Tim Weiner “One Man Against The World,” Holt
& Co., 2015, 320 pp.
Here’s a book that
will make you feel much better about the coming election. If the country survived Richard Nixon—and we
did—how much more, may I say, deplorable, can this election’s results be? You just cannot make this stuff up. Even so, after all these years one might
believe there is little more to be said about Richard Nixon, but in the past
few years a large number of documents have been declassified between 2007 &
2014. These recent documents & tapes
(secret taping began in February 1971) show a man who distrusted everyone: his
cabinet, congress, and the American population;
A man who sabotaged President Johnson’s Vietnam Paris peace talks so
that he could be President and thus the one to bring peace. That war and the Watergate controversy were
linked and brought about Nixon’s resignation to avoid impeachment.
Most everyone
thinks of Watergate when Nixon’s name comes up.
But Watergate was more than a botched burglary: Warrantless burglaries
and bugs, lies obstructing justice, attempting to use the CIA to block the FBI,
black bags crammed with hush money, B-52 bombings erased by falsified records,
all this is included under the Watergate mantra. Also, this is a book outlining the
questionable behavior of Kissinger.
My Notes:
Pg. 2: This book is a history of Nixon’s anguished
presidency. It concentrates on the
intertwined issues of war and national security, because Nixon spent so many of
his hours and so much of his power wrestling with those twin demons. (He spent little time on domestic issues).
Nixon’s grasp on
power began to slip soon after he won reelection in 1972 by a margin of almost
eighteen million votes, the largest in American history. He was undone by the slow but steady
revelation of ‘the White House horrors;’ the Watergate break-in was only one of
those horrors, and hardly the worst.
Pg. 12: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had urged Nixon
to be on the lookout for Communist infiltration of the American government when
Nixon was a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Nixon and the committee’s Republican staff were
then supplied secret information from the FBI.
That information would soon propel Nixon to power by his unceasing hunt
for traitors and spies. Thus began an
alliance that would last a quarter century.
Nixon became a leading figure in the Cold War’s culture of espionage and
counterespionage, where bugging, break-ins, and wiretaps without warrants were
weapons of political warfare. As
president, Nixon would call Hoover ‘my closest friend in all of political
life.’ (Later in his presidency he wanted to get rid of Hoover but was afraid
what Hoover could reveal about him).
Pg. 20: Nixon had
learned through his associations with the CIA and the FBI during his years
under Eisenhower that suitcases stuffed with cash were instruments of foreign
policy for an American commander in chief.
He now applied the methods of covert operations to obtaining campaign
contributions from foreign sources.
The Greek military
junta contributed $549,000 to the Nixon campaign. A coalition of right-wing leaders in Italy
served as another source of covert contributions to Nixon, kicking in hundreds
of thousands of dollars. Nixon liked to
reward his contributors when he could: as president, he personally approved
millions of dollars in covert support to right-wing Italian politicians through
the CIA and tens of millions in weapons sales to the Greek colonels through the
Pentagon.
Mary Woods,
Nixon’s personal secretary since 1951, handled American corporate executives
who gave at least four million dollars to the campaign off the books. She made the appointment when the president
of Phillips Petroleum personally delivered fifty thousand dollars in cash to Nixon
at the candidate’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City. She told Nixon about an off-the-record
seven-figure contribution collected by Wiley Buchanan, a Texas
millionaire. The 1968 Nixon campaign
also had the ability to tap wellsprings of cash whose ultimate source is still
a mystery.
Pg. 24: Philip Habib a senior State Department
diplomat at the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam in 1968 thought that the
war would have ended if Nixon had not sabotaged the talks. Somebody got to South Vietnam’s leader
General Thieu on behalf of Nixon and told him not to participate in the Paris
peace talks, he would get a much better deal from Nixon when he became
president. Later, when it became obvious
that peace was not at hand, the polls showed the pendulum of popular opinion
swinging to Nixon and away from Humphrey.
President Johnson discovered Nixon’s treachery but determined not to it
because the information had been obtained by tapping General Thieu’s phone, the
president of South Vietnam. Nor, did
Johnson believe, could the electorate tolerate a last-minute political bombshell
of this magnitude. If Nixon won, the revelation
could destroy him before he was sworn into office. Nixon won by a margin of fewer than half a
million votes, a narrow plurality, not a ringing majority: 43.4 percent of the
vote to Humphreys 42.7 percent, with George C. Wallace winning 13.5 percent.
(Walt Rostow* wrote the last chapter of the
story in 1973. Rostow had smuggled out
of the White House the key documents that told the tale. He had copies of the NSA’s reports, the FBI
wiretaps, and a cable from the CIA station in Saigon that directly quoted
President Thieu. He sent the documents
to the LBJ Presidential Library with a request that it remain secret for fifty
years. (From Nixon’s point of view,
Johnson’s bombing halt and peace talks were perceived as an effort to boost
Humphrey’s chances)
*Walt Rostow: an
economic historian who became one of the principal architects and passionate
defenders of the Vietnam War as an adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson.
Pg.
33: Kissinger’s right-hand man was
Alexander M. Haig, his military assistant at the National Security
Council. Haig rose in rank from colonel
to four-star general under Nixon without leading troops in combat. Haig was a rarity in American history: a
political general, much like his hero MacArthur, but without the military experience.
Pg.
49: On April 15, 1969, Nixon learned
that North Korea had shot down an American spy plane in international waters
over the Sea of Japan. Thirty-one
Americans were killed aboard the navy EC-
121 aircraft operated by the National
Security Agency. The Pentagon, among
other ideas, proposed to strike back with nuclear weapons. Ultimately, after much discussion, Nixon did
little. He sent a meager show of force,
sending a flotilla of navy ships into the Sea of Japan.
Pg. 52:
Nixon instructed Haldeman in June 1971 that the going price to be an
ambassador must be at least $250,000. (Multiply
by 7 for in-today’s dollars).
Pg.
83: In 1970 Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to
conduct undercover investigations of his Senate opponents—notably, Teddy
Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Birch Bayh, and William Proxmire. Nixon wanted an ‘all-out hatchet job on the
Democrat leaders,’ including the use of the IRS to investigate their
finances.
Pg.
98: In March 1970 Nixon stated to his
aides that thousands of Americans under the age of thirty were ‘determined to
destroy our society’, and good intelligence was ‘the best way to stop this
terrorism.’ This resulted in the Huston
Plan by Tom Charles Huston, a twenty-nine-year-old army intelligence
veteran. Immediately, Huston went to
Hoover’s intelligence chief, Bill Sullivan, who had the outlines of the plan
already in hand. The plan would have FBI
agents and their counterparts free to intensify the electronic surveillance of
American citizens, read their mail, burglarize their homes and offices, step up
undercover spying on college campuses—in short, keep on doing what the Bureau
had been doing for decades, but in closer coordination with the CIA and the
NSA, and with the secret imprimatur of the president of the United States. The president said he approved the plan. But Hoover flew into a rage when he realized
that it would have to be carried out with his signature, not Nixon’s. Hoover said, ‘I’m not going to accept the
responsibility myself anymore, even though I’ve done it for many years. It is becoming more and more dangerous and we
are apt to get caught.’ Mitchell then
convinced Nixon to drop it as Hoover would find a way to leak the plan if
ordered to sign it. (Parts of this plan
later re-emerged and was put in play).
Pg.
106: On September 15, 1970, after
hearing that Allende had won the presidency of Chile, despite millions already spent
by the CIA against him, