Moreover, while Butterfield claimed that Haldeman had offered him the White House job, Haldeman was quite emphatic in recalling that Butterfield had written to him asking for a position. If Haldeman was right about this too, then it adds to the list of people with CIA connections—notably Hunt, Dean, McCord, and Poppy Bush—who had pushed hard to get into Nixon’s inner sanctum.

Butterfield and the tapes had come to the committee’s attention courtesy of two people: Woodward of the Washington Post, who suggested they look into Butterfield; and Dean, who mentioned in his opening statement that he thought his conversations were being taped.

The person who first directed Congress’s attention to the smoking gun conversation, on May 14, 1973, was General Vernon Walters, CIA deputy director.

It looks a bit like a CIA layer cake, with Butterfield as the icing.

The best laid plans require contingencies. If a group was setting out to steer the Watergate affair in a particular direction, it would have been advisable to make sure that nothing went wrong.

One thing that could have gone wrong was that the Watergate Committee staff might figure out that a group of CIA-connected figures with ties to the Bay of Pigs and the events of November 22, 1963, was setting Nixon up.

The person who was most potentially problematic in that regard was Carmine Bellino, the Senate committee’s chief investigator. An old associate of the Kennedys, he had been around the block a few times—and if anything smelling of 1963 surfaced, he would be most likely to follow it up.

So it is interesting to note that one of the few overt measures Poppy Bush took as RNC chairman during Watergate was to attack Carmine Bellino. In this, he relied on hearsay from others—much as he had in claiming that the Bull Elephants wanted Dean to testify—and years earlier in telephoning in the “threat” to President Kennedy supposedly represented by James Parrott in 1963.

During this same eventful month of July 1973, George Bush issued a long statement demanding an investigation into whether Bellino had ordered electronic surveillance of the Republicans in 1960. “This matter,” Bush announced in a press conference on July 24, 1973, “is serious enough to concern the Senate Watergate Committee, and particularly since its chief investigator is the subject of the charges.”

Three days after Bush’s press conference, twenty-two Republican senators signed a letter to Senator Sam Ervin, chair of the Senate Watergate Committee, urging that the committee investigate Bush’s charges and that Bellino be suspended. The Republicans had chosen their target well, and Ervin had no choice but to comply. The Bellino flap took up a lot of the Watergate Committee’s time. It also neutralized Bellino, who never had a chance to fully defend himself or to dig deeper.

Committee chairman Sam Ervin would later state, with a hint of bitterness, “One can but admire the zeal exhibited by the RNC and its journalistic allies in their desperate efforts to invent a red herring to drag across the trail which leads to the truth of Watergate.”

In fact, it was Ervin himself who had snapped at the herring. He mistakenly assumed that Poppy’s mission was to ardently defend Richard Nixon. What he missed was what everybody missed: that Watergate was actually not a Nixon operation at all, but a deep, deep covert operation against Nixon— seeking to protect the prerogatives and secrets of a group accountable to no one.

The Little Man on the Cake

If Poppy was the blushing bride of this enterprise, his groom atop the cake would be a surprising figure: the tough, no-nonsense Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski.Jaworski entered the Nixon chase in October 1973, after Haig helped persuade Nixon to force out the independent counsel Archibald Cox, yet another ill-advised act that turned public opinion against Nixon and suggested his guilt. A survey of books on Watergate shows that little attention was paid to Jaworski’s background, or, especially, to how he came to be prosecutor.

Jaworski was a conservative Texas Democrat who had actually backed Nixon in 1968. As a young man, he had served as legal counsel to some of Houston’s most powerful figures—oil and cotton kings so influential they had the ear of presidents like Franklin Roosevelt. Perhaps these connections helped him obtain an important post in World War II: prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. This activity earned him a top-secret clearance that for some reason was never relinquished after the end of the war. As will be discussed in chapter 16, prosecutions of war criminals both in Asia and in Europe were not simply lofty and symbolic pursuits of justice. They were intelligence exercises, in which powerful figures from the losing side could be made to reveal valuable information, ranging from the locations of billions of dollars of war loot to the country’s scientific and military technology advances.

After the war, Jaworski returned to his Houston law practice and became a close friend of, and lawyer for, Lyndon Johnson. Jaworski and Johnson’s professional and personal relationship would prove mutually beneficial. In his memoir, Jaworski said that his good friend LBJ “had a boundless capacity for hard work . . . Lyndon was a man of extra dimensions, who thought bigger, laughed louder, and got mad faster than most men. He had the ability . . . to make people move, jump, change their minds.”

When JFK was assassinated, Jaworski, along with a friend, Southern Methodist University law school dean Robert Storey, another Nuremberg prosecutor, quickly launched a Texas-based investigation of the assassination under the auspices of Texas attorney general Waggoner Carr. When Earl Warren was asked to convene a national commission of inquiry, he told the Texans that no independent Texas-based investigation could be allowed, principally because it would be viewed with suspicion. He also said that the Texans could not work for the Warren Commission. But he agreed to a compromise: the Texans could handle the Texas end of the investigation for the commission, and could have one of their number present at every commission hearing. Thus, Jaworski and his friends were monitoring all proceedings, including those at which Bush’s old friend and Oswald’s mentor George de Mohrenschildt testified.

Jaworski’s own memoir, oddly titled Confession and Avoidance, is in itself an elaborate exercise in self-clearance. The book, published in 1979 during a period of renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination, belittles Oswald’s mother for asserting that she believes her son was framed—and portrays her as self-serving and money-grubbing, while excoriating anyone who does not accept that the Warren Commission did a stellar job.

The impact of John Kennedy’s death has been overshadowed now by the ghoulish industry that grew out of it. Over forty books have been published attacking the Warren Report, or introducing new theories. Some of these books have been described as “scholarly,” which means they contain footnotes . . . others are in the conspiracy game for financial gain, notoriety, excitement, or all of these.

Because of Jaworski’s association with the effort to prove that there was no conspiracy in JFK’s death, his emergence as part of the group that drove Nixon from office cannot be automatically dismissed as unrelated. Nor can the background as to how he ended up as the Watergate prosecutor.

Jaworski, it turns out, was recommended by national security aide Alexander Haig. General Haig was a career military man and deeply enmeshed in the complicated intrigues and power struggles surrounding presidents Nixon and Ford. A White House survivor, Haig was first a top aide to Henry Kissinger, then became chief of staff after Haldeman resigned; later the military man helped persuade Nixon to resign, and retained power throughout Nixon’s fall, inserting himself into the process of determining which of the expresident’s tapes became public. As we now know, this was a crucial function, as certain tapes could be presented in a way that suggested Nixon’s guilt, while others would suggest the opposite.

Haig’s rapid career rise, from the lowest third of his class at West Point to positions in a succession of Democratic and Republican administrations starting with JFK’s, benefited in part from sponsorship by Joseph Califano Jr., a powerful Washington attorney who served in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was considered a close ally of LBJ’s. Washington Post chair and publisher Katharine Graham initially brought Califano and his law partner Edward Bennett Williams together and the two attorneys spoke of lunching frequently on Saturdays with managing editor Ben Bradlee or “other pals from the Post.” Complicating matters and illuminating these tangled alliances, Califano served as counsel for both the Post and the Democratic National Committee—the very entity purportedly victimized by the president’s men. As secretary of the Army under LBJ, Califano had been responsible for looking after veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, along with two of his aides: Haig and Alexander Butterfield.

As noted earlier, Haig may have also had a past relationship with Bob Woodward when Woodward was in Naval Intelligence, prior to the latter becoming the reporter who broke the Watergate story. This raises the question of whether the “high White House official” who recommended Woodward to former Naval Intelligence officer Ben Bradlee and/or former Navy secretary Ignatius at the Post was not Haig himself. That Haig, who was working in the Pentagon’s Operations office in 1963, also had something to do with Jaworski’s becoming the Watergate prosecutor, poses intriguing questions— as does almost everything about this remarkable circle of friends.

Jaworski was also, by Poppy Bush’s own standards, “a close friend” to the Bushes. He certainly met with George H. W. Bush’s approval. In his book All the Best, Poppy praises Jaworski as “determined to do a thorough job” and labels him “a respected Houston lawyer and a longtime friend of ours.”

The thorough job? Ordering Nixon to turn over a carefully considered group of sixty-four additional tapes—including the smoking gun tape that would implicate Nixon in a cover-up. Two years later, during the Senate confirmation hearings on Poppy’s appointment as director of the CIA, Jaworski would go out of his way to give Bush a clean bill of health on Townhouse. Poppy, citing Jaworski’s good seal of approval, paraphrased his friend: “clean, clean, clean.” Poppy later successfully courted Democrat Jaworski for an endorsement of the Reagan-Bush ticket in 1980.

Jaworski was one of those mentioned briefly by the Washington Post in its lengthy 1967 series on CIA-connected foundations. As a trustee and attorney for one of those foundations, he had declined to answer the Post’s questions. This factor seemingly went unnoticed when he became Watergate prosecutor. It does not appear in any of the major accounts of that episode.

Also, one thing was clear about Jaworski’s Watergate inquiry: he was not interested in pursuing Poppy Bush. “We sat down with Jaworski’s staff and went over name after name after name,” recalled Jack Gleason. “They were mainly after [Nixon’s close friend] Bebe Rebozo. I spent two days at a hundred dollars an hour with my lawyer listening to ‘have you ever heard of Jose Martinez’ and name after name. At one point we went over the list of the recipients of the six thousand dollars. And I said, . . . the only one I remember clearly is George Bush. And they just brushed right past it . . . It was a name they didn’t want to hear. I remember it so clearly because it was such a colossal screw-up.”

Assistant special prosecutor Charles Ruff sent Jaworski a memo concerning Poppy Bush. “George Bush received a total of approximately $112,000 from the Townhouse Operation,” Ruff wrote. “Bush also received, probably through his campaign manager, $6,000 in cash.” Then, he concluded, “Bush is neither a target of our investigation nor a potential witness.”

Poppy had the perfect cover. If he was one of the recipients, whether as beneficiary or victim of a setup, how could he be one of the authors of the scheme itself ? And if that failed, he also had a perfect friend: Leon Jaworski.

Getting the Tapes

What in the end brought Nixon down was the release of his tapes, in particular, one portion: the “smoking gun” conversation. Whittling down the materials of Watergate to the few select pieces that could be orchestrated to suggest Nixon’s culpability was the key.

It would be the responsibility of Poppy’s good friend Jaworski to wrest the incriminating tapes from Nixon. Poppy’s own diary, noted in All the Best, is interesting on Jaworski’s appointment and role:

Nixon had appointed Leon Jaworski—a respected Houston lawyer and longtime friend of ours—to replace Archibald Cox as the special prosecutor. Determined to do a thorough job, Jaworski . . . subpoenae[d] an additional 65 [sic—correct number is 64] tapes and documents . . . Many more shocking revelations were on the tapes, but the most damning—the “smoking gun” tape—were a conversation from June 23, 1972 where Nixon could be heard telling Haldeman to block the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in, which had occurred just six days earlier. This was proof the President had been involved, at least in the cover-up. [emphasis added]

As noted earlier, Bush, who within eighteen months would become director of the CIA, never mentioned the CIA’s involvement in the Watergate break-in. By committing this sin of omission, Bush was leaving out some important context and smudging a trail of clues that might otherwise have led back to himself.

The Loyalty Trail

As noted multiple times in previous chapters, Poppy Bush appears to have labored creatively to create benign explanations for his proximity to controversial operations.

The easiest way to do that with regard to Watergate would be to establish an auxiliary role for him or his close allies in the original plot ascribed to Nixon. That is, were an investigation to look into Watergate, it would find Nixon involved with serious wrongdoing, and find that person ever so slightly tied to that wrongdoing, but in an ultimately harmless way that would have no adverse long-term consequences. That way, he could have his cake and eat it too.

Poppy had achieved that effect when the Townhouse Operation, run by his allies, had made sure that he was one of the recipients of its cash— though guilty of no obvious wrongdoing. The same would need to be true of Watergate.

It is in this light that we now consider the fact that some funds involved in Watergate would be traced back to Texas members of Poppy’s team.

In his diary entries, Bush shows no sign of finding it interesting that some of the Watergate monies traced back to close friends of his. Nixon and Haldeman, however, took note. So did acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray. Wrote Gray in his memoirs:

We had made progress tracing the four Mexican checks to the Texas Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President. Its chairman, the Houston oilman Robert Allen, sent us back to Maurice Stans [treasurer of CREEP] . . . who acknowledged that Manuel Ogarrio may have gotten the funds from a Texas campaign contributor but declined to elaborate without talking to his lawyer . . . On August 24, another Houston oilman, Roy Winchester of Pennzoil, told agents that in April a Mexican he believed to be Manuel Ogarrio came to his office and gave him four checks valued at “over $80,000,” which Winchester then hand-delivered to [CREEP’s] Hugh Sloan in Washington. [emphasis added]

The FBI, in short, was following a trail that led directly to associates of George H. W. Bush. Pennzoil was the oil company of William C. Liedtke Jr. and his brother Hugh, Poppy’s former partners in Zapata Petroleum. Winchester had flown the eighty thousand dollars by private Pennzoil jet to Washington in order to get it into Sloan’s hands before a new federal election law went into effect in April 1972 that required disclosure of the names of the campaign donors and the recipients of such funds. The ultimate effect of this information was that some people concluded that Poppy was extraloyal to Nixon. And despite the sinister elements, particularly the foreign money, Jaworski found no wrongdoing on Bush’s part.

The FBI’s inquiries into the Texas money chain went nowhere, thanks to the CIA’s interference. Ditto an investigation by Texas congressman Wright Patman, an old-time populist who was chair of the House Banking Committee. Like FBI director Gray, Patman had been able to trace the money found in the pockets of burglar Bernard Barker back to the Texas chairman of the Committee to Re-elect the President, William Liedtke. But before Patman could issue some twenty-three subpoenas for CREEP officials, his fellow committee members voted 20–15 on October 3, 1972, to stop the investigation.

What was interesting about the Texas connection was that it essentially put everyone in bed together, just as the break-in put Nixon in bed with the CIA. Even though Nixon was secretly feuding with the CIA, in the end it would appear to anyone investigating that everyone was on one team. But of course the Texans would not be found to have done anything wrong.

In fact, nobody did much of anything to pursue that lead. Not the Senate Watergate Committee, not the Watergate special prosecutor’s office, and not the intrepid Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein, who famously resolved to “follow the money” at the advice of Woodward’s mysterious source, Deep Throat. All would claim that they were more interested in the dollar trail than the Watergate burglary itself, but when they got even remotely close to the source of the funds—the Texas money—they all stopped.

For Bush, this was, if anything, proof to Nixon of his loyalty. His group had raised money for CREEP and for the burglars, had sent a jet to bring the money. It was like Bush’s Parrott phone call: I was on the right side, so how could I be a traitor?

Poppy’s Foundation

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Washington Post’s Richard Harwood, whose reporting drew from investigations by House Banking chairman Wright Patman, was his citation of dozens of prominent figures and entities that served as conduits for CIA funds. Although Harwood did not explore these connections in depth, it is striking to discover how many of the CIA-connected figures were Texans. And not just Texans, but Texans with important ties either to Poppy Bush or to November 22, 1963, or both. Among those listed was the family foundation of the head of Dallas’s Republic National Bank, whose building was the headquarters of the Dallas oil-intelligence elite, including Dresser Industries and—for years—of George de Mohrenschildt. Another entity identified by the Post as connected to the CIA was the Houston-based San Jacinto Fund, which was incorporated by oilman John W. Mecom Sr., one of George de Mohrenschildt’s backers. And a third was the family foundation of Peter J. O’Donnell Jr., who had been the chairman of the Republican Party in Texas at the time of the Kennedy assassination.

O’Donnell was responsible for the candidacies of both Poppy Bush and Army Intelligence man Jack Crichton for statewide office in the fall of 1963. It was O’Donnell, in other words, who provided both men with the cover they needed to move about Texas and meet with all sorts of people in the critical period before and after November 22. The significance of O’Donnell’s presence on this list of the CIA-connected, or that of the others mentioned here, was not necessarily apparent at the time, and was not raised in the Post or elsewhere.

On Oil Connections

There is one other intriguing aspect to the Texas connection.

It turns out that in March 1974, as the effort to oust Nixon continued to mount, Congress and the Nixon administration were making things very uncomfortable for the Bush crowd.

There were news reports that federal officials and members of Congress were looking into possible antitrust violations by people who sat simultaneously on multiple oil company boards. In a December 1973 letter responding to members of Congress, an assistant attorney general had confirmed that the Nixon Justice Department was looking at these so-called interlocking directorates.

Most striking about the long list of violators is this: a significant majority of them had been friends of, fund-raisers for, or major donors to Poppy Bush. Many had also been employers or sponsors of George de Mohrenschildt. The list included the son of oil depletion king Clint Murchison Sr.; Admiral Arleigh Burke Jr., who had allied himself with Allen Dulles in post–Bay of Pigs inquiries into the disaster and criticized Kennedy’s handling of the invasion; George Brown of Brown and Root, backer of LBJ and Poppy and employer of de Mohrenschildt; Dean McGee, former business partner of the late oil depletion backer Senator Robert Kerr; Toddie Lee Wynne, whose family provided lodging to Marina Oswald after Kennedy’s assassination; military intelligence man Jack Crichton; and Neil Mallon, Poppy’s well-connected “uncle.”

Who had been investigating these men? Nixon’s Justice Department. It was almost a perfect echo of what was going on in JFK’s final year in office—and in life. Jack Kennedy had been fighting with the same group of independent oilmen over the oil depletion allowance, and Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department had sent grudging FBI agents into oil company offices to examine their books. Nixon and his old nemesis JFK had both angered the same people, and both had been removed from the presidency.

The Extent of the Infiltration

Nixon was “paranoid” about the CIA. He imagined that agency operatives were everywhere, working to undermine him. Was he crazy, or was he right?

So far, we have seen many people whose actions undermined Nixon, and found in each case what appear to be CIA connections: Dean, Dean’s lawyers, Hunt, Butterfield (who exposed the White House taping system), Jaworski, McCord, Barker, Martinez, Sturgis.

And then there is Jeb Magruder, who played a crucial role in accusing his boss John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager, and Nixon himself of being behind the Watergate activities. Magruder was a crucial figure in the downfall of Nixon because he had been the number-two man to John Mitchell, and Mitchell became the highest-ranking member of Nixon’s team— indeed, of any administration—to go to jail. Nailing Mitchell was crucial to nailing Nixon. Magruder would offer detailed, though often demonstrably false, testimony implicating Mitchell, asserting that not only did Mitchell know about the DNC break-ins, but that he was in fact primarily responsible for orchestrating the cover-up.

Back in college, Magruder’s adviser had been William Sloane Coffin, the liberal theologian. Coffin is most remembered for his opposition to the Vietnam War. Yet his background included membership in Skull and Bones and service in the Central Intelligence Agency that he himself acknowledged. He also had been chaplain at Andover and was a lifelong friend of Poppy Bush. Indeed, Poppy had brought Coffin into Skull and Bones. “There’s no specific creed that they are supposed to go out and spread,” Alexandra Robbins, author of a book on Skull and Bones, told the Washington Post. “They do have this agenda to further and bolster their superiority complex . . . and to get its members into positions of power, and to have those members hire other members into similar positions of power.” Coffin’s subsequent liberal credentials notwithstanding, during the period in which he had an influence on Magruder, he was still a creature of that world. Years later, when Magruder became a key witness against Nixon’s aides in the Watergate trials, his lawyer was James Bierbower, who had served as vice president of Southern Air Transport, one of the CIA’s largest air proprietaries.

Denial

The reader may be wondering why almost everything in this chapter—in particular its theme that Nixon appears to have been ousted in a nonviolent coup—is not common knowledge.

To understand why, it is necessary to contemplate the system through which information is disseminated to the public, and the mind-set with which it is received. The common narrative on the most complex, disturbing events is usually generated by insiders—so-called investigative commissions made up of figures acceptable to the establishment, and by a handful of designated authorities deemed suitably presentable as well. For the rest of us, it is almost always easier on the conscience to accept the most benign interpretation. If everything is tied up neatly, then we do not have to do anything. The key to it all is the gatekeepers.

I got an insight into all this when I telephoned Stanley Kutler, an academic who has authored several books related to Nixon and Watergate, and whose name comes up most often on Internet searches under the term “Watergate scholar.” I had hoped to find some “expert” to review my manuscript and poke holes where holes needed to be poked. I later learned that Kutler had testified for John Dean in a legal proceeding against the authors of Silent Coup, and in another against Gordon Liddy, who had alleged that Dean was the guiding hand behind the Watergate burglary.

When I called Kutler, he asked, “Have you spoken to John?” When I asked what John he meant, he said, “John Dean. He’s a very close personal friend.” When I mentioned Dean’s aggressiveness toward writers, he replied, “I have enough sense never to challenge him in a court of law. Of course he’s litigious, when you have all that crap coming down on you.”

(In the end, Dean dropped his Silent Coup suit; coauthor Len Colodny, who declined to settle with the former White House counsel, received $410,000 from his own insurance company to allow Dean to dismiss the lawsuit—and a pledge from Dean not to sue in the future. And a federal judge dismissed Dean’s suit against Liddy.)

Dean doesn’t seem to have suffered inordinately for his role in Watergate. His one-to-four-year jail sentence became, in his own words, just four months, part of it in a government “safe house.” He made millions off book deals and moved to the West Coast, where he became an affluent Beverly Hills investment banker. Asked about his business success, Dean has been markedly secretive, declining to name his partners or clients. “I just quietly want to do my own thing, without flash or splash . . . We have no advertising, no marketing, and there’s no shortage of business,” Dean said.

In the years since Watergate, Dean has assiduously offered himself as available to help others understand the complicated affair, thereby narrating his own saga. In this, he again has positioned himself, with great effect, at the control point for information. These “assists” have ranged from helping an investigative reporting class at the University of Illinois whose project was to try to discover Deep Throat’s identity to aiding documentary makers.

Jim Hougan, author of Secret Agenda, which posits a CIA role in Watergate, was hired by Time magazine to review Silent Coup at the time of its release in 1991. Hougan says that after receiving the assignment, he got a call from Hays Gorey, the onetime Time correspondent who had lionized Dean in 1973 and later coauthored Maureen Dean’s memoirs. Gorey, by 1991 a Time editor, wanted to be assured that Hougan planned to pan Silent Coup. According to Hougan, when he told Gorey that he found the book, which deeply implicated Dean in the origins of Watergate, to be thoroughly researched and well documented, Gorey pulled the assignment. And in an interesting twist, it turns out that Maureen Dean, before meeting John during his White House residency, had been a Dallas-based flight attendant. She had been married to George Owen, who worked for Clint Murchison Jr.—a central figure in the oil depletion–George de Mohrenschildt circle. At minimum, it certainly is a small world.

Meanwhile, oblivious to the most basic questions about Woodward, everyone continued the parlor game of guessing the “true identity” of Deep Throat. Most folks missed the statement of Woodward and Bernstein’s former literary agent David Obst to the New York Times that Deep Throat, as such, was a fiction, concocted for purposes of making All the President’s Men a snappier read. “Mark Felt was an invaluable source . . . but he was not Deep Throat—there was no Deep Throat.” Even the book was the idea of Robert Redford, who had initially pitched a movie deal, and thought publishing a book first would make sense.

Questions about the whole Deep Throat exercise can be found buried in many articles on the subject. For example, in the above-mentioned Times article, titled “Mystery Solved: The Sleuths,” about the Mark Felt revelations, Anne E. Kornblut begins, “With the most tantalizing mystery in recent political history solved,” but seven paragraphs below she also notes, “Some cases of mistaken identity appear to be the result of false clues planted by Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein in their book, ‘All the President’s Men,’ as they tried to protect Mr. Felt.”

None less than Robert McCandless, Dean’s cocounsel and former brotherin-law, would tell an Oklahoma newspaper reporter in a little-noted interview in 1992, on the twentieth anniversary of Watergate, that he had been one of Woodward’s sources.

“I was at least one-third of Deep Throat,” Robert McCandless, a Hobart native, told The Daily Oklahoman’s Washington bureau in a copyright story in today’s editions . . . McCandless, 54, said he met with Woodward and Bernstein “at least four dozen times” at the George Washington University Faculty and Alumni Club . . . He said his worry then was that disclosure of his giving information about his client might lead to his disbarment.

There you have a man with apparent intelligence connections admitting to having fed a story to another man with apparent intelligence connections— yet almost no one knows this.

Indeed, the vast majority of Americans never learned either the key facts about Woodward or of these statements from insiders about the fictitious or composite nature of Deep Throat. Thus, when Vanity Fair was approached in 2005 with the claim that former FBI official W. Mark Felt Sr. was the real Deep Throat, it is understandable that the magazine thought it had the scoop of a lifetime. The Felt story generated tremendous publicity and is now the conventional wisdom. Given the above information that there was in fact no single source known as Deep Throat, one has to ask about the motives of those who came forward to offer up Felt, a man who had previously insisted he was not Deep Throat, and who by 2005 was seriously debilitated by old age and could not even speak for himself.

The backstory is that Woodward approached Felt in 1999, showing up at Felt’s California house and taking the eighty-six-year-old to a parking lot eight blocks away, where a chauffeured limousine was waiting. Some years later, with Felt incapacitated, a lawyer surfaced to write the Vanity Fair article. The lawyer, by the way, mentions in passing that his own father was an intelligence officer.

More recently, the book In Nixon’s Web, the posthumous memoir of former acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III, completed by his journalist son, Ed Gray, used Woodward’s own archival papers to demonstrate irrefutably that Woodward used the term “Deep Throat” to refer to at least three of his secret sources. At a minimum, that means that Deep Throat was not, as Woodward has maintained, Mark Felt alone.

To be sure, the stakes must have always been high. Not just to get Nixon out, but also, decades later, to preserve the image of Nixon as a monster. In an interview with Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober for their book, Nixon: An Oral Histor y of His Presidency, Dean says:

Someone once said to me, “What is Richard Nixon’s presidency without Watergate?” This same person—if someone had asked him the question—would have answered it by saying, “Nixon’s presidency without Watergate is Hitler’s Reich without the Holocaust. How do you separate them?”

As for Bob Woodward, he told the Strobers:

I disagree very strongly that [Nixon] has been rehabilitated. It’s like the three-headed monkey in the circus; he’s a bit of a freak. People are interested in him in the same way they are interested in Madonna, or other celebrities, because he does have stamina and endurance, and he has fought a rear-guard action against history to try to blot out what happened and encourage people to forget. It’s sad, but it’s also endearing, that somebody so old would keep trying to “out, damned spot!” The record is so voluminous on Watergate; there is nothing like it . . . It’s the most investigated event of all time, perhaps even more so than the Kennedy assassination.”

As for the universally reviled Haldeman, whose credibility rating has steadily climbed with corresponding revelations over the years, in 1992 he would insist that the conventional account of Watergate, that Nixon and his top aides had been trying to cover up their illegal activities, was way off base:

We never set out to plan a planned, conscious cover-up operation. We reacted to Watergate just as we had to other [news-making events]: the Pentagon papers, ITT and the Laos Cambodia operations. We were highly sensitive to any negative PR, and our natural reaction was to contain or minimize any potential political damage.

Haldeman and Ehrlichman would both claim that Nixon never explained his obsession with the Kennedy assassination and the Bay of Pigs. And Nixon wasn’t talking about it at all. He refused all interviews on the topic and took whatever he knew to his grave.

Nixon, of course, was no innocent. He played rough with his critics, and he liked intrigue. But the evidence indicates that, despite his documented penchant for dirty deeds, he wasn’t behind Watergate and the Watergaterelated dirty deeds that ultimately brought him down.

As the former GOP official Ed DeBolt told me: “I think that [Weicker] wanted to hear that Nixon was a bad guy . . . I always say to people, especially if they are liberals, do you like having the Clean Water Act? Do you like having the EPA? Do you like having the government clean up the air?

“He was not controllable,” DeBolt said of Nixon. “You wouldn’t want to depend on Nixon if you were doing all kinds of clandestine crazy stuff . . . He had his own mind, and he was insecure. You want someone who is good and stable and solid, and who is going to carry out your bidding and do your thing for you . . . He was just a very strong-willed person who had his back up . . . That is not the kind of person, I wouldn’t think, that the intelligence people would want to have to deal with.”

DeBolt, who left Washington some years ago, said it was only when he got away that he gained some perspective. “There’s nothing real, and there’s nothing pleasant about the way people live there . . . The administrator of the RNC? I heard that he was CIA, he was running the business part of the RNC.” (According to Senate testimony, that man was the person who initially hired former CIA man James McCord, who became a key player in the Watergate burglary.)

“When you get away from the city . . . you realize, wow, the tentacles of the CIA really, really are everywhere.”

In the end, Nixon acted toward Poppy as he always had—with a kind of restraint. Through all Nixon’s tribulations, through all his rants and firings, he had never said a single negative word in public or on tape about Poppy Bush. He had managed to avoid putting Poppy into certain powerful positions—always apologetic about it—but he had always found a consolation prize.

And in 1974, after fighting on and on and on, when Nixon finally agreed to go, it would be after Poppy gave the word. Poppy himself has acknowledged (in his quiet and “unboastful” way) that the day before Nixon resigned, he wrote him and suggested that it was time to go—a view that Poppy said was shared “by most Republican leaders across the country.”

When Bush tried to arrange a visit with Nixon the day after the gloomy cabinet meeting and personally convince him to resign, Nixon refused to see him. “The President,” Haig explained to an astonished and “somewhat offended” Poppy, “simply cannot bring himself to talk to people outside of a tiny, tiny circle and this has brought him to his knees.”

In the midst of this upheaval, Poppy could barely contain his excitement, writing in his diary as if he was in the final stages of his own covert operation. “Suspense mounting again. Deep down inside I think maybe it should work this time. I have that inner feeling that it will finally abort.” [emphasis added]

He also noted that Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, was considering him for vice president. “Another defeat in this line is going to be rough but then again, it is awful egotistical to think I should be selected.” [emphasis added]

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Less than two weeks after Richard Nixon left Washington in disgrace, and Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office, Newsweek reported that the vice presidential prospects of George H. W. Bush—a “youthful, middleground . . . appealing” figure—had suddenly taken a nose dive.

The Bush item appeared within a larger article and few people noticed it. Unnamed White House sources cited questions over Bush’s apparent failure to report forty thousand of one hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions he had received from the secret Townhouse Operation.

Whether the real story was his failure to report the funds—or a more general pressing need to move Poppy far off-screen for a while—within a week Bush was “offered” a job by President Ford at the other end of the world.And not a bad job. Poppy was to be the United States’ envoy to the People’s Republic of China, a significant posting in the aftermath of Nixon’s diplomatic breakthrough with the Communist country.Once again, Bush seemed an improbable choice. The awkwardness was apparent when, shortly before he departed for Beijing in October 1974, Poppy was granted an audience with Ford. The meeting lasted under ten minutes and unfolded as follows:

FORD: You will be leaving soon.

BUSH: The day after tomorrow. Don’t ask me about China! …I know you’re busy. I just wanted to say goodbye.

FORD: We couldn’t have found anyone more qualified.

BUSH: If there is anything I can do to help you politically as ’76 approaches, just let me know. [emphasis added]

FORD: Thanks. I may try to visit you there by then.

BUSH: That would be great! Many thanks for the time.

Bush’s jocular admonition not to ask him about China brings to mind a similar, earlier incident, in which a friend had asked what could possibly qualify Poppy to be U.N. ambassador. At that time, Bush had replied, “Ask me in ten days.” This time around, Ford was clearly in on the joke.

But shipping Poppy seven thousand miles away made a different kind of sense. With this move, Ford had effectively put Bush outside both domestic politics and the reach of congressional investigators. So important did this piece of business seem to be that Ford took care of it even before he got around to his most famous act: pardoning Nixon.

The Nixon pardon could seem as strange in its own way as sending Bush to Beijing. Nixon had not even been charged with a crime, so he was in essence being given a “premature” pardon. Although this act insulated Nixon against later prosecution, it also branded him forever with the mark of Watergate and its felonious cover-up. As for Ford, while he cast himself as a healer whose only motive was to bring peace to a badly fractured country, the pardon infuriated anyone who wanted to see the full story brought out in open court; the backlash ended up damaging Ford’s political future. That he was willing to risk this outcome may say something about the pressures brought to bear to curtail further inquiry into the origins of Watergate. In effect, Ford was sealing away “Exhibit A” of the Watergate mess—before investigators could dig deeper and find out who really was behind it and why.

In explaining away Bush’s China appointment, the media reported that he was getting a consolation prize after losing out to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller as Ford’s vice presidential pick. According to that version, Poppy had his choice of London or Paris, and he surprised Ford by countering with a third option: Beijing.

An admission by Bush’s close friend Robert Mosbacher probably came closer to the truth—namely, that Bush “wanted to get as far away from the stench [of Watergate] as possible.” Of course, historians generally attributed that to Bush’s desire to keep his own seemingly clear political future unsullied rather than any sort of admission.

Certainly, Poppy urgently needed to get away from the scene of the crime. Throughout his life thus far, and on into the future, Poppy would evince a real talent for edging to the periphery of the crowd, watching like any other bystander while subtly guiding the main action—before slipping away entirely to deny that he had been there at all. In the case of Watergate, his getaway path was clear. A brief exile to China would keep him out of the line of fire, cleanse him of the stench, and burnish his credentials too.

More important, the London and Paris postings would have required Senate confirmation, which could have opened up the very questions he wanted to escape. But the United States did not have full diplomatic relations with Beijing, so that post required no confirmation process (as Bush himself noted in his memoirs).

As for his lack of experience and knowledge, that hardly mattered, as things turned out. The job was largely pro forma, because, as Ford noted to Bush, Henry Kissinger was determined to handle the sensitive Sino-American relationship himself. Poppy Bush’s published recollections of his time in China are dominated by leisurely bike rides and barbecues.

The Beijing posting was a fortuitous breather for Poppy, but soon he was ready for the main act. He was finally ready to come in from the cold.

##

This ends our three-installment excerpt. For more, please see Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.

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This is the second installment of a three-part series, featuring chapters related to Nixon and Watergate from WhoWhatWhy editor Russ Baker’s book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.

Notes: (1) Although these excerpts do not contain footnotes, the book itself is heavily footnoted and exhaustively sourced. (2) To distinguish between George Bush, father and son, George H.W. Bush is sometimes referred to by his nickname Poppy, and George W. Bush by his, W. (3) Additional context can be found in the preceding chapters.

Before you read this second installment, please go here to read the first installment.

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CHAPTER  10

 Downing Nixon, Part I: The Setup

Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Priest?
—ascribed to Henry II

On June 17, 1972, a group of burglars, carrying electronic surveillance
equipment, was arrested inside the Democratic National
Committee offices at 2650 Virginia Avenue, NW, in Washington,
D.C., the Watergate building complex. The men were quickly identified as
having ties to the Nixon reelection campaign and to the White House.

Though at the time the incident got little attention, it would snowball into
one of the biggest crises in American political history, define Richard Nixon
forever, and drive him out of the White House.

Most historical accounts judge Nixon responsible in some way for the
Watergate burglary—or at least for an effort to cover it up. And many people
believe Nixon got what he deserved.

But like other epic events, Watergate turns out to be an entirely different
story than the one we thought we knew.

Hanky-Panky, Cuban-Style

Almost no one has better expressed reasons to doubt Nixon’s involvement
than Nixon himself. In his memoirs, Nixon described how he learned about
the burglary while vacationing in Florida, from the morning newspaper. He
recalled his reaction at the time:

It sounded preposterous. Cubans in surgical gloves bugging the
DNC! I dismissed it as some sort of prank . . . The whole thing
made so little sense. Why, I wondered. Why then? Why in such a
blundering way . . . Anyone who knew anything about politics
would know that a national committee headquarters was a useless
place to go for inside information on a presidential campaign. The
whole thing was so senseless and bungled that it almost looked
like some kind of a setup.

Nixon was actually suggesting not just a setup, but one intended to harm
him.

Perhaps because anything he might say would seem transparently self-
serving, this claim received little attention and has been largely forgotten.

Notwithstanding Nixon’s initial reaction to the news of the break-in,
less than a week later he suddenly learned more—and this gave him much
to ponder.

On June 23, Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, came into the
Oval Office to give the president an update on a variety of topics, including
the investigation of the break-in. Haldeman had just been briefed by John
Dean, who had gotten his information from FBI investigators.

HALDEMAN: . . . The FBI agents who are working the case, at this
point, feel that’s what it is. This is CIA….

Nixon’s response would show that he had already realized this:

NIXON: Of course, this is a, this is a [E. Howard] Hunt [operation,
and exposure of it] will uncover a lot of things. You open that
scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it
would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further.
This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that
we have nothing to do with ourselves… This will open the
whole Bay of Pigs thing…

Of course, it is important to remember that Nixon knew every word he
uttered was being recorded. Like his predecessors Kennedy and Johnson,
he had decided to install a taping system so that he could maintain a record
of his administration. He was, in a way, dictating a file memo for future historians.

But that doesn’t make everything he said untrue. While Nixon undoubtedly
spun some things, he still had to communicate with his subordinates,
and the tape was rolling while he was trying to run the country. Those were
actual meetings and real conversations, tape or no tape. And though the
result was 3,700 hours of White House tape recordings, Nixon evinced
merely sporadic consciousness of the fact that the tape was rolling. Only after
his counsel John Dean defected to the prosecutors did Nixon appear to
be tailoring his words.

Nixon’s memoirs, combined with the tape of June 23, make clear that
Nixon recognized certain things about the implementation of the burglary.
The caper was carried out by pros, yet paradoxically was amateurish, easily
detected—an instigation of the crime more easily pinned on someone else.
A break-in at Democratic Party headquarters: On whom would that be
blamed? Well, who was running against a Democrat for reelection that
fall? Why, Richard Nixon of course. Nixon, who frequently exhibited a grim
and self-pitying awareness of how he generally was portrayed, might have
grasped how this would play out publicly. Dick Nixon: ruthless, paranoid,
vengeful—Tricky Dick. Wouldn’t this burglary be just the kind of thing that
that Dick Nixon—the “liberal media’s” version of him—would do? Nixon’s
opponent, George McGovern, made this charge repeatedly during the 1972
campaign.

Though Nixon would sweep the election, it would become increasingly
apparent to him that, where Watergate was concerned, the jury was stacked.
The path was set. Someone had him in a corner.

But who?

Many people, including those within Nixon’s own base of support, were
not happy with him—even from early in his administration. As Haldeman
noted in his diary, one month after the inauguration in 1969:

Also got cranking on the political problem. [President’s] obviously
concerned about reports (especially Buchanan’s) that conservatives
and the South are unhappy. Also he’s annoyed by constant right-
wing bitching, with never a positive alternative. Ordered me to assemble
a political group and really hit them to start defending us,
including Buchanan . . . [and political specialist Harry] Dent.

There would be growing anger in the Pentagon about Nixon and Kissinger’s
secret attempts to secure agreements with China and the Soviet Union without
consulting the military. And there were the oilmen, who found Nixon
wasn’t solid enough on their most basic concerns, such as the oil depletion
allowance and oil import quotas.

As for the burglary crew, Nixon recognized them instantly, because he
knew what they represented. While serving as vice president, Nixon had
overseen some covert operations and served as the “action officer” for the
planning of the Bay of Pigs, of which these men were hard-boiled veterans.
They had been out to overthrow Fidel Castro, and if possible, to kill him.

Nixon had another problem. These pros were connected to the CIA, and
as we shall see, Nixon was not getting along well with the agency.

One of the main reasons we fundamentally misunderstand Watergate is
that the guardians of the historical record focused only on selected parts of
Nixon’s taped conversations, out of context. Consider a widely cited portion
of a June 23 meeting tape, which would become known forever as the
“smoking gun” conversation:

HALDEMAN: The way to handle this now is for us to have [CIA
deputy director Vernon] Walters call [FBI interim director] Pat
Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this… this is ah, business
here we don’t want you to go any further on it.”
NIXON: Um hum.

Short excerpts like this seem especially damning. This one sounds right
off the bat like a cover-up—Nixon using the CIA to suppress an FBI investigation
into the break-in.

But these utterances take on a different meaning when considered with
other, less publicized parts of the same conversation. A prime example:
Haldeman went on to tell Nixon that Pat Gray, the acting FBI director, had
called CIA director Richard Helms and said, “I think we’ve run right into
the middle of a CIA covert operation.”

Although the first excerpt above sounds like a discussion of a cover-up,
when we consider the information about the CIA involvement, it begins to
seem as if Nixon is not colluding. He may well have been refusing to take the
rap for something he had not authorized—and certainly not for something
that smelled so blatantly like a trap. Nixon would have understood that if the
FBI were to conduct a full investigation and conclude that the break-in was indeed
an illegal operation of the CIA, it would all be blamed squarely on the
man who supposedly had ultimate authority over both agencies—him. And
doubly so, since the burglars and their supervisors were tied not just
to the CIA but also directly back to Nixon’s reelection committee and the
White House itself.

Yet, however concerned Nixon certainly must have been at this moment,
he played it cool. He concurred with the advice that his chief of staff was
passing along from the counsel John Dean, which was to press the CIA to
clean up its own mess.

If the CIA was involved, then the agency would have to ask the FBI to
back off. The CIA itself would have to invoke its perennial escape clause—
say that national security was at stake.

This must have sounded to Nixon like the best way to deal with a vexing
and shadowy situation. He had no way of knowing that, two years later, his
conversation with Haldeman would be publicly revealed and construed as
that of a man in control of a plot, rather than the target of one.

Sniffing Around the Bay of Pigs

How could Nixon have so quickly gotten a fix on the Watergate crew? He
might have recognized that the involvement of this particular group of
Cubans, together with E. Howard Hunt—and the evidence tying them back
to the White House—was in part a message to him. One of the group leaders,
G. Gordon Liddy, would even refer to the team as a bunch of “professional
killers.” Indeed, several of this Bay of Pigs circle had gone to Vietnam
to participate in the assassination-oriented Phoenix Program; as noted in
chapter 7, Poppy Bush and his colleague, CIA operative Thomas Devine,
had been in Vietnam at the peak of Phoenix, and Bush had ties to at least
some from this émigré group.

So Nixon recognized this tough gang, but this time, they weren’t focused on
Fidel Castro; they were focused on Dick Nixon.

Hunt was a familiar figure from the CIA old guard. A near contemporary of
Poppy Bush’s at Yale, Hunt had, as noted in earlier chapters, gone on to star in
numerous agency foreign coup operations, including in Guatemala. He had
worked closely with Cuban émigrés and had been in sensitive positions at the
time John F. Kennedy was murdered and Lee Harvey Oswald named the lone
assassin. Moreover, Hunt had been a staunch loyalist of Allen Dulles, whom
Kennedy had ousted over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion; he allegedly even
collaborated on Dulles’s 1963 book, The Craft of Intelligence. Hunt was one
connected fellow, and his presence in an operation of this sort, particularly with
veterans of the Cuba invasion, was not something to pass over lightly.

Nixon had further basis for viewing the events of Watergate with special
trepidation. From the moment he entered office until the day, five and a half
years later, when he was forced to resign, Nixon and the CIA had been at
war. Over what? Over records dating back to the Kennedy administration
and even earlier.

Nixon had many reasons to be interested in the events of the early 1960s.
As noted, he had been the “action officer” for the planning of the Bay of Pigs
and the attempt to overthrow Castro. But even more interestingly, Nixon had,
by coincidence, been in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and had left the city
just hours before the man he barely lost to in 1960 had been gunned down.

Five years after the Kennedy assassination, as Richard Nixon himself assumed
the presidency, one of his first and keenest instincts was to try to learn more
about these monumental events of the past decade.

Both of Nixon’s chief aides, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, noted
in their memoirs that the president seemed obsessed with what he called
the “Bay of Pigs thing.” Both were convinced that when Nixon used the
phrase, it was shorthand for something bigger and more disturbing. Nixon
did not tell even those closest to him what he meant.

When Nixon referred to the Bay of Pigs, he could certainly have been using
it as a euphemism, because any way one thought about it, it spelled
trouble. The Bay of Pigs invasion itself had been a kind of setup of another
president. JFK had made clear that he would not allow U.S. military forces
to be used against Castro. When the invasion by U.S.-backed Cuban exiles
failed, the CIA and the U.S. military hoped this would force Kennedy to
launch an all-out invasion. Instead, he balked, and blamed Dulles and his
associates for the botched enterprise, and, to their astonishment, forced
them out of the agency. As noted in chapter 4, these were the roots of the hatred
felt by Hunt, Dulles, and the Bush family toward Kennedy.

Nixon was keenly aware that Kennedy’s battle with powerful internal elements
had preceded JFK’s demise. After all, governments everywhere have
historically faced the reality that the apparatus of state security might have
the chief of state in its gun sights—and that it certainly possesses the ability
to act.

Moreover, Richard Nixon was a curious fellow. Within days of taking
office in 1969, Nixon had begun conducting an investigation of his own regarding
the turbulent and little-understood days leading up to the end of the
Kennedy administration. He had ordered Ehrlichman, the White House
counsel, to instruct CIA director Helms to hand over the relevant files, which
surely amounted to thousands and thousands of documents. Six months
later, Ehrlichman confided to Haldeman that the agency had failed to produce
any of the files.

“Those bastards in Langley are holding back something,” a frustrated
Ehrlichman told Haldeman. “They just dig their heels in and say the President
can’t have it. Period. Imagine that. The Commander-in-Chief wants to
see a document and the spooks say he can’t have it . . . From the way they’re
protecting it, it must be pure dynamite.”

Nixon himself then summoned Helms, who also refused to help. Helms
would later recall that Nixon “asked me for some information about the Bay
of Pigs and I think about the Diem episode in Vietnam and maybe something
about Trujillo in the Dominican Republic”—all events involving the
violent removal of foreign heads of state.

Fidel Castro had managed to survive not only the Bay of Pigs but also multiple
later assassination attempts. Diem and Trujillo were not so fortunate.
And President Kennedy, who made a lot of Cuban enemies after the botched
Bay of Pigs operations, had also succumbed to an assassin’s bullet. This was a
legacy that might well seize the attention of one of Kennedy’s successors.

The explosiveness of the mysterious “Bay of Pigs thing” became abundantly
apparent on June 23, 1972, the day Nixon instructed Haldeman to tell
CIA director Helms to rein in the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Recalled
Haldeman:

Then I played Nixon’s trump card. “The President asked me to tell
you this entire affair may be connected to the Bay of Pigs, and if it
opens up, the Bay of Pigs might be blown . . .”

Turmoil in the room, Helms gripping the arms of his chair,
leaning forward and shouting, “The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do
with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.” . . . I was
absolutely shocked by Helms’ violent reaction. Again I wondered,
what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story?

Nixon made clear to his top aides that he was not only obsessed with the
CIA’s murky past, but also its present. He seemed downright paranoid about
the agency, periodically suggesting to his aides that covert operatives lurked
everywhere. And indeed, as we shall see, they did.

In all likelihood, the practice of filling the White House with intelligence
operatives was not limited to the Nixon administration, but an ongoing effort.
To the intelligence community, the White House was no different than
other civil institutions it actively penetrated. Presidents were viewed less as
elected leaders to be served than as temporary occupants to be closely monitored,
subtly guided, and where necessary, given a shove.

If the CIA was in fact trying to implicate Nixon in Watergate (and, as we
shall see, in other illegal and troubling covert operations), the goal might
have been to create the impression that the agency was joined at the hip
with Nixon in all things. Then, if Nixon were to pursue the CIA’s possible
role in the assassination of Kennedy, the agency could simply claim that
Nixon himself knew about these illegal acts, or was somehow complicit in
them.

A Little Exposure Never Hurts

Something had been gnawing at Nixon since November 22, 1963. Why had
he ended up in Dallas the very day the man who he believed had stolen the
presidency from him was shot? Nixon had been asked to go there just a few
weeks before, for the rather banal purpose of an appearance at a Pepsi-Cola
corporate meeting—coinciding with a national soda pop bottlers’ convention.
The potential implications could not have been lost on this most shrewd and
suspicious man.

Nixon was no shrinking violet in Dallas. He called a press conference in
his hotel suite on November 21, the day before Kennedy’s murder, criticizing
Kennedy’s policies on civil rights and foreign relations but also urging
Texans to show courtesy to the president during his visit.

More significantly, he declared his belief that Kennedy was going to replace
Vice President Johnson with a new running mate in 1964. This was
an especially incendiary thing to say, since the whole reason for Kennedy’s
visit was to cement his links to Texas Democrats, help bridge a gap between
the populist and conservative wings of the state party, and highlight his partnership
with Johnson. Nixon’s comment was hot enough that it gained a place in the
early edition of the November 22 Dallas Morning News, under the headline
“Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.”

This was likely to get the attention of Johnson, who would be in the motorcade
that day—and of conservatives generally, the bottlers included, whom Johnson
had addressed as keynote speaker at their convention earlier in the week.

Nixon had finished his business and left the city by 9:05 on the morning
of the twenty-second, several hours before Kennedy was shot. He learned
of the event on his arrival back in New York City. Like most people, he no
doubt was shocked and perhaps a bit alarmed. Many people, Nixon included,
believed that Kennedy had stolen the presidential election in 1960 by fixing
vote counts in Texas and Illinois.

At the very least, the appearance of Nixon’s November 21 press conference
remarks in the newspaper just hours before Kennedy’s death was a
stark reminder of the large and diverse group of enemies, in and out of politics,
that JFK had accumulated.

Certainly, Nixon himself was sensitive to the notion that his appearance
in Dallas had somehow contributed to Kennedy’s bloody fate. According to
one account, Nixon learned of the assassination while in a taxi cab en route
from the airport. He claimed at the time and in his memoirs that he was
calm, but his adviser Stephen Hess remembered it differently. Hess was the
first person in Nixon’s circle to see him that day in New York, and he recalled
that “his reaction appeared to me to be, ‘There but for the Grace of
God go I.’ He was very shaken.”

As Hess later told political reporter Jules Witcover: “He had the morning
paper, which he made a great effort to show me, reporting he had held a
press conference in Dallas and made a statement that you can disagree with
a person without being discourteous to him or interfering with him. He
tried to make the point that he had tried to prevent it . . . It was his way of
saying, ‘Look, I didn’t fuel this thing.’ ”

Nixon’s presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963, along with LBJ’s—
and Poppy Bush’s quieter presence on the periphery—created a rather remarkable
situation. Three future presidents of the United States were all present in a
single American city on the day when their predecessor was assassinated
there. Within days, a fourth—Gerald Ford—would be asked by LBJ to join
the Warren Commission investigating the event.

Bottled Up

Nixon’s unfortunate timing resulted from a series of events that seem, in retrospect,
almost to have benefited from a guiding hand. In mid-1963, friends
had persuaded him that his long-term prospects required a move from California,
where he had lost the 1962 race for the governorship. Now that he
was a two-time loser, Nixon’s best hope, they counseled, was to find a position
in New York that would pay him handsomely, and let him politick and
keep himself in the public eye. His friend Donald Kendall, the longtime head
of Pepsi’s international operations, offered to make him chairman of the
international division. But the consensus was that a law firm job would suit
him better, so he joined the firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, and Todd.
Kendall sweetened the deal by throwing the law firm Pepsi’s lucrative legal
business. In September, Kendall himself was promoted to head the entire
Pepsi company.

On November 1, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, a corrupt
anti-Communist, was overthrown and assassinated. On November 7, Nixon
wrote to GOP strategist Robert Humphreys, expressing outrage over Diem’s
death and blaming the Kennedy administration. “Our heavy-handed complicity
in his murder can only have the effect of striking terror in the hearts
of leaders of other nations who presumably are our friends.”

Historians disagree on what exactly Kennedy knew about Diem’s death,
though Kennedy registered shock at the news—just as he had when Patrice
Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, was assassinated in 1961.
Kennedy realized that he could be blamed. Later on, it would be established
by the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA had been attempting to
kill Lumumba.

Also of interest is a little-noticed comment made by President Lyndon
Johnson in 1966, caught by his own recording equipment, in which he
declared about Diem: “We killed him. We all got together and got a god-
damn bunch of thugs and assassinated him.” It is not clear whom he
meant by “we.”

Kendall asked Nixon to accompany him to Dallas for the Pepsi corporate
gathering coinciding with the bottlers’ convention in late November. The
convention was an important annual event for Pepsi, and so would have
been on Kendall’s schedule for a while, though the necessity of Nixon’s
presence is less apparent. And with LBJ as keynote speaker, and appearances
by Miss USA, Yogi Berra, and Joan Crawford, Nixon, the two-time loser, did
not even appear at the convention.

For his part, Nixon seems to have agreed to go because it was an opportunity
to share the limelight surrounding Kennedy’s visit. And since Nixon was
traveling as a representative of Pepsi, and flying on its corporate plane—
something noted in the news coverage—Kendall was getting double duty out
of Nixon’s play for media attention. That was something Kendall understood
well.

Donald Kendall was, like Nixon and Poppy Bush, a World War II Navy
vet who had served in the Pacific. But instead of politics, he had gone into
the business world, joining the Pepsi-Cola company and rising quickly
through the ranks. Like Nixon and Bush, he was enormously ambitious.
And in his oversight of Pepsi operations abroad, he also shared something
else with them: a deep concern about Communist encroachment—which
was just about everywhere. Plus Kendall had a passion for covert operations.

Kendall’s particular reason for being interested in Cuba was sugar, for
many years a key ingredient of Pepsi-Cola. Cuba was the world’s leading
supplier; and Castro’s expropriations, and the resulting U.S. embargo, had
caused chaos in the soft drink industry. (It also had affected the fortunes of
Wall Street firms such as Brown Brothers Harriman, which, as noted in
chapter 3, had extensive sugar holdings on the island.)

Indeed, articles from the Dallas papers anticipating the bottlers’ convention
talked openly about all these problems with Cuba. One of the articles, titled
“Little Relief Seen for Sugar Problem,” explains the pressure felt by soft drink
bottlers in light of a crisis concerning high sugar prices. The president of a major
New York-based sugar company is quoted explaining why the crisis had
not yet been averted: “The government probably thought the Castro regime
might be eliminated.”

It is in this context that we consider a June 1963 letter from Nixon to
Kendall, then still running Pepsi’s foreign operations. A researcher working
for me found it in Nixon’s presidential library archives; it appears to be previously
unpublished.

Dear Don:
In view of our discussion yesterday morning with regard
to Cuba, I thought you might like to see a copy of the speech
I made before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in
which I directed remarks toward this problem.
When I return from Europe I am looking forward to having
a chance to get a further fill-in with regard to your experiences
on the Bay of Pigs incident.

Dick

The letter rings a little odd. Nixon and Kendall were close, and more than
two years had passed since the Bay of Pigs; it was unlikely that this would be
the first chance Nixon got to discuss the subject with his friend. Furthermore,
Kendall is not known to have had any “experiences” in relation to the invasion.
In a 2008 interview, Kendall, by then eighty-seven years old but still maintaining
an office at Pepsi and seeming vigorous, said that he could not recall the letter
nor provide an explanation for it.

Given this, the use of the phrase in the letter appears to be some form of
euphemism between friends, a sort of discreet wink. Nixon, the former
coordinator of covert operations under Ike, clearly knew that Kendall was
more than a soda pop man. Nixon’s experiences representing Pepsi instilled
in him a lasting—and not altogether favorable—impression of what he
acidly termed “the sugar lobby.” Haldeman got the message that treading
carefully was wise. Some of his notes are intriguing in this respect. He
urges special counsel Charles Colson:

0900 Cols[on]—re idea of getting pol. Commitments—
Sugar people are richest & most ruthless
before we commit—shld put screws on
& get quid pro quo
ie Fl[anigan]—always go to Sugar lobby or oil etc.
before we give them anything

The CIA also knew the soft drink industry well. The agency used bottling
plants, including those run by Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and other companies, for
both cover and intelligence. Moreover, the local bottling franchises tended
to be given to crucial figures in each country, with ties to the military and
the ruling elites. It was not just bottlers that played such a role; there were
marketing monopolies for all kinds of products, from cars to sewing machines,
given out on recommendations of the CIA.

Kendall was a close friend of the Bush family and a fellow resident of
Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1988, he would serve in the crucial position of
finance chairman for Poppy Bush’s successful run for the presidency. His
support for the Bushes included donating to George W. Bush’s 1978 Midland
congressional campaign.

And as noted by the New York Times, Kendall was identified with the successful
effort to overthrow the elected democratic socialist president of Chile, Salvador
Allende.

As the Times would report in July 1976:

One of Mr. Kendall’s great passions is international trade, and his
interest in foreign affairs won him a footnote in a 1975 interim report
of a Senate Select Committee. The report was called “Alleged
Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” and discussed in
part the assassination of Salvador Allende Gossens, the Marxist
Chilean president who was killed in 1973.
The report stated that Mr. Kendall had requested in 1970 that
Augustin Edwards, who was publisher of the Chilean newspaper
El Mercurio, as well as a Pepsi bottler in Chile, meet with high
Nixon Administration officials to report on the political situation
in Chile. (Pepsi bottling operations were later expropriated by the
regime.) That meeting, which included Mr. Kendall, Mr. Edwards,
Henry Kissinger and John N. Mitchell, was indeed held, and later
the same day, Mr. Nixon met with Dr. Kissinger and Richard
Helms, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Helms
later testified that President Nixon had ordered at the follow-up
meeting that Chile was to be saved from Allende “and he didn’t
care much how.” Mr. Kendall says he sees nothing sinister, or for
that matter even controversial, in his action.

Like many on the right, quite a few bottlers regarded the Kennedy administration’s
policy toward Castro’s Cuba as dangerously soft. Declassified FBI
files show that, after Kennedy’s death, one man contacted the FBI regarding
threatening remarks that his brother, a bottler, had made in reference to the
president. Another convention attendee was identified in FBI reports as
having had a drink with Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, on
the night of November 21.

Though unhappy with Kennedy, these independent businessmen clearly
wanted to hear what Johnson had to say, which is why the Texas-born vice
president was the convention’s keynote speaker.

By some estimates, the convention included close to eight thousand
bottlers—so many, in fact, that it had taken over Dallas’s largest venue, the
new Market Hall. This meant that when Kennedy’s trip planners determined
where he would speak on November 22, one of the very few sufficiently large
and central venues had long since been taken. The Dallas Trade Mart thereby
became the most likely location for Kennedy’s speech, with the route through
downtown to the Trade Mart, past the Texas School Book Depository, as the
most likely for the presidential motorcade.

In fact, the Trade Mart was secured by that most unlikely group of “friends”
of JFK, the Dallas Citizens Council, whose members’ views were described by
the New York Times as “very conservative and range rightward.” The council
had cosponsored the luncheon as a putative peace offering to JFK. Indeed, it
seems that JFK’s itinerary in Dallas was circumscribed by the bottlers and the
Citizens Council.

The mere fact that eight thousand strangers had poured into Dallas in
the days before JFK’s arrival should presumably have been of interest, yet
the Warren Commission ignored the event altogether.

Another interesting thing about the bottlers’ convention is that the Army
Reserves volunteered to help facilitate an unusual extracurricular activity.
As noted in chapters 6 and 7, Poppy Bush’s friend Jack Crichton was head of
a local Army Intelligence unit. Associates of Crichton’s who were involved
with the Army Reserves had managed to get into the pilot car of Kennedy’s
procession, with one as the driver. Crichton would also provide the interpreter
for Marina Oswald after her husband’s arrest as the prime suspect in
Kennedy’s murder.

According to a short item in the Dallas Morning News the day before
Kennedy was shot, members of the Dallas unit of the 90th Artillery Division
of the Army Reserve would be providing trucks and drivers to transport two
hundred orphans to a livestock arena for a rodeo sponsored by the bottlers’
group. This was to take place at nine P.M. on the night before Kennedy’s arrival.
The arena was at Fair Park, near the site under which Crichton’s Dallas
Civil Defense maintained its underground emergency bunker and communications
facility. Putting aside the Dickensian aspect of moving orphans in
Army trucks within an affluent American city, this raises some questions
about the reason for this odd maneuver. Whatever the true purpose of a small
platoon of Army vehicles being permitted to move about Dallas on purportedly
unrelated civilian business as the president’s arrival was imminent, it appears
investigators never considered this incident worthy of a closer look.

Cumulatively, the bottlers’ convention was responsible for a number of
curious circumstances that may be said to have some relevance to the
events surrounding Kennedy’s death:

•    The convention brought Nixon to Dallas.
•    It brought eight thousand strangers to Dallas.
•    It sent army vehicles into action on city streets the night before the
assassination.
•    Its early reservation of one large venue helped determine Kennedy’s
ultimate destination and thus the motorcade route.

In any event, as Nixon’s adviser Stephen Hess has recounted, the former
vice president emerged deeply shaken about the timing of his Dallas visit. It
served to remind him that if he ever occupied the Oval Office, he too could
be vulnerable and targeted—by the very same players. And his presence in
this incriminating spot was suggestive of wheels within wheels, to which he
of all people would have been alert. Were these intrigues what fueled President
Nixon’s obsession with the CIA and its cloak-and-dagger activities in
the Kennedy era? This little-noted tug-of-war, a struggle over both current
policy and past history, would become an ongoing theme throughout Nixon’s
term in office.

The Loyalist in Chief

At one time, Poppy Bush had worked hard to position himself as Richard
Nixon’s most loyal servant. An example appeared in a 1971 profile of Poppy
in his role as Nixon’s United Nations ambassador. Under the banner headline
“Bush Working Overtime,” the Dallas Morning News of September 19,
1971, portrayed the ambassador as poised at the center of world affairs.
Leaning forward at his desk, a large globe next to him, his lean face bearing
a look of calm intensity, George H. W. Bush looked almost presidential.

The reporter for the Texas paper picked up on that. But he was equally
struck by Poppy’s devotion to the sitting president. Ambassador Bush, he
noted, “is loyal—some say to a fault—to President Nixon, and frequently
quotes him in conversation.”

It was the image Poppy wanted to convey. Even when the reporter asked
for his own views, he quickly deferred. “I like to think of myself as a pragmatist,
but I have learned to defy being labeled,” Bush said. “What I can say
is that I am a strong supporter of the President.”

Of course, when someone defies being labeled, it gives him extraordinary
flexibility to move in different circles, to collect information, to spin on
a dime—in short, to behave a lot like a covert intelligence officer.

The image of Poppy as the ultimate loyalist was one he would project for
three more years—right up to the final days of the Nixon presidency. Not
even Nixon, who was famously distrustful, seemed to doubt it. After winning
the 1972 election in the midst of the Watergate scandal, Nixon decided
to hedge his bets and clean house.

Planning to fire all but his most trusted aides, Nixon instructed Ehrlichman
to “eliminate everyone except George Bush. Bush will do anything for
our cause.” This trust endured to the end of Nixon’s presidency.

If indeed Bush was ever a Nixon loyalist, he certainly flipped the moment
the tide turned. This new stance emerged with the 1974 public release of
the transcript of Nixon’s smoking gun conversation with Haldeman. As
Bush would record in his diary after Nixon’s final cabinet meeting, the taped
conversation was irrefutable proof that “Nixon lied about his knowledge of
the cover-up of the Watergate scandal . . . I felt betrayed by his lie . . . I want
to make damn clear the lie is something we can’t support.”

Added Poppy: “This era of tawdry, shabby lack of morality has got to end.”

This purported diary entry was most likely part of Poppy’s perennial alibi
trail. It could have been Bush family tradecraft, something like Barbara’s
Tyler, Texas, hair salon letter from November 22, 1963—always intended
for public view. Perhaps the most revealing part is the point at which Bush
summarizes the content of the smoking gun conversation. Poppy selectively
paraphrases a tiny part of that session, making it look as if Nixon had
ordered Haldeman (as Bush put it) to “block the FBI’s investigation of the
Watergate break-in.” This, Poppy asserted, “was proof [that] the President
had been involved, at least in the cover-up.”

What Poppy omitted were two key things: that it was actually John Dean’s
suggestion, not Nixon’s, to block the investigation—and that the CIA was at
the center of the intrigue to begin with.

Watergate’s Unknown Prelude

The series of scandals that undid Richard Nixon’s presidency are principally
identified with the 1972 burglary at the Democratic party offices in the Watergate
complex. But one could argue that Watergate—and Nixon’s
downfall—really began in late 1969, during Nixon’s first year in office, with
a phone call from a man almost no one today has heard of.

An independent oilman named John M. King dialed in to offer ideas for
improving Nixon’s hold over Congress. Former White House staffer Jack
Gleason remembered the episode: “[King] called one day in ‘69 and said,
‘You know, we have to start planning for 1970.’ ”

King’s call suggested he was principally concerned about helping Nixon,
but in retrospect, there may have been more at stake. For one thing, King
was a member of the fraternity of independent oilmen who were growing
increasingly unhappy with Nixon. As we saw in the last chapter, the oil barons
were up in arms over threats to the oil depletion allowance, convinced that
Nixon was not solidly enough in their corner. But they had other gripes.
As Haldeman noted in a diary entry in December 1969: “Big problem persists
on oil import quotas. Have to make some decision, and can’t win. If
we do what we should, and what the task force recommends, we’d apparently
end up losing at least a couple of senate seats, including George Bush in
Texas. Trying to figure out a way to duck the whole thing and shift it to Congress.”

On a more personal level, King was mired in problems. The Denver-based
King had assembled a global empire with oil drilling and mining operations
in a hundred countries; he was known for a high-flying lifestyle and a gift
for leveraging connections. He even had two Apollo astronauts on
his board. In 1968, King had donated $750,000 to Nixon, and as a big donor,
his calls always got attention. But King was, according to a Time magazine
article of the period, something of a huckster. By late 1969, his empire
was on the verge of collapse. In the end, he would face jail and ruin.

Perhaps he was looking to secure intervention from the White House.
Perhaps it was just general business insurance. Or perhaps he was speaking
on behalf of his fellow in dependent oilmen.

In any event, King’s pitch sounded like a good idea. He was proposing
that the Nixon White House funnel money from big GOP donors directly to
Senate and House candidates of its choice, rather than following the customary
method: letting the Republican Party determine the recipients. To do this
without provoking the wrath of the GOP establishment, King suggested
it be kept under wraps.

This idea appealed to the White House brass, and soon, a special operation
was being convened.

”As it matured, we had a couple of meetings with Ehrlichman and Haldeman
and went over some of the ground rules,” said Gleason. Haldeman
brought the bare bones of the idea to Nixon, who thought it sounded fine.
Anything that involved secrecy and centralized White House control was
likely to find a receptive ear. Gleason’s recollection is confirmed by a notation
in Haldeman’s diary of December 11: “I had meeting with [Maurice]
Stans, Dent, and Gleason about setting up our own funding for backing the
good candidates in hot races. A little tricky to handle outside the RNC but
looks pretty good.”

The White House political unit assigned the job of organizing and running
the new fund to its operative Gleason, an experienced GOP fundraiser.
Gleason was instructed by his boss, Harry Dent, to find an office for the operation.
When he suggested renting space in one of those prefurnished office
suites that come with secretarial and other services, he was told that this
would be too expensive.

That struck Gleason as odd, since it would not have cost much more and
would have been a pittance in relation to the large sums that would be
raised. But he followed his orders and rented something cheaper and more
discreet. Dent directed him to a townhouse on Nineteenth Street, in a residential
area near Dupont Circle. The space was not just in a townhouse but
in the basement of a townhouse. And not only that, it was in the back of the
basement. Reporters would later describe it as a “townhouse basement back
room”—an arrangement guaranteed to raise eyebrows if ever discovered.

The way in which the funds were to be handled also struck Gleason as
unnecessarily complicated, and even furtive. While donors could simply—
and legally—have written a single check to each candidate’s campaign committee,
they were instructed instead to break up their donations into a number of
smaller checks. The checks were then routed through the townhouse,
where Gleason would pick them up and deposit them in a “Jack
Gleason, Agent” account at American Security and Trust Bank. Gleason
then would convert the amounts into cashier’s checks and send them on to
the respective campaign committees, often further breaking each donation
up into smaller ones and spreading them over more than one campaign
committee of each candidate.

The ostensible reason for these complex arrangements was to enable the
White House to control the money. The actual effect, however, was to create
the impression of something illicit, such as a money-laundering operation
aimed at hiding the identities of the donors.

Somewhere along the way Gleason began to detect an odor stronger than
that of quotidian campaign operations. What seemed suspect to him was
not that Nixon would help Republican candidates—that was how things
worked. What bothered him were the operational details. Many seemed
positively harebrained, the kind of things with which no president should be
associated. But Gleason just figured that Richard Nixon, or his subordinates,
had a blind spot when it came to appearances of impropriety.

Deep-Sixing Nixon

Late in the election season, Gleason’s superiors told him to add a new component
to the Townhouse Operation. Gleason found this new development
particularly disturbing. It was called the “Sixes Project.” Launched in October
1970, when the midterm elections were almost over, it provided an extra
personal donation of six thousand dollars to each of thirteen Senate
candidates—in cash.

Gleason’s job was simple enough: get on a plane, fly out to meet each of
the candidates, and personally hand over an envelope of cash. He was to add
a personal message: “Here’s a gift from Dick and Pat.” And he was to keep
meticulous receipts, noting who received the cash and the date of the transaction.

Gleason was not happy about his role as dispenser of envelopes full of
cash. As he told me in a 2008 interview,

Of all the silly things I’ve ever been asked to do in this life, traveling
around with six thousand dollars to give the guy and say, “This
is from Dick and Pat,” was colossally bad . . . Now you crank me
up, leave a paper trail a mile long and a mile wide of flight tickets,
hotel reservations, rental cars, everything, and have me traipsing
all over the country giving these guys six thousand dollars in cash,
[and besides], the six thousand doesn’t matter, doesn’t get you anywhere.
If we give you a quarter of a million, what’s another six
thousand? . . . The six thousand dollars itself was a disconnect, because
everything else was largely done to keep the whole thing under wraps.

In those days, the campaign finance laws, most of which were at the state
level, were limited and rarely enforced. Reporting requirements were thin,
but those candidates who wanted to abide by the law made sure to report
any cash they received to their respective campaign committees. That posed
a challenge for a candidate caught in a grueling nonstop schedule, who was
handed an envelope of cash. It would be easy enough to forget to report it,
whether deliberately or accidentally.

Even back in 1973, Gleason could come to only one conclusion. When
special prosecutors in the Watergate investigation later grilled him about
the Townhouse Operation, he told them as much. “The purpose of these
contributions was to set up possible blackmail for these candidates later
on.” However, at that point Gleason assumed that the sponsors of the
blackmail were Nixon loyalists—perhaps even authorized by the president
himself.

Alarmed at this arrangement, and cognizant that he might be generating
myriad campaign law violations, Gleason asked the White House for a legal
analysis. But despite multiple requests, he never got it. Finally, he asked for
a letter stating that nothing he was being asked to do was illegal. (That letter,
Gleason later explained, would somehow disappear before it could arrive at
the offices of the Watergate prosecutors.)

Since the six-thousand-dollar donations were ostensibly generated by
“Dick and Pat,” one could easily surmise that Richard Nixon, or those under
his authority, were indeed out to get something on Republican candidates.
Once they took the cash, the recipients would have to do as he wanted, or
else risk exposure. As Assistant Special Prosecutor Charles Ruff wrote to
his boss: “It has been our guess that [the Nixon White House] hoped to gain
some leverage over these candidates by placing cash in their hands which
they might not report.”

Had this become known, Nixon would have had trouble explaining it.
Few would have believed that such a scheme could have been run under
White House auspices without Nixon’s approval. And yet that seems to have
been the case. In fact, Nixon’s name rarely appears in the Townhouse files of
Watergate prosecutors—for whom the evidence of Nixon’s wrongdoing
would have been the ultimate prize.

Even the complex and calculating Charles Colson, who served as special
counsel to the president in 1970, admitted to prosecutors that Nixon was
not involved. Colson said that he had sat in on a Townhouse planning meeting
and later briefed the president about “political prospects in that race”  -
but “did not recall that the fundraising aspects were discussed with the
President.”

John Mitchell, who was attorney general before he resigned in 1972 to
head up Nixon’s reelection campaign, attended a meeting for “substantial
contributors” and later told prosecutors that “the President stopped by, but
was not present during discussions of campaign finances.” Mitchell himself
denied participation in or knowledge of the Town house plan. Even
Herb Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer, seems to have been involved only
in the most benign part of the operation: the legal solicitation of funds from
wealthy donors. Of course, all this could be about denials and deniability  -
but as we shall see, it apparently was not.

Meet John Dean

At the time Town house was becoming operational, the position of counsel
to the president opened up. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s trusted aide, was
moving to head up domestic affairs, and Ehrlichman was looking for someone
to replace him—a smart lawyer and good detail man who was also loyal
to the president. The man who came on board on July 27, 1970, was John
Wesley Dean III.

Dean arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue just as President Nixon was
trying to figure out how to deal with massive street demonstrations against
the Vietnam War. A month before, a White House staffer named Tom Huston
had drawn up a plan to spy on the demonstrators through electronic
surveillance, recruitment of campus informants, and surreptitious entry
into offices and meeting places.

In hindsight, this sounds especially odious, and it was, but at the time, and
from the vantage point of the administration and its supporters in the “silent
majority,” America was besieged. The general atmosphere in the country
and the domestic violence, actual and hinted, surrounding the Vietnam War
debate, felt like chaos was descending. Even so, Attorney General John
Mitchell shot down the notorious “Huston Plan.” John Dean, however, took
an immediate interest in some of the proposals.

Although his official duties centered on giving the president legal advice—
often on arcane technical matters—Dean was considered a junior staffer and
had virtually no contact with Nixon. Nevertheless, the White House neophyte
quickly began taking on for himself the far edgier and dubious mantle of
political intelligence guru.

Among the bits of intelligence Dean collected were the details of the
Townhouse Operation. In November 1970, following the midterm elections,
Jack Gleason turned over all his files to the White House, where
Haldeman had them delivered to Dean. Watergate investigators would later
discover that “Haldeman also gave Dean several little notebooks which pertained
to the 1970 fundraising.” Those little notebooks would have told Dean who the
donors were, how much they gave, and the identity of the recipients.

Shortly after the files ended up in Dean’s hands, the media began
receiving—perhaps coincidentally—leaks about the Townhouse Operation.
One of the first reports was an AP article with no byline that appeared
in the New York Times on December 27, 1970. It said that seven
ambassadors had received their positions as rewards for their contributions
to the Townhouse Operation: “Mr. Jack Gleason left the staff of a
White House political operative, Harry Dent, this fall to run the fund-
raising campaign from a basement back office in a Washington townhouse.”
And there it was: Gleason caught up in something that sounded
sinister, complete with the townhouse basement back office, all purportedly
on behalf of Richard Nixon.

In February 1972, someone cranked Townhouse back up again. Jim Polk,
an investigative reporter at the Washington Star with an impressive track
record on campaign finance matters, got more information about the fund
from “inside sources.”

Polk published an article headlined “Obscure Lawyer Raises Millions for
Nixon.” It sounded even more disturbing than the previous one. Polk’s article
did two things: it introduced the public to Nixon’s personal lawyer Kalmbach
and it provided many new details about the Townhouse fund.

A little-known lawyer in Newport Beach, Calif., has raised millions
of dollars in campaign contributions as an unpublicized fund-
raiser . . . [and] as Nixon’s personal agent . . . to collect campaign
checks from Republican donors… Kalmbach helped to raise
nearly $3 million in covert campaign money . . . The checks were
sent through a townhouse basement used by former Nixon political
aide Jack A. Gleason. But the operation was run from inside the
White House by presidential assistant H.R. (Bob) Haldeman . . .
Only a portion of this money has shown up on public records. The
rest of the campaign checks have been funneled through dummy
committees.

When I spoke to Polk in 2008, not surprisingly, he no longer recalled the
identity of his source. But whoever had leaked this story to him was no
friend of Nixon’s. Yet if it was intended to provoke further interest, it failed.
Someone had attempted to light a fuse with Townhouse, but it did not ignite.
Just four months later, however, another fuse was lit. And this one would
burn on and on.

The Brazen Burglary

If Townhouse was engineered to discredit Nixon, it had one potential flaw.
The wrongdoing involved technical financial matters that reporters might
find daunting. Watergate, on the other hand, was inherently sexy; it had all
the elements of the crime drama it became. The break-in was brazen and
easily grasped, and carried out in such a manner as to just about guarantee
both failure and discovery. It also involved a cast of characters that neither
reporters nor television cameras could resist (as the Watergate hearings later
would demonstrate). It was like a made-for-TV movie: burglars in business
suits, living in a fancy suite near the scene of the crime; Cuban expatriates;
documents in pockets leading to the White House. Even Nixon had to interrupt
his reelection campaign to confront it.

But the burglars didn’t appear to take anything, so what was the intended
crime? Breaking and entering—for what purpose?

As with the JFK assassination, theories abound. The burglars were found
with bugging equipment. But that made little sense; Nixon didn’t have
much to worry about from his presumed Democratic opponent, George
McGovern. The risks of a bugging operation far outweighed any conceivable
gains. And if Nixon had really wanted inside dope on the McGovern
campaign, which he hardly needed, he could have sent teams into McGovern’s
headquarters up on Capitol Hill, or to Miami, where the Democrats
would hold their convention.

If, on the other hand, the intent was to fire the public imagination, the
Watergate complex was far better—and Washington itself a necessary locale
if the national press was to stay with the story week after week.

With all this in mind, Nixon’s observation in his memoirs that “the whole
thing was so senseless and bungled that it almost looked like some kind of
a setup” seems on the mark.

If the Cubans were really trying to do the job, their supervisors were
guilty of malpractice. They might as well have called the D.C. police to reserve
an interrogation room.

The flubs were so obvious it was as if they were the work of amateurs—
which it was not. Burglary team member James McCord left tape horizontally
over a lock, so that it could be spotted, as it was, by a security guard
when the door was closed. If he had taped the lock vertically, it would have
been invisible to a passerby. And if the intent was to pull off a real burglary,
there was no need for tape anyway—as the burglars were already inside.
Even so, after the security guard discovered and removed the tape, McCord
put it right back.

The entire operation reflected poor judgment. An experienced burglar
would have known not to carry any sort of identification, and certainly not
identification that led back to the boss. How elementary is that? Among the
incriminating materials found on the Watergate burglars was a check with
White House consultant E. Howard Hunt’s signature on it—and Hunt’s
phone number at the White House, in addition to checks drawn on Mexican
bank accounts. Despite the obvious risks, the burglars were also instructed
by Hunt to register at the Watergate Hotel, and to keep their room keys in
their pockets during the mission. These keys led investigators straight back
to an array of incriminating evidence, not the least damaging of which was
a suitcase containing the burglars’ ID cards. Everything pointed back to
CREEP and the White House.

The most interesting thing was that the materials identified the burglars
as connected not just to the White House, but to the CIA as well. And not
just to the CIA, but to a group within the CIA that had been active during
the controversial period that included the Bay of Pigs invasion and the
assassination of JFK.

Hunt, whose status in the CIA was described earlier, was a high-ranking
(GS-15) officer and a member of the “Plumbers,” a White House special
investigations unit ostensibly dedicated to stopping government leaks to the
media. As discussed in chapter 6, Hunt had been a key player in the coup in
Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs invasion, in addition to working very closely
with Allen Dulles himself. As noted previously, Dulles was in Dallas shortly
before November 22.

And Hunt had been there on the very day of the assassination, according
to an account confirmed in 1978 by James Angleton, the longtime CIA
counterintelligence chief. Angleton, clearly concerned that investigations
would uncover Hunt’s presence in Dallas anyway, went so far as to alert a
reporter and a House Committee to Hunt’s being in the city that day, and
then opined that Hunt had been involved in unauthorized activities while
there; ‘Some very odd things were going on that were out of our control.”

Watergate burglar and electronic surveillance expert James McCord, like
Hunt, had also been a GS-15 agent, serving for over a decade in the CIA’s
Office of Security. Around the time of the Kennedy assassination, he began
working with anti-Castro Cubans on a possible future invasion of the island.
Allen Dulles once introduced McCord to an Air Force colonel, saying,
“This man is the best man we have.” Regarding Nixon, McCord dismissed
him to a colleague as not a team player, not “one of us.”

In a long-standing tradition, both Hunt and McCord had officially “resigned”
from the agency prior to the Watergate time frame. But their continued
involvement in CIA-related cover operations suggested otherwise.
Indeed, as noted earlier in the book, many figures, including Poppy Bush’s
oil business colleague Thomas J. Devine, officially took retirement prior to
participating in seemingly independent operations in which deniability was
crucial.

Though Hunt claimed to have cut his CIA ties, he actually went out of
his way to draw attention to those ties while working in the Nixon White
House. He ostentatiously ordered a limousine to drive him from the
White House out to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It was as though
he was trying to broadcast the notion that Nixon was working closely with
the agency—with which, as we now know, the president was in reality battling.

After Hunt’s alleged retirement, he was employed at the Mullen Company,
a public relations firm that served as a CIA cover. In a 1973 memo, Charles
Colson recounted a meeting he’d just had with Senate Republican minority
leader Howard Baker. Charles Colson wrote, “Baker said that the Mullen
Company was a CIA front, that [Hunt’s] job with the Mullen Company was
arranged by [CIA director] Helms personally.” Baker also informed Colson
that, during Hunt’s time at the Mullen Company, his pay had been adjusted to
the exact salary he would have been making had he stayed at the spy agency.

Eugenio Martinez, one of the anti-Castro Cuban burglars, was another
CIA operative in the break-in crew. Indeed, he was the one member of the
team who remained actively on the CIA payroll, filing regular reports on the
activities of the team to his Miami case officer. Then there was Bernard L.
Barker, who first worked as an FBI in formant before being turned over to
the CIA during the run-up to the Bay of Pigs. Frank Sturgis, too, had CIA
connections. Martinez, Barker, and Sturgis had worked with Hunt and Mc-
Cord on the Second Naval Guerrilla operation.

So Nixon, who had been trying to see the CIA’s file on the Bay of Pigs,
was now staring at a burglary purportedly carried out in his name by veterans
of the same “Bay of Pigs thing” with strong CIA ties. It was like a flashing
billboard warning. CIA professionals, Cuban exiles, all tied to the events
of 1961 through 1963, suddenly appearing in the limelight and tying themselves
and their criminal activity to the president.

Layers and Layers

If most of us ever knew, we have probably long since forgotten that before
the June 1972 Watergate break-in, there was another Watergate break-in
by the same crew. With this earlier one, though, they were careful to avoid
detection and were not caught. At that time, they installed listening devices.
The second burglary, the one that seemingly was designed for detection,
and designed to be traced back to the Nixon White House, ostensibly revolved
around removing listening devices installed earlier—and therefore drawing
attention to the devices and the surveillance.

The conclusion one would likely draw from their being caught red-handed
is that Dick Nixon is up to yet another manifestation of his twisted and illegal
inclinations. And what were they listening to? Purportedly, DNC personnel
were arranging for “dates” for distinguished visitors with a call-girl ring. The
ring was operating from down the street, not far from where the bugs were
being monitored. The conclusion is that Nixon was perhaps trying to sexually
blackmail the Democrats. It got more and more objectionable.

But the fact is that no evidence shows Nixon wanting to sexually blackmail
Democrats, nor wanting to install bugs at the DNC, nor wanting to
order a burglary to remove the bugs. Yet somebody else clearly had a good
imagination, and a talent for executing a script that was magnificently inculpatory
of someone who would appear to deserve removal from the highest
office in the land.

Eventually, Americans would learn that the Watergate break-ins were
not the first such operation that made Nixon look bad, and not the first coordinated
by Hunt and featuring Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Back in September 1971, the team hit the Beverly Hills office of Dr.
Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle-blower who
leaked the explosive Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. First, though,
Nixon, who was initially indifferent over the leak, was persuaded to take on
the Times for publishing the documents, a posture that would position him
as a foe of public disclosure. It also escalated his already adversarial relationship
with the news media—a relationship that would become a severe
disadvantage to Nixon as the Watergate “revelations” began to emerge.
Nixon was also persuaded to authorize the formation of a leak-busting
White House group, which was soon dubbed “the Plumbers.” Soon, purportedly
operating on Nixon’s behalf—but without his actual approval—the
Hunt team broke into Dr. Fieldingís office, having been told to photograph
Ellsberg’s patient files.

However, as with Watergate, the burglary appears to have had an ulterior
motive. Senator Baker, ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee,
learned of this, according to White House special counsel Charles
Colson, when Baker interviewed the Cuban émigré Eugenio Martinez, who
participated in the burglaries of both Fielding’s office and the DNC office in
Watergate:

Baker told me of his interview with Martinez who said that there
were no patient records in Dr. Fielding’s office, that he, Martinez,
was very disappointed when they found nothing there, but Hunt
on the other hand seemed very pleased and as a matter of fact
broke out a bottle of champagne when the three men returned
from the job. Martinez says that he has participated in three hundred
or four hundred similar CIA operations, that this was clearly
a ‘cover’ operation with no intention of ever finding anything.

In fact, though the burglars were ostensibly seeking records while on a
covert mission, they did not act like people who wished to avoid discovery. In
addition to smashing the windows and prying open the front door with a crowbar,
the burglars proceeded to vandalize the office, scattering papers, pills, and
files across the floor. The result was to ensure the generation of a crime report,
establishing a record of the burglary. The break-in would not become public
knowledge until John Dean dramatically revealed it two years later—
and implicitly tied Nixon to it by citing the involvement of Egil Krogh, the man in
charge of Nixon’s so-called Plumbers unit.

Dean and his lawyers showed far greater enthusiasm for pursuing the
Beverly Hills break-in than even the prosecutors. As Renata Adler wrote in
the New Yorker: “Dean’s attorney, Charles Shaffer, practically had to spell it
out to [the prosecutors] that they would be taking part in an obstruction of
justice themselves if they did not pass the information on.”

Like Watergate, the Fielding office break-in was on its face a very bad idea
that was not approved by Nixon but certain to deeply embarrass him and
damage his public standing when it was disclosed. The principal accomplishment
of the break-in was to portray Nixon as a man who had no decency
at all—purportedly even stooping to obtain private psychiatric records
of a supposed foe. This was almost guaranteed to provoke public revulsion.

The notion that a group surrounding the president could be working to
do him in might sound preposterous to most of us. But not to veterans of
America’s clandestine operations, where the goal abroad has often been to
do just that. And Nixon was a perfect target: solitary, taciturn, with few
friends, and not many more people he trusted. Because of this, he had to
hire virtual strangers in the White House, and as a result, the place was
teeming with schemers. Nixon was too distrustful, and yet not distrustful
enough. It was supremely ironic. Nixon, ridiculed for his irrational hatred
and “paranoia” toward the Eastern Establishment, may in the end have been
done in by forces controlled by that very establishment. Of course, it was
nothing less than that level of power to remove presidents, plural, one after
the other if necessary.

Among the myriad plots was the so-called Moorer-Radford affair, cited in
chapter 9, in which the military actually was spying on Nixon and stealing
classified documents in an attempt to gain inside information, influence
policy, and perhaps even unseat the president.

That Nixon could actually have been the victim of Watergate, and not the
perpetrator, will not sit well with many, especially those with a professional
stake in Nixon’s guilt. Yet three of the most thoroughly reported books on
Watergate from the past three decades have come to the same conclusion:
that Nixon and/or his top aides were indeed set up. Each of these books takes
a completely different approach, focuses on different aspects, and relies on
essentially different sets of facts and sources. These are 1984’s Secret Agenda,
by former Harper’s magazine Washington editor Jim Hougan; 1991’s Silent
Coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin; and 2008’s The Strong Man, by
James Rosen.

Rosen’s The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate is a biography
of Nixon’s close friend, attorney general, and campaign chief, the
highest-ranking official ever to be sentenced to prison. The book, on which
Rosen labored for seventeen years, is based on sources not previously interviewed
and also on unprecedented access to documents generated by the Senate
Watergate Committee and Watergate special prosecutors. Rosen asserts
that the Watergate operation was authorized behind Mitchell’s back by his
subordinate Jeb Magruder and by John Dean and was deliberately sabotaged
in its execution by burglar and former CIA officer James McCord. As Rosen
puts it:

Mitchell knew he had been set up. In later years, his mind reeled at
the singular confluence of amazing characters that produced
Watergate—Dean, Magruder, Liddy, Helms, Hunt, McCord,
Martinez—and reckoned himself and the president, neither of
whom enjoyed foreknowledge of the Watergate break-in, victims
in the affair. “The more I got into this,” Mitchell said in June 1987,
“the more I see how these sons of bitches have not only done
Nixon in but they’ve done me in.”

Rosen also writes:

The [Watergate] tapes unmasked Nixon not as the take-charge boss
of a criminal conspiracy but rather as an aging and confused politician
lost in a welter of detail, unable to distinguish his Magruders
from his Strachans, uncertain who knew what and when, what
each player had told the grand jury, whose testimony was direct,
whose hearsay.

My independent research takes the argument one step further, and the facts
in a completely new direction. It leads to an even more disturbing conclusion
as to what was really going on, and why.

Woodward at His Post

The accepted narrative of Nixon as the villain of Watergate is based largely on
the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They both were young reporters
on the Washington Post’s Metro desk when the story fell into their laps.
When it was over, they were household names. Woodward in particular would
go on to become the nation’s most visible investigative journalist, and indeed
the iconic representation of that genre. The work of “Woodstein” would play a
key role in enhancing the franchise of the Post itself. Yet this oeuvre—in
particular the role of Woodward—has become somewhat suspect among those
who have taken a second and third look—including Columbia Journalism
Review contributing editor Steve Weinberg, in a November/December 1991
article.

Woodward did not fit the profile of the typical daily print reporter. Young,
midwestern, Republican, he attended Yale on an ROTC scholarship and
then spent five years in the Navy. He had begun with a top-secret security
clearance on board the USS Wright, specializing in communications, including
with the White House.

His commanding officer was Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, who
would later be implicated in the military spy ring in the Nixon White
House, mentioned in chapter 9. According to Silent Coup, an exhaustive
study of the military espionage scandal, Woodward then arrived in Washington,
where he worked on the staff of Admiral Thomas Moorer, chief of naval
operations, again as a communications officer, this time one who provided
briefings and documents to top brass in the White House on national security
matters. According to this account, in 1969-70, Woodward frequently
walked through the basement offices of the White House West Wing with
documents from Admiral Moorer to General Alexander Haig, who served
under Henry Kissinger.

In a 2008 interview, Woodward categorically denied having any intelligence
connections. He also denied having worked in the White House or
providing briefings there. “It’s a matter of record in the Navy what I did,
what I didn’t do,” Woodward said. “And this Navy Intelligence, Haig and so
forth, you know, I’d be more than happy to acknowledge it if it’s true. It just
isn’t. Can you accept that?”

Journalist Len Colodny, however, has produced audiotapes of interviews
by his Silent Coup coauthor, Robert Gettlin, with Admiral Moorer, former defense
secretary Melvin Laird, Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim—and
even with Woodward’s own father, Al—speaking about Bob’s White House
service.

At a minimum, Woodward’s entry into journalism received a valuable
outside assist, according to an account provided by Harry Rosenfeld, a retired
Post editor, to the Saratogian newspaper in 2004:

Bob had come to us on very high recommendations from someone
in the White House. He had been an intelligence officer in the
Navy and had served in the Pentagon. He had not been exposed to
any newspaper. We gave him a tryout because he was so highly
recommended. We customarily didn’t do that. We wanted to see
some clips, and he had none of that. We tried him out, and after a
week or two I asked my deputy, “What’s with this guy?” And he
said well, he’s a very bright guy but he doesn’t know how to put the
paper in the typewriter. But he was bright, there was that intensity
about him and his willingness, and he acted maturely. So we decided
because he had come so highly recommended and he had
shown certain strengths that we would help get him a job at the
Montgomery County Sentinel.

In 2008, some time after I spoke to Woodward, I reached Rosenfeld. He
said he did not recall telling the Saratogian that Woodward had been hired
on the advice of someone in the White House. He did, however, tell me that
he remembered that Woodward had been recommended by Paul Ignatius,
the Post’s president. Prior to taking over the Post’s presidency, Ignatius had
been Navy secretary for President Johnson.

In a 2008 interview, Ignatius told me it was possible that he had a hand
in at least recommending Woodward. “It’s possible that somebody asked
me about him, and it’s possible that I gave him a recommendation,” Ignatius
said. “I don’t remember initiating anything, but I can’t say I didn’t.” I
asked Ignatius how a top Pentagon administrator such as himself would
even have known of a lowly lieutenant, such as Woodward was back in
those days, and Ignatius said he did not recall.

In September 1971, after one year of training at the Maryland-based Sentinel,
Woodward was hired at the Washington Post. The Post itself is steeped
in intelligence connections. The paper’s owner, the Graham family, were, as
noted in chapter 3, aficionados of the apparatus, good friends of top spies,
and friends also of Prescott Bush. They even helped fund Poppy Bush’s earliest
business venture. Editor Ben Bradlee was himself a Yale graduate who,
like Woodward, had spent time in naval intelligence during World War II.
(As noted earlier, Poppy Bush had also been associated with naval intelligence
during World War II: prior to beginning his work with the CIA, he had
been involved with top-secret aerial reconnaissance photography.)

Woodward demonstrated his proclivity for clandestine sources a month
before the Watergate break-in, in his coverage of the shooting and serious
wounding of presidential candidate George Wallace at a shopping center in
Washington’s Maryland suburbs. A lone gunman, Arthur Bremer, would be
convicted. Woodward impressed his editors with his tenacity on the case,
and his contacts. As noted in a journalistic case study published by Columbia
University:

At the time, according to [Post editors Barry] Sussman and [Harry]
Rosenfeld, Woodward said he had “a friend” who might be able to
help. Woodward says his “friend” filled him in on Bremer’s background
and revealed that Bremer had also been stalking other
presidential candidates.

As to Woodward’s initial introduction to the newspaper, nobody seems to
have questioned whether a recommendation from someone in the White
House would be an appropriate reason for the Post to hire a reporter. Nor
does anyone from the Post appear to have put a rather obvious two and two
together, and noted that Woodward made quick work of bringing down the
president, and therefore wondered who at the White House recommended
Woodward in the first place—and with what motivation.

Others, however, were more curious. After Charles Colson met with Senator
Howard Baker and his staff—including future senator Fred Thompson—
he recounted the session in a previously unpublished memo to file:

The CIA has been unable to determine whether Bob Woodward
was employed by the agency. The agency claims to be having difficulty
checking personnel files. Thompson says that he believes the
delay merely means that they don’t want to admit that Woodward
was in the agency. Thompson wrote a lengthy memo to Baker last
week complaining about the CIA’s non-cooperation, the fact that
they were supplying material piecemeal and had been very uncooperative.
The memo went into the CIA relationship with the press, specifically
Woodward. Senator Baker sent the memo directly to [CIA Director] Colby
with a cover note and within a matter of a few hours, Woodward
called Baker and was incensed over the memo. It had been immediately
leaked to him.

Woodward’s good connections would help generate a series of exclusive-
access interviews that would result in rapidly produced bestselling books.
One was Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, a controversial book
that relied in part, Woodward claimed, on a deathbed interview—not
recorded—with former CIA director William Casey. The 543-page book,
which came out as Poppy Bush was seeking the presidency, contained no
substantive mentions of any role on the part of Bush in these “secret wars,”
though Bush was both vice president with a portfolio for covert ops and a
former CIA director.

Asked how it was possible to leave Bush out of such a detailed account of
covert operations during his vice presidency, Woodward replied, “Bush was,
well, I don’t think he was— What was it he said at the time? I was out of the
loop?” Woodward went on to be blessed with unique access to George W.
Bush—a president who did not grant a single interview to America’s top
newspaper, the New York Times, for nearly half his administration—and the
automatic smash bestsellers that guaranteed. Woodward would also distinguish
himself for knowing about the administration’s role in leaking the
identity of CIA undercover officer Valerie Plame but not writing or saying
anything about it, despite an ongoing investigation and media tempest.
When this was revealed, Woodward issued an apology to the Post.

To its credit, the Washington Post in these years had other staffers doing
some of the best reporting on the intelligence establishment. Perhaps the
most revealing work came prior to Nixon’s tenure, while Woodward was still
doing his naval service. In a multipart, front-page series by Richard Harwood
in early 1967, the paper began reporting the extent to which the CIA
had penetrated civil institutions not just abroad, but at home as well. “It was
not enough for the United States to arm its allies, to strengthen governmental
institutions, or to finance the industrial establishment through economic
and military programs,” Harwood wrote. “Intellectuals, students, educators,
trade unionists, journalists and professional men had to be reached directly
through their private concerns.” Journalists too. Even Carl Bernstein later
wrote about the remarkable extent of the CIA’s penetration of newsrooms,
detailing numerous examples, in a 1977 Rolling Stone article. As for the Post
itself, Bernstein wrote:

When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company,
publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that
the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according
to CIA sources. “It was widely known that Phil Graham was
somebody you could get help from,” said a former deputy director
of the Agency. “Frank Wisner dealt with him.” Wisner, deputy director
of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965,
was the Agency’s premier orchestrator of “black” operations, including
many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to
boast of his “mighty Wurlitzer,” a wondrous propaganda instrument
he built, and played, with help from the press. Phil Graham
was probably Wisner’s closest friend. But Graham, who committed
suicide in 1963, apparently knew little of the specifics of any cover
arrangements with Newsweek, CIA sources said.

In 1965-66, an accredited Newsweek stringer in the Far East was
in fact a CIA contract employee earning an annual salary of
$10,000 from the Agency, according to Robert T. Wood, then a CIA
officer in the Hong Kong station. Some Newsweek correspondents
and stringers continued to maintain covert ties with the Agency
into the 1970s, CIA sources said.

Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post
newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some
Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say
they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of
the arrangements.

When the Watergate burglary story broke, Bob Woodward got the assignment,
in part, his editor Barry Sussman recalled, because he never
seemed to leave the building. “I worked the police beat all night,” Wood-
ward said in an interview with authors Tom Rosenstiel and Amy S.
Mitchell, “and then I’d go home—I had an apartment five blocks from the
Post—and sleep for a while. I’d show up in the newsroom around 10 or 11
[in the morning] and work all day too. People complained I was working too
hard.” So when the bulletin came in, Woodward was there. The result was
a front-page account revealing that E. Howard Hunt’s name appeared in the
address book of one of the burglars and that a check signed by Hunt had
been found in the pocket of another burglar, who was Cuban. It went further:
Hunt, Woodward reported, worked as a consultant to White House counsel
Charles Colson.

Thus, Woodward played a key role in tying the burglars to Nixon.

Woodward would later explain in All the President’s Men (coauthored with
Bernstein) that to find out more about Hunt, he had “called an old friend
and sometimes source who worked for the federal government.” His friend
did not like to be contacted at this office and “said hurriedly that the break-
in case was going to ‘heat up,’ but he couldn’t explain and hung up.” Thus
began Woodward’s relationship with Deep Throat, that mysterious source
who, Woodward would later report, served in the executive branch of government
and had access to information in the White House and CREEP.

Based on tips from Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein began to “follow
the money,” writing stories in September and October 1972 on a political
“slush fund” linked to CREEP. One story reported that the fund had
financed the bugging of the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters as
well as other intelligence-gathering activities. While Nixon coasted to a
landslide victory over the liberal Democrat George McGovern, the story
seemed to go on hiatus. But just briefly.

Poppy Enters, Stage Right

If someone did want to undermine the president from outside the White
House, he couldn’t have found a better perch than the chairmanship of the
Republican Party.

Right after the election, Poppy Bush, again utilizing his pull with Nixon,
had persuaded the president to bring him back from his cushy U.N. post
and install him at the Republican National Committee. This put him at the
very epicenter of the nationwide Republican elite that would ultimately
determine whether Nixon would stay or go.

As chairman of the RNC, Poppy was expected to be the president’s chief
advocate, especially to the party faithful. He would travel widely, interact
with big donors and party activists. If anyone would have their finger on the
pulse of the loyalist base, it was Poppy. He would have a good sense of what
would keep supporters in line, and conversely, what might convince them to
abandon ship.

But Poppy was unique among RNC chairmen over the years in that he
had convinced Nixon to let him maintain an official presence at the White
House. Just as Nixon had permitted him to participate in cabinet meetings
as U.N. ambassador, he now continued to extend that privilege while Poppy
ran the RNC. This was unprecedented for someone in such an overtly partisan
position.

Here was a man closely connected to the CIA, as we have seen, now both
running the Republican Party and sitting in on cabinet deliberations. An
intelligence officer couldn’t have asked for a better perch. Moreover, this put
him in the catbird seat just as Watergate began heating up.

But Poppy was even more wired into Nixonworld. When he came to the
RNC, he hired Harry Dent and Tom Lias, the top officials of Nixon’s Political
Affairs office, which had established the Town house Operation. Dent was
the architect of Nixon’s Southern strategy, with which Poppy Bush and his
backers were closely allied. Lias had ties to Poppy from before working in
the White House. He had been a top organizer for the Republican Congressional
Campaign Committee, strategizing how to elect people like Poppy to
formerly Democratic seats in the South.

After Poppy came to Washington, the two often socialized. According to
Pierre Ausloos, stepfather of Lias’s daughter, and a friend of the family, “On
weekends, Bush would always invite [Lias] for a barbecue party at his house
here in Washington.” Ausloos also remembers that during the 1968
Republican convention, Liasís daughter’s babysitter was Poppy’s son, George
W. Bush.

Thus, at the time Dent and Lias were installed in the White House Political
Affairs office, they were already close with Bush. Indeed, right after the
1970 election and the termination of the Town house Operation, Bush took
Lias with him to New York, where Lias served as a top aide on Poppy’s
United Nations staff. The U.N. choice struck people who knew Lias as odd.
Lias had no relevant qualifications or knowledge for the U.N. post, just as
Poppy himself didn’t.

Poppy’s decision, once he moved to the RNC, to hire both Lias and
Dent—the two men supervising Jack Gleason’s Town house Operation—
is surely significant.

Meanwhile, Poppy Bush and his team had already been in contact with
John Dean.

In a brief 2008 conversation, in which a prickly Dean sought to control
the conditions of the interview, I asked him whether he had any dealings
with Bush. “I think there are some phone calls on my phone logs, but I
never met with him personally,” he said.

Indeed, phone logs show that on June 24, 1971, Ambassador Bush called
Dean, and on December 6, 1971, Tom Lias of Ambassador Bush’s office
called. The logs show other calls from Lias as well. It is not clear—nor did
Dean volunteer an opinion—why Bush and Lias would have been calling
him at all.

Slumming in Greenwich

When the Senate created a committee to investigate Watergate, there was no
guarantee that anything would come of it. The perpetrators—the burglars
and their supervisors, Hunt and Liddy—were going on trial, and it was uncertain
whether the hearings would produce any further insights. Moreover,
the committee featured four rather somnolent Democrats and three Republicans,
two of them staunch Nixon loyalists.

This left only one wild card: Lowell Weicker, a liberal Republican from
Connecticut.

A freshman, and an independent one, Weicker was not disposed to knee-
jerk defense of Nixon. Furthermore, he saw himself as a crusader. At six feet
six, Weicker was imposing, considered basically well-intentioned, a little
naive, and in love with publicity. He had gotten his political start in the
Bush hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut; and like the Bushes, he was
heir to a family fortune, in his case from two grandfathers who owned the
Squibb pharmaceutical company.

But there the similarities ended. Weicker chose for his base Greenwich’s
Third Voting District, which consisted almost entirely of working-class
Italians. “Just decent, hard-working, down-to-basics families,” Weicker
would say. “Had I been raised as a typical Republican in the salons of Fair-
field County, discussing international issues at teas and cocktail parties,
I know my career would have been a short one once off the Greenwich
electoral scene.” In 1960, Weicker aligned himself with Albert Morano,
a congressional candidate opposed by the Bush family. Now the Bushes
saw Weicker as a traitor to his class. Over the years, Weicker and Bush
would generally maintain a cool but civil relationship, driven by political
expediency.

“I think he was viewed as an outsider from day one, and it was a perspective
he relished,” said Townhouse operative Jack Gleason. ”Because he
always used to joke about ‘the Round Hill boys out to get me again’ every
time he was up for reelection.”

Weicker had arrived in Washington in 1968, following his election to the
House of Representatives. Given the past, this would have made him a
not-very-welcome colleague of Poppy Bush. And Poppy probably was not
enthused when, after only two years in the House, Weicker was elected
to Prescott Bush’s old Senate seat—in the same year Poppy lost his second
Senate bid. Weicker’s star was rising faster than Poppy’s—and in the Bush
home state to boot. It must have rankled.

Still, Weicker’s least endearing qualities—his considerable ambition,
love of publicity, and penchant for self-aggrandizement—would shortly
prove useful in at least one respect: as a champion of the “truth” on the
Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, commonly
known as the Watergate Committee. The same Republican maverick who
had no qualms about challenging his party’s leadership in Connecticut
would soon debut his maverick persona on the national stage.

In his memoirs, Weicker writes that he was given the Watergate Committee
assignment because he was one of only two Republicans who volunteered
and that his interest in “campaign financing” and dwindling faith in
the democratic process spurred his personal interest. Interestingly, the
other Republican volunteer, stalwart conservative Edward J. Gurney of Florida,
had won his seat with the help of Bush’s top political lieutenant, Jimmy
Allison—and eldest son George W. Bush, who took the extraordinary step of
securing a leave from his National Guard unit in 1968, when he had barely
begun his military training. The other Republican on the committee was Minority
Leader Howard Baker, a moderate. Weicker was the only Republican
on the committee with the inclination to prove his independence from the
party and openly challenge the president.

By the spring of 1973, six defendants had been sentenced in the DNC burglary,
and the Watergate hearings were due to begin. There was now an opportunity
for Nixon to put the whole Watergate affair behind him, without
mortal damage to his presidency. Weicker, however, already saw his role as
an honest broker, and he criticized Nixon’s attempts at tamping down the
matter. “I think the national interest is achieved by opening, not closing, the
White House doors,” he said. He added that he would vote in favor of subpoenas
for White House officials to appear before the committee.

Poppy Bush apparently agreed. On March 20, the day after Weicker’s remarks,
Poppy went to see Nixon at the Oval Office. In his usual oblique way,
ascribing his advice to others, he urged Nixon to send John Dean to testify.

BUSH: We’re getting hit a little bit, Mr. President . . . It’s building,
and the mail’s getting heavier . . .
NIXON: What do you think you can do about it? . . . We’ve got hearings
coming up. The hearings will make it worse.
BUSH: . . . I was speaking with the executives at the Bull Elephants
…The guy said to me,… why doesn’t the President
send Dean? . . . The disclosure is what they’re calling for.
NIXON: We are cooperating… They don’t want any cooperation.
They aren’t interested in getting the facts. They’re only interested
in [politicalgains?]… I wish there were an answer to Watergate,
but I just don’t know any . . . I don’t know a damn thing
to do. [emphasis added]

John Ehrlichman remembers that meeting well, as noted in his memoirs.
“Bush argued that the only way to blunt the current onslaught in the newspapers
and on television was for the president to be totally forthcoming—to
tell everything he knew about all aspects of Watergate.”

This was a significant moment, where Poppy demonstrates a possible
connection to and interest in Dean. It was a sort of specific advice that warrants
attention, because it is an indication that the outsider Bush is unusually
well informed about who knows what inside the White House—
and encourages Nixon to let Dean begin confessing his knowledge. When I
asked Dean in 2008 why he thought Poppy Bush was suggesting he testify,
he said he had no idea.

Nixon resisted Poppy’s advice to have Dean testify because, Nixon maintained,
there was no White House staff involvement in Watergate, and
therefore Dean’s testimony would serve only to break executive privilege,
once and for all. “The president can’t run his office by having particularly
his lawyer go up and testify,” Nixon told Poppy.

If Poppy Bush seemed to have unusually good intelligence as to what
was happening in the Oval Office, it might have had something to do with
a good friend of his who was right in there with Nixon and Dean during the
most critical days of Watergate. Richard A. Moore, a lawyer who served as a
kind of elder statesman off of whom Nixon and Mitchell could bounce
ideas, was, like Poppy, an alumnus of Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones.
Moore served as special assistant to the chief of military intelligence during
World War II and is believed to have transitioned to civilian intelligence
after the war. Over the years, Moore was practically a member of the
extended Bush clan, exchanging intimate notes with Poppy and even joining
family dinners.

Moore shows up in background roles on a number of Nixon tapes, and
phone logs show a flurry of phone calls between Moore and Dean, especially
in the final weeks before Dean turned on Nixon. In a little-reported taped telephone
conversation from March 16, Dean tells Nixon that he and Moore are
working on a Watergate report; he also mentions that he and Moore drive
home together. On March 20, in an Oval Office meeting featuring Nixon,
Dean, and Moore—just prior to Nixon’s meeting with Poppy Bush—
Moore can be heard typing the report in the background.

Dean would later write that the term “cancer” as used in his famous “cancer
on the presidency” briefing had been suggested by Moore—who though a close
Nixon adviser in these sensitive days, managed to emerge from Watergate
obscure and unscathed. His Watergate testimony did not support Dean, but
he tended to be ambiguous. As Time magazine noted on July 23, 1973,
“The Moore testimony was certainly not evidence that the President
had had prior knowledge of the Plumbers’ felonious break-in. But it seemingly
betrayed a curious nonchalance on the President’s part toward questionable
activities by White House staffers.”

Later, with Nixon departing and Ford preparing to become president,
Moore urged Ford to make Poppy Bush his vice president, arguing that
Bush had strong economic credentials. Moore specifically cited Poppy’s ties
to Wall Street through his father and grandfather, “both highly respected investment
bankers in New York.” Moore would go on to work on all of Poppy
Bush’s presidential campaigns, including his unsuccessful 1980 bid, and
would in 1989 be named by Poppy as his ambassador to Ireland.

Repeat After Me

Immediately after Poppy tried to convince Nixon to send Dean to testify,
Dean himself telephoned the president. Dean asked to urgently meet the
following morning and carefully explained to Nixon that there were important
details of which the president was unaware and that he would tell him
about these things—but did not yet tell him:

DEAN: I think that one thing that we have to continue to do, and
particularly right now, is to examine the broadest, broadest implications
of this whole thing, and, you know, maybe about thirty minutes
of just my recitations to you of facts so that you operate from
the same facts that everybody else has.
NIXON: Right.
DEAN: I don’t think—we have never really done that. It has been sort
of bits and pieces. Just paint the whole picture for you, the soft
spots, the potential problem areas… [emphasis added]

In other words, Dean was admitting, nine months into the scandal, that
he knew quite a bit about Watergate that he had never revealed to the president.
Now Dean planned to clue him in.

Nixon then inquired about the progress on a public statement Dean was
to be preparing—and was made to understand that the statement was going
to try to avoid specifics, i.e., employ a common practice, stonewalling:

NIXON: And so you are coming up, then with the idea of just a
stonewall then? Is that—
DEAN: That’s right.
NIXON: Is that what you come down with?
DEAN: Stonewall, with lots of noises that we are always willing to
cooperate, but no one is asking us for anything.

Nixon went on to pressure Dean to issue a statement to the cabinet explaining,
in very general terms, the White House’s willingness to cooperate in any
investigations. Without going into detail, Nixon wanted to publicly defend the
innocence of White House officials whom he believed were innocent:

NIXON: I just want a general—
DEAN: An all-around statement.
NIXON: That’s right. Try just something general. Like “I have
checked into this matter; I can categorically, based on my investigation,
the following: Haldeman is not involved in this, that
and the other thing. Mr. Colson did not do this; Mr. So- and- so
did not do this. Mr. Blank did not do this.” Right down the line,
taking the most glaring things. If there are any further questions,
please let me know. See?
DEAN: Uh huh, I think we can do that.

But Dean apparently didn’t intend to “do that.” He was seemingly waiting
for the right moment to create the right effect—and that moment would not
come until he had jumped the wall to the other side and become the key witness
for the prosecution.

In Haldemans diary entry of the same day, he observes that Nixon wants
to come clean, but that Dean is warning him not to:

[The president] feels strongly that we’ve got to say something to get
ourselves away from looking like we’re completely on the defensive
and on a cover-up basis. If we . . . are going to volunteer
to send written statements . . . we might as well do the statements
now and get them publicized and get our answers out. The problem
is that Dean feels this runs too many leads out. [emphasis added]

Thus, according to this account, Nixon was interested in facing his problems.
This included, it appears, telling what they knew—Nixon’s version, in
any case.

And John Dean was urging Nixon not to do that. To make that case, Dean
was feeding Nixon’s paranoia. In other words, Dean seemed to be saying:
Too many leads out. Let me control this process.

In response to a combination of events—Weicker’s call for more disclosure,
Bush’s intervention with Nixon aimed at forcing Dean to testify, and
Dean’s own insistence that there was more to the story—Nixon met with
Dean the next day. That conversation, together with the smoking gun episode,
would help seal Nixon’s fate.

On the morning of March 21, Nixon’s White House counsel stepped
into the Oval Office and proceeded to deliver a speech that would make
Dean famous for the rest of his life. He would dramatically warn the president
of a “cancer on the presidency” soon to become inoperable. This
speech, which would shortly become Dean’s principal evidence against
Nixon, may have been carefully calculated based on Dean’s awareness
that the conversations were being taped. (Dean would later say he suspected
he was being taped, but as we shall see, he may have known for certain.)

In fact, for this dramatic moment, Dean had begun performing dress
rehearsals some eight days earlier. This is borne out by earlier taped
conversations—ones whose very existence has been largely suppressed in
published accounts. In these earlier tapes, we hear Dean beginning to tell
Nixon about White House knowledge related to Watergate. (Most of these
tapes are excluded from what is generally considered the authoritative compendium
of transcripts, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes, by Stanley Kutler,
who told me in a 2008 interview that he considers himself a close friend
of John Dean.)

In one unpublicized taped conversation, from March 13, Dean told Nixon
that Haldeman’s aide Gordon Strachan had foreknowledge of the break-in,
was already lying about it in interviews, and would continue to do so before
a grand jury. The Watergate prosecutors, for whom Dean was a crucial witness,
had the March 13 tape, but did not enter it into evidence.

DEAN: Well, Chapin didn’t know anything about the Watergate, and—
NIXON: You don’t think so?
DEAN: No. Absolutely not.
NIXON: Did Strachan?
DEAN: Yes.
NIXON: He knew?
DEAN: Yes.
NIXON: About the Watergate?
DEAN: Yes.
NIXON: Well, then, Bob knew. He probably told Bob, then. He may
not have. He may not have.
DEAN: He was, he was judicious in what he, in what he relayed,
and, uh, but Strachan is as tough as nails. I—
NIXON: What’ll he say? Just go in and say he didn’t know?
DEAN: He’ll go in and stonewall it and say, “I don’t know anything
about what you are talking about.” He has already done it twice,
as you know, in interviews.

This is significant since Strachan, a junior staff member, was essentially
reporting to Dean—a fact that Dean failed to point out to Nixon. Although
Strachan was Haldeman’s aide, when it came to matters like these, he
would, at Dean’s request, deal directly with Dean. “As to the subject of political
intelligence-gathering,” Strachan told the Senate Watergate Committee,
“John Dean was designated as the White House contact for the Committee
to Re-elect the President.” Thus, if Strachan knew anything about Watergate,
even after the fact, it seems to have been because Dean included him in
the flow of “intelligence.”

On March 17, in another tape generally excluded from accounts of Watergate,
Dean told Nixon about the Ellsberg break-in. He also provided a long list of
people who he felt might have “vulnerabilities” concerning Watergate,
and included himself in that list.

NIXON: Now, you were saying too, ah, what really, ah, where the,
this thing leads, I mean in terms of the vulnerabilities and so
forth. It’s your view the vulnerables are basically Mitchell, Colson,
Haldeman, indirectly, possibly directly, and of course, the
second level is, as far as the White House is concerned, Chapin.
DEAN: And I’d say Dean, to a degree.
NIXON: You? Why?
DEAN: Well, because I’ve been all over this thing like a blanket.
NIXON: I know, I know, but you know all about it, but you didn’t,
you were in it after the deed was done.
DEAN: That’s correct, that I have no foreknowledge . . .
NIXON: Here’s the whole point, here’s the whole point. My point is
that your problem is you, you have no problem. All the others
that have participated in the God-damned thing, and therefore
are potentially subject to criminal liability. You’re not. That’s the
difference.

In the heavily publicized “cancer” speech of March 21, Dean essentially
reiterated what he had told Nixon previously, if in more detail. But he added
an important element—one which would cause Nixon serious problems
when the “cancer” tape was played for the public: a request for one million
dollars in “hush money” for the burglars. Informed by Dean of a “continual
blackmail operation by Hunt and Liddy and the Cubans,” Nixon asked how
much money they needed. Dean responded, “These people are going to cost
a million dollars over the next two years.” There is debate as to whether
Nixon actually agreed with Dean’s suggestion to pay money or merely ruminated
over it. He never did pay the money.

Dean’s behavior did not appear to be that of a lawyer seeking to protect
his client, let alone advice appropriate to the conduct of the presidency.

Next: Chapter 11 – Downing Nixon, Part II: The Execution

GRAPHIC:   http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall06/Weiner/IMGS/burglars.jpg

The media were excited to report that Robert Redford is working on a documentary about the scandal that brought down a president and created new heroes: the reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Given that the film All the President’s Men, in which Redford played the heroic Bob Woodward, practically made Redford’s career, we probably shouldn’t expect any big surprises.

But here’s one: In recent days, we’ve heard doubts from former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee about his journalists’ reporting on Watergate. This from a new book by Woodward’s own former assistant:

Ben talked about Bob’s famous secret source, whom he claimed to have met in an underground garage in rendezvous arranged via signals involving flowerpots and newspapers.

You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat…..Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? … and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage … There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.

Salon ran a kind of strange and foggy article about Nixon’s difficult relationship with the CIA, which nevertheless brought up an important question: what was the real role of the spy agency in Nixon’s downfall? That article doesn’t answer it. But I did—in my book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.

One of the major revelations is that, decades before George H.W. Bush was named CIA director as a purported outsider, he was already involved with CIA covert operations. Family of Secrets shows how the CIA has violated the spirit and letter of its charter by meddling secretly, and constantly, in American politics since its inception. The book follows the elder Bush and the CIA into the life of Richard Nixon and the scandal that brought Nixon down. It reveals new information about the background and actual role of Bob Woodward and other seminal figures in the drama. And it provides an explanation of Watergate that is the polar opposite of the one that most Americans have accepted for four decades.

Because people are talking again about Watergate and Nixon, we felt this was a good time to present the three Nixon chapters from the book. The first installment is today. It provides an alternate history of the rise of Nixon, and sets the stage for the momentous collision between Nixon and powerful forces in and out of government that would lead to his political demise. The next two installments, to be published imminently, cover Watergate itself.

Notes: (1) Although these excerpts do not contain footnotes, the book itself is heavily footnoted and exhaustively sourced. (2) To distinguish between George Bush, father and son, George H.W. Bush is sometimes referred to by his nickname Poppy, and George W. Bush by his, W. (3) Additional context can be found in the preceding chapters.

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Family of Secrets, Chapter 9: The Nixonian Bushes

In early 1969, the newly elected Richard M. Nixon took one of his first acts as president: he arranged a date for his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Tricia, with George W. Bush. Not only that, he even dispatched a White House jet, at taxpayers’ expense, to pick up young Bush at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in order to bring him back to Washington.

This would not be the only time that Nixon would bestow special favors upon the Bush family. Six months earlier, as the GOP presidential candidate, he had seriously considered Poppy as a potential running mate, even though the latter was just a freshman congressman. Two years after W.’s date with Tricia, following Poppy’s second unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate, Nixon named him his ambassador to the United Nations. And two years later, with President Nixon’s nod, Poppy served a stint as chairman of the Republican Party. It was a quick rise from relative obscurity to the highest level of national politics—and all with Nixon’s help.

Taped conversations reveal that Nixon considered Poppy Bush a lightweight. Nevertheless, he repeatedly pushed Poppy ahead, often over people who were much more qualified. This put the elder Bush on the upper rungs of the ladder to the presidency. In all probability, had Nixon not so favored Poppy, he never would have reached the top. And had Poppy Bush not been president, his son George W. Bush almost certainly would not have either.

In no small way, Richard Nixon helped to create the Bush presidential dynasty.

What disposed Nixon so positively toward the Bushes? A little-known fact, certainly missing from the many splendid biographies of the thirty-seventh president, is the likely role of Poppy Bush’s father, Prescott, in launching Nixon’s own political career.

Beyond that, the depth and complexity of the ongoing relationship between Nixon and the Bushes, a relationship that spanned nearly three de cades, has somehow eluded most historians. An index search of the name Bush in the major Nixon biographies—including even those published after George H. W. Bush rose to the presidency—finds at most a handful of mentions, and in some cases, none at all.

The long overlooked Nixon-Bush story is a tale filled with plots and counterplots, power lust and ego trips, trust and betrayal, strategic alliances and rude revenge. It has a kind of mythic circularity: the elite Bush clan created the “populist” Nixon so that a President Nixon could later play a major role in creating a Bush political dynasty. And finally, the trusted Bushes, having gotten where they wanted, could play a role in Nixon’s fall.

Generally, Richard Nixon was known to be a wary and suspicious man. It is commonly assumed that he was paranoid, but Nixon had good reasons to feel apprehensive. One was probably the worry that someone would unearth the extent to which this self-styled outsider from Whittier, California, had sold his soul to the same Eastern Establishment that he publicly (and even privately) reviled. At the same time, he knew that those elites felt the same about him. They tolerated him as long as he was useful, which he was—until he got to the top. Then the trouble started.

Obeisance

When Poppy Bush arrived in Washington after the 1966 elections, he was immediately positioned to help large moneyed interests, and by so doing improve his own political fortunes. His father, still influential, had twisted arms to get him a coveted seat on the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes all tax legislation. The committee was the gatekeeper against attempts to eliminate the oil depletion allowance, and Bush’s assignment there was no small feat. No freshman of either party had gotten on since 1904. But former senator Prescott Bush had personally called the committee chairman. Then he got GOP minority leader Gerald Ford—a Warren Commission member and later vice president and president—to make the request himself.

It was a lot of voltage, but the rewards were worth the effort. Poppy now would be a go-to rep for the oil industry, which could provide Nixon with the Texas financial juice he would need to win the Republican nomination in 1968. Bush was also now a crucial link to an alliance that was forming between Eastern bankers, Texas oilmen, and intelligence operatives.

Indeed, Texans and Bush friends dominated the Nixon presidential campaign. For fund-raising, Poppy recruited Bill Liedtke, his old friend and former Zapata Petroleum partner, who became Nixon’s highest- producing regional campaign finance chairman. Poppy’s ally, Texas senator John Tower, endorsed Nixon shortly before the 1968 GOP convention and was put in charge of Nixon’s “key issues committee.” Once Nixon’s nomination was secured, Poppy and Prescott worked their networks furiously, and within days some of the most influential members of the Republican Party sent letters to Nixon urging him to choose Poppy as his running mate. The names must have given Nixon pause—the CEOs of Chase Manhattan Bank, Tiffany & Co., J. P. Stevens and Co., and on and on. Not surprisingly, executives of Pennzoil and Brown Brothers Harriman were among the petitioners. Thomas Dewey, éminence grise of the GOP, also pushed for Poppy. Nixon put Bush’s name on a short list. But as he glimpsed the prize in the distance, he began to assert his independence. To the surprise of almost everyone, he selected as his running mate Spiro Agnew, Maryland’s blunt and combative governor, who had backed Nixon opponent Nelson Rockefeller, the “limousine liberal,” in the primaries. Agnew seemed to offer two things. One, he could be the attack dog who enabled Nixon to assume the role of statesman that he craved. And two, there was little chance that he would outshine the insecure man under whom he would be serving.

(Poppy Bush would adopt a variation on this same strategy in 1988 when he selected as his running mate Senator Dan Quayle, who was handsome but inexperienced, and would be ridiculed for his gaffes and general awkwardness.)

After Nixon tapped Agnew, Prescott Bush, writing to his old friend Tom Dewey, registered his disappointment in a measured manner: “I fear that Nixon has made a serious error here,” Prescott wrote. “He had a chance to do something smart, to give the ticket a lift, and he cast it aside.” Actually Prescott was seething; he hadn’t felt this betrayed since John Kennedy fired his friend Allen Dulles as CIA director. As for the Bush children, they had learned years earlier to fear the wrath of their stern, imposing father. “Remember Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’?” Poppy once said. “My dad spoke loudly and carried the same big stick.”

But beyond political expediency, Prescott may have had good reason to expect Nixon to follow “suggestions” from the GOP establishment—a reason rooted in the earliest days of Nixon’s political career.

Nixon’s Big Break

In Nixon’s carefully crafted creation story, his 1945 decision to enter politics was triggered when the young Navy veteran, working on the East Coast, received a request from an old family friend, a hometown banker named Herman Perry. Would he fly back to Los Angeles and speak with a group of local businessmen looking for a candidate to oppose Democratic congressman Jerry Voorhis? They felt he was too liberal, and too close to labor unions.

The businessmen who summoned Nixon are usually characterized as Rotary Club types—a furniture dealer, a bank manager, an auto dealer, a printing salesman. In reality, these men were essentially fronts for far more powerful interests. Principal among Nixon’s bigger backers was the arch-conservative Chandler family, owners of the Los Angeles Times. Nixon himself acknowledged his debt to the Chandlers in correspondence. “I often said to friends that I would never have gone to Washington in the first place had it not been for the Times,” he wrote. Though best known as publishers, the Chandlers had built their fortune on railroads, still the preferred vehicle for shipping oil, and held wide and diverse interests.

Yet Voorhis appears to have recognized that forces even more powerful than the Chandler clan were opposing him. As he wrote in an unpublished manuscript, “The Nixon campaign was a creature of big Eastern financial interests… the Bank of America, the big private utilities, the major oil companies.” He was hardly a dispassionate observer, but on this point the record bears him out. Nixon partisans would claim that “not a penny” of oil money found its way into his campaign. Perhaps. But a representative of Standard Oil, Willard Larson, was present at that Los Angeles meeting in which Nixon was selected as the favored candidate to run against Voorhis.

Representative Voorhis had caused a stir at the outset of World War II when he exposed a secret government contract that allowed Standard Oil to drill for free on public lands in Central California’s Elk Hills. But the establishment’s quarrel with Voorhis was about more than oil. While no anti-capitalist radical, Voorhis had a deep antipathy for corporate excesses and malfeasance. And he was not afraid of the big guys. He investigated one industry after another—insurance, real estate, investment banking. He fought for antitrust regulation of the insurance industry, and he warned against the “cancerous superstructure of monopolies and cartels.” He also was an articulate voice calling for fundamental reforms in banking.

He knew Wall Street was gunning for him. In his memoir, Confessions of a Congressman, Voorhis recalled:

The 12th District campaign of 1946 got started along in the fall of 1945, more than a year before the election. There was, of course, opposition to me in the district. There always had been. Nor was there any valid reason for me to think I lived a charmed political life. But there were special factors in the campaign of 1946, factors bigger and more powerful than either my opponent or myself.

And they were on his side.

In October 1945, the representative of a large New York financial house [emphasis mine] made a trip to California. All the reasons for his trip I, of course, do not know. But I do know that he called on a number of influential people in Southern California. And I know he “bawled them out.” For what? For permitting Jerry Voorhis, whom he described as “one of the most dangerous men in Washington,” to continue to represent a part of the state of California in the House of Representatives. This gentleman’s reasons for thinking me so “dangerous” obviously had to do with my views and work against monopoly and for changes in the monetary system.

It is not clear whether Voorhis knew the exact identity of the man. Nor is it clear whether Voorhis knew that his nemesis, the Chandler family, had for several years been in business with Dresser Industries. The latter had begun moving into Southern California during the war, snapping up local companies both to secure immediate defense contracts and in anticipation of lucrative postwar opportunities. One of these companies, Pacific Pump Works, which manufactured water pumps, later produced components for the atomic bomb. The Chandlers were majority shareholders in Pacific Pump when Dresser acquired the company, and so gained a seat on the Dresser board, along with such Dresser stalwarts as Prescott Bush.

But there was even more of a Bush connection to the movers and shakers behind Nixon’s entry into politics. In October 1945, the same month in which that “representative of a large New York financial house” was in town searching for a candidate to oppose Voorhis, Dresser Industries was launching a particularly relevant California project. The company was just completing its purchase of yet another local company, the drill bit manufacturer Security Engineering, which was located in Whittier, Nixon’s hometown.

The combined evidence, both from that period and from the subsequent relationships, suggests that Voorhis’s Eastern banking representative may have been none other than Prescott Bush himself. If so, that would explain Nixon’s sense of indebtedness to the Bush family, something he never acknowledged in so many words but clearly demonstrated in so many actions during his career.

A Quick but Bumpy Ascent

In his first race for public office in 1946, Nixon went after the incumbent Voorhis with a vengeance. It was a campaign that helped put the term “Red baiting” into the political lexicon. After his victory, Nixon continued to ride the anti-Communist theme to national prominence.

Following two terms in the House, Nixon moved up to the Senate in the 1950 election. By 1952, he was being foisted on a reluctant Dwight Eisenhower as a vice presidential candidate by Wall Street friends and allies of Brown Brothers Harriman.

But the further Nixon rose, the more he resented the arrogance of his Eastern elite handlers. Though he would continue to serve them diligently throughout his career, his anger festered—perhaps in part over frustration with the extent to which he was beholden.

Meanwhile, George H. W. Bush, not yet thirty years old and a relative newcomer to West Texas, was named chair of the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign in Midland County. For someone with political ambitions of his own, it was an enviable assignment, and Poppy threw himself into it. When a heckler interrupted a welcoming ceremony for Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate, Poppy rushed at the man, grabbed his anti-Nixon sign, and tore it to bits.

Nixon himself would demonstrate a more effective response to criticism. His storied “Checkers speech,” answering charges that he had accepted political donations under the table, was a masterful appeal to middle-class sensibilities, with a maudlin self-pity that went up to the edge but not over.

Telegrams of support came pouring in to Republican headquarters; and one of the first politicians to write was the silver-haired U.S. senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush:

No fair-minded person who heard Senator Nixon bare his heart and soul to the American people Tuesday night could fail to hold him in high respect. I have felt all along that the charges against Dick Nixon were a dirty smear attempt to hurt him and the Republican ticket . . . [These smears] will boomerang in his favor. Nixon is absolutely honest, fearless and courageous. I’m proud of him.

Nixon saved his political skin that night, but money problems would continue to plague him. This increased his seething resentment of Jack Kennedy, who never had to grovel for money (and who was smooth and handsome to boot). As anyone who knew Nixon, including the Bushes, must have realized, his dependence on the financial resources of others constituted a vulnerability. That vulnerability would later lead to his undoing.

The essence of Nixon’s relationship with the Bushes, as with other key backers, was that they had the wherewithal and he didn’t. And since money was behind the relationship that made Nixon, it was only fitting that when Watergate undid him, it was to a large extent money—as we shall see in chapters 10 and 11—that was behind his downfall.

Symbiotic Relationship

During the Eisenhower years, the Texas oil industry really took off. Poppy was now part of a “swarm of young Ivy Leaguers,” as Fortune magazine put it, who had “descended on an isolated west Texas oil town—Midland—and created a most unlikely outpost of the working rich.” Central to these ambitions was continued congressional support for the oil depletion allowance, which greatly reduced taxes on income derived from the production of oil. The allowance was first enacted in 1913 as part of the original income tax. At first it was a 5 percent deduction but by 1926 it had grown to 27.5 percent. This was a time when Washington was “wading shoulder-deep in oil,” the New Republic reported.

“In the hotels, on the streets, at the dinner tables, the sole subject of discussion is oil. Congress has abandoned all other business.”

Following the discovery of the giant East Texas oil fields in 1931, there was nothing Texas oilmen fought for more vigorously than their depletion allowance. From its inception to the late 1960s, the oil depletion allowance had cost taxpayers an estimated $140 billion in lost revenue. Nixon supported the allowance in 1946, while Voorhis opposed it. Six years later, General Dwight D. Eisenhower supported it, and he got the oilmen’s blessings—and substantial contributions as well.

The Bushes backed Nixon passionately in his 1960 presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy. After Nixon lost—and then lost again when he ran for governor of California two years later—the oil lobby began to look for another horse. Poppy Bush saw his opening. He knew which way the political winds were blowing: toward an ultraconservatism based on new wealth, in particular the wealth of independent oilmen.

In 1964 the Bushes gave their support to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, even though this meant turning against their longtime allies, the Rockefellers. One can only speculate as to their motives, though Prescott Bush’s puritanical streak may have played a role. Goldwater’s opponent, Nelson Rockefeller, recently divorced, had decided in 1958 to wed Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, an even more recently divorced mother of four. Prescott delivered Rockefeller a public tongue lashing that Time called “the most wrathful any politician had suffered in recent memory.” This may have been just a convenient target. As political historian Rick Perlstein put it, conservatives genuinely preferred Goldwater, “and welcomed the remarriage as an excuse to cut loose from someone they were never excited about in the first place.”

Goldwater’s success in snatching the 1964 Republican nomination from Rockefeller changed the ideological dynamics of the Grand Old Party. Even though Goldwater lost the presidential race, the party would never be the same. So-called movement conservatives managed to build an uneasy alliance between social issue ground troops and the corporate libertarians who finance the party. The ever-nimble Bushes managed to straddle both camps.

Political ambition ran in the Bush family. According to his mother, Prescott had wanted to be president and regretted not getting into politics sooner. The lesson was not lost on Poppy. If he wanted to be president, he would have to take the long view and get started early. An alliance with Richard Nixon could be useful. Nixon would vouch for his rightward bona fides, and thereby make moot the patrician residues of Yale that still clung to him.

Nixon Presidency, 1969

As for Nixon, he understood only too well the perils he faced. With his paranoid tendencies, he worried constantly about where the next challenge would come from. Robert Dallek’s biography Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power describes Nixon as “an introspective man whose inner demons both lifted him up and brought him down.” When he looked at George Bush—a handsome, patrician Yale man with no worries about money—he likely saw another version of Jack Kennedy, which for him was not a recommendation.

But people were nagging Nixon, people he couldn’t ignore—all the more so once he locked up the nomination in 1968. “As your finance chairman in Texas,” wrote Bill Liedtke, “I am committed, and will back you up what ever you decide [about a running mate]. However . . . George Bush, in spite of his short service in the House, could help you win. George has appeal to young people and can get them fired up. He’s got plenty of energy. Lastly, Dick, he’s a loyal kind of guy and would support you to the hilt.”

Instead Nixon chose a running mate who was less capable and ambitious, and consequentially, less threatening. Having angered both Prescott and Poppy with his choice of Agnew, he knew that he would need to make amends to them and their allies.

Outside the small circle of longtime Nixon loyalists, the Bush group seems to have fared better than any other party faction in Nixon’s first administration. Bill Clements, Poppy’s friend and sometime oil drilling partner, became deputy secretary of defense, a position that involved securing oil for the U.S. military. Bush’s ex-business partner Bill Liedtke of Pennzoil (formerly Zapata Petroleum), the prodigious Nixon fund-raiser, successfully recommended former Baker Botts lawyers for positions on the Federal Power Commission. The FPC made crucial decisions affecting the natural gas industry, including one that directly benefited Pennzoil.

For his chief political adviser, Nixon chose Harry S. Dent of South Carolina, the architect of his “Southern strategy,” which had centered on wooing conservative Democrats to the Republican cause. Poppy Bush’s election from Texas’s Seventh Congressional District had benefited greatly from this strategy. As his top aide, Dent chose Tom Lias, who had run the candidate selection process for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee during that election cycle. These men, especially Lias, are little known today. But they would play crucial roles in the process that would lead ultimately to Nixon’s resignation.

Meanwhile, to head the Republican National Committee (RNC), Nixon picked Rogers Morton, a congressman from Kentucky, who had been his convention floor manager. Morton, a Yale graduate, was an old friend of the Bushes who had served with Poppy on the Ways and Means Committee.

Morton in turn named as his deputy chairman Jimmy Allison, Poppy’s longtime friend, administrative assistant and former campaign manager. Because at the time the RNC chairmanship was a part-time position and Morton was busy on Capitol Hill, Allison was the de facto day-to-day manager of the Republican Party. This was a huge step up for Allison, and quite a triumph for the Bushes. In a phrase, they had the place wired.

Once in the Oval Office, some presidents have warmed to the public aspects of their role. FDR, Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton come to mind. Others retreat into a kind of self-imposed exile. They cut themselves off from outside advice and effectively hunker down against attack. That was the case with Nixon, whose reclusive tendencies were abetted by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.

As a longtime protégé of the Rockefeller family, Kissinger was suspect on both the left and right. Movement conservatives in particular feared that the Rockefellers had a grand global design that included accommodation, rather than confrontation, with the Russians and Chinese. Nixon would become embroiled in this growing dispute within the Republican Party, between the two factions known as the “traders” and the “warriors.”

The traders were the Eastern Establishment internationalists who supported free trade, arguing that it would prevent another world war. They generally had a sense of noblesse oblige that translated into the “corporate liberalism” of a Nelson Rockefeller, then New York governor, who believed that ameliorative social programs for the needy were the price of a healthy business climate. The warriors, on the other hand, generally represented new money from the Southwest and Southern California. Although they lacked experience in foreign policy, they resented having to take backseats to their Eastern rivals, especially when it came to the increasingly important task of securing oil and mineral resources in such places as Southeast Asia.

Personally, Nixon felt more comfortable with the warriors. But especially in his first term, he worked to accommodate both sides, while he and Kissinger fashioned foreign policy themselves, in a way that bypassed the Pentagon, the CIA, and even the State Department. He wasn’t about to let the “the striped- pants faggots on Foggy Bottom” tell him what to do, he said, and that included the Yalies at the CIA. As his secretary of state Nixon chose his old friend William Rogers, with whom he had worked on the Alger Hiss spy case. Rogers knew little about foreign policy, but Nixon considered that a good thing, because Rogers would keep quiet and do as he was told. “Few Secretaries of State can have been selected because of their President’s confidence in their ignorance of foreign policy,” Kissinger wryly observed.

However, this determined effort to conduct foreign policy in secret and exclude the entities normally charged with that function caused growing alarm, particularly within the military and the defense industry. Eventually, the Nixon administration would discover that the military had its own powerful “back channel.” That apparatus, little recalled today, was the equivalent of a spy ring inside the Nixon White House. Its operatives passed top-secret documents from the National Security Council to the Joint Chiefs of Staff without Nixon’s knowledge. On discovering what seemed to him not only disloyalty but also borderline treason, Nixon expressed his fury to aides, who convinced him that the only option was to handle the matter quietly.

The First Challenge

Despite his earlier attempts to keep the peace among the party’s factions, Nixon was soon embroiled in a series of power struggles. Perhaps the most important concerned the oil depletion allowance, as members of Congress in 1969 launched new attempts to rein in the costly giveaway. Representative George H. W. Bush was the industry’s Horatio at the bridge—or perhaps its George Wallace. “In an era when civil rights became the great moral issue that galvanized liberals,” observed Bush biographer Herbert S. Parmet, “the targeted oil depletion allowance was not far behind.”

Poppy had barely completed his first term in the House. But he had an urgent task. President Nixon was under pressure to support a reduction in the depletion allowance, and some signals were emerging from the administration that he might do just that. Poppy, joined by Senator Tower, flew to Nixon’s vacation home in California to help save the day. The trip was apparently a success. Nixon affirmed his intention to block the reform efforts. Bush later wrote Nixon’s treasury secretary, David Kennedy, to thank him for reversing an earlier statement hinting that the White House might cave in to popular pressure for reform, adding: “I was also appreciative of your telling how I bled and died for the oil industry.”

The moment passed, but protecting the allowance remained uppermost in the minds of independent oilmen—and Nixon was not proving sufficiently stalwart on the matter. The White House sent political operative Jack Gleason out to West Texas to calm flaring tempers. “Harry [Dent] sent me down to Midland, to the Midland Petroleum Club, to talk to them about the depletion allowance,” Gleason told me in a 2008 interview. Gleason had trouble understanding the complex issue, so he was not clear on precisely what the oilmen were mad about. “Almost got lynched and run out of town . . . It was a very ugly scene. Fortunately one guy . . . saved my ass, or otherwise I’d still be buried somewhere at the Petroleum Club.”

A battle to control the soul of the president, not unusual in any administration, was under way. While the conservative, hawkish in de pen dent oilmen thought he was insufficiently loyal to their cause, the Rockefeller Republicans felt the same from their side. Writing in the Dallas Morning News, Robert Baskin noted fears among the Eastern corporate elite that Nixon was being dominated by the right wing. A few months later Baskin further underlined the point in an article headlined “Divisiveness Within GOP Rising.” In truth, Nixon’s reign was a highly complicated one, far from doctrinaire, with issues handled on a case- by-case basis. Thus, Attorney General John Mitchell could say the administration was against busing but for desegregation. Nixon himself could complain about people in his administration being too tough on corporations, yet his Justice Department aggressively pursued antitrust actions that angered industry. While waging the Vietnam War, Nixon held secret peace talks with the North Vietnamese Communists. He also produced a series of liberal-leaning reforms, including creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. And Nixon implemented the first major affirmative action program. But some of his Supreme Court nominees leaned far to the right, and Nixon and his attorney general championed tough law-and-order tactics against political protesters and dissidents. His presidency was a mixed bag, meaning no one was entirely happy, and everyone perceived someone else as having the inside track.

Thus, the July 1969 Dallas Morning News article describing moderates as fearful of the influence of a cabal of conservatives—a cabal that included such names as Tower, Morton, Dent, and Allison. What was left unsaid was that all these people were in the Bush camp. If nothing else, it was a testament to Poppy’s dexterity: the embodiment of blue-blooded Wall Street interests had morphed into a champion of the radical, upstart Southwest.

Bush’s Run for the Money: The 1970 Campaign

As early as the 1968 GOP convention, Nixon had tried to keep the Bush family close but not too close. He assured Poppy that he would support him in another Senate bid, and Poppy took that seriously. By January 1969, even before Nixon’s inauguration, Poppy’s administrative aide Jimmy Allison was back in Houston to lay the groundwork for another campaign. (After several months in Houston, Allison would return to D.C. as deputy director of the Republican Party.) There was no mistaking Poppy’s ultimate goal, though—and “ultimate” in Poppy’s mind did not mean that far in the future. As his brother Jonathan commented, “It was a long shot but he wanted to get into position to run for President.”

Nixon’s support for Poppy’s Senate bid made sense strategically for the Republicans, and besides, he had little choice. As congressman, Bush had supported him unfailingly, backing even the president’s most unpopular policies, from the continuation of the Vietnam War to the Supreme Court nomination of Judge G. Harrold Carswell, a purported racist.

Nixon knew that in running for the Senate, Bush risked giving up a safe House seat and his powerful position on the Ways and Means Committee, which was so crucial to the oil industry. To sweeten the pot, Nixon told Poppy that if he won, he’d be in the running for the VP slot in 1972, replacing Agnew; if Bush lost, Nixon would try to find him a desirable cabinet position.

Bush’s prospects seemed bright in 1970. His presumptive Democratic opponent, Senator Ralph Yarborough, was an unreconstructed liberal populist in an increasingly conservative, buttoned-down state. Then disaster struck. Former congressman Lloyd Bentsen Jr. entered the Democratic primary—and he was even more conservative than Bush. In a summer 1970 newspaper column, Bush family friend William F. Buckley lamented Bentsen’s entry, praised Bush as “genuinely talented on the platform and in the ways of the world,” and quoted Rogers Morton that Poppy was the only one of his generation of GOP figures who could “go all the way to the top.”

Bush raised enormous amounts of money and campaigned relentlessly. But for a second time he fell short. This was particularly hard for the competitive Poppy, whose father had become U.S. senator from Connecticut without even bothering to run for the House. He was disconsolate and confessed to his old friend Robert Mosbacher, “I feel like Custer.”

President Nixon offered pro forma condolences. “I am sure . . . that you will not allow this defeat to discourage you in your efforts to continue to provide leadership for our party and the nation,” he wrote in a cable on November 5, 1970, right after the election.

Bush waited for a more tangible form of consolation, and then waited some more. When a friend tipped him off that Treasury Secretary David Kennedy was leaving, Bush called Nixon and made a modest pitch for a job—not of secretary but of undersecretary. Poppy knew too little about finance to assume the top post. Besides, it was the undersecretary who dealt specifically with issues of concern to oil interests.

Nixon’s response came as a shock. His new treasury secretary would be John Connally, the Texas governor and conservative Democrat who had just helped defeat Bush by throwing his weight behind Lloyd Bentsen. Connally would most certainly not want Bush on his staff—not that Bush would have wanted to serve under him anyway. And even if Connally had been willing, it was unlikely that Nixon would okay having two Texans in top Treasury Department posts. For Nixon’s part, he wanted at least one Democrat in his cabinet, to create a perception of bipartisanship, and also help his Southern strategy in the 1972 campaign. He also greatly admired the confident, handsome Connally. But the move must have raised suspicions in Bush’s mind about which candidate Nixon really had wanted to win the Texas Senate race.

Bush’s suspicions were on target. It would subsequently be shown that Nixon often secretly backed conservative Democrats, especially Southern hard-liners like Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who would support his policies while staying out of Republican internecine squabbling.

Now, with the Connally business, Bush was livid. This is what he got for his loyalty to Nixon? John Tower put it this way: “He was out of work, and he wanted a job. As a defeated senatorial candidate, he hoped and fully expected to get a major job in the Administration. Yet the Administrationseemed to be paying more attention to the very Democrat who had put him on the job market. What gives?”

It was the kind of political snub that could not—and perhaps would not—be easily forgotten. Nixon had already disappointed Poppy by choosing Spiro Agnew over him as a running mate. Now this.

But Poppy was nothing if not resilient. Once again, he suggested a job to Nixon: ambassador to the United Nations. The case he made shows a keen grasp of Nixon’s neurosis and class envy, and a willingness to exploit it. There was a “dirth [sic] of Nixon advocacy in New York City,” where the U.N. was based, Bush wrote the president, noting that he was well suited to “fill that need in New York social circles.”

Nixon complied. Parmet described the meeting where the matter was settled: Bush did most of the talking. He told the president that he preferred going to New York as ambassador to the United Nations… He and Barbara could . . . become invaluable . . . Nothing in the record of the session indicates any discussion of global factors, or, for that matter, US relationships with that world body.

The inexperienced Poppy was again being offered something for which he was ill-prepared—an important diplomatic post at a time of global turmoil. Among the hot-button issues on which he was expected to hold forth were the China-Taiwan dispute, Vietnam, and the Middle East conflict. Some of his closest friends were astonished. Congressman Lud Ashley, an old chum from his Skull and Bones days, put it this way: “George, what the fuck do you know about world affairs?” To which Poppy replied, “You ask me that in ten days.”

In private, neither Nixon nor his top adviser on foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger, thought much of Bush’s capacities. On April 27, 1971, several months after Poppy’s appointment, Nixon raised the possibility of sending Poppy on a secret diplomatic mission to China.

PRESIDENT NIXON: How about [UN Ambassador George H.W.]  Bush?

KISSINGER: Absolutely not, he is too soft and not sophisticated enough.

PRESIDENT NIXON: I thought of that myself.

In a 1992 letter to Herbert Parmet, Nixon claimed that he had made the U.N. appointment because Bush “not only had the diplomatic skills to be an effective ambassador, but also because it would be helpful to him in the future to have this significant foreign-policy experience.” Although Bush was an amiable fellow, it is a stretch to believe that either the first or the second part of that statement fully conveyed Nixon’s true motives. But one thing was clear: Nixon did not feel he could leave Poppy entirely out in the cold.

Not only did Nixon appoint Poppy to the U.N.; he also upgraded the post to that of full ambassador, a title previously conferred only upon envoys to foreign states. He even made Bush a member of his cabinet. This was most unusual, but it put Bush in a unique position: although he traveled to Washington regularly for cabinet meetings, he was “a Washington outsider” by dint of his being based in New York. Whatever Nixon’s ultimate purpose in continuing to mollify him, these decisions clearly worked to Poppy’s advantage. When the Watergate scandal erupted, nobody thought to include George H. W. Bush in the circle of blame. He was literally out of sight, out of mind. But not necessarily out of the loop.

Next: Chapter 10 – Downing Nixon, Part I: The Setup

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When I got an email announcing an exclusive from NBC about the raid that, we’re told, resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, I dared raise my hopes. The last time a major media organization, the New Yorker, had promised us the inside story about what really happened on that day in early May, 2011, we got a major bit of disinformation.

But, being an optimist, I set my TV to record the hour on NBC’s newsmagazine show, Rock Center, and went out to dinner. When I returned, I settled in and began watching.

I heard the dramatic music, and listened to correspondent Brian Williams’s dramatic intro. Then I began waiting for answers. I waited. And waited. The answers never came. Can you believe an entire hour (or about half an hour plus endless ads) and not one interesting revelation? Can you believe that almost the entire thing dealt with how people in the White House felt that day, what kind of chairs they sat in, etc, and almost nothing on the details of the raid or the disposition of the body? Even the details that sounded vaguely interesting, like the fact that the chopper that crashed was some kind of new, secret craft, were already known long ago.

I got a feeling that the whole thing had been carefully rehearsed, and then I thought: Why would the White House give NBC an exclusive, “first-time” look inside the White House Situation Room? Well, in part because it’s just a room with chairs and flat screen TVs—absolutely nothing interesting. But why even offer this purported exclusive insight into the raid? Because it was nothing of the sort. Because it was propaganda to make these people look good, to quell reasonable doubts about what really happened that day, and to get the president and his team re-elected.

That’s it. If you would like to judge this yourself, be my guest. Here’s the show, blessedly without most of the ads:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Did you see Williams asking any of the scores of questions one might ask: about how no one in that crashed helicopter was hurt; about whether Osama was armed, and if not, then why he had to be killed instead of captured and interrogated for the valuable information he could offer; about how and why the SEALs’ headcams purportedly failed at the critical moment and prevented the White House group from seeing what was going on; about why the body had to be thrown in the sea—and before proper DNA verification was possible; about the wildly conflicting accounts of what took place and the White House’s failure to this moment to explain; about…I could go on and on. But we’ve already laid all that out—you can read those questions here.  

Probably the only interesting thing in the entire report was that Vice President Biden fingers a rosary bead when he’s nervous—or maybe that they ordered in pizza while waiting for the raid.

The lesson that NBC is kind enough to offer seems to be this: We’re further than ever from having public officials who level with us, and we’re further than ever from having large news organizations that….do actual journalism. (On a tenth of Brian Williams’ salary, WhoWhatWhy could field a whole team of real journalists who ask real questions.)

Oh, and one more lesson—that all those people must think we’re really, really, stupid.

Hope NBC reports this as an in-kind donation to the Obama campaign.

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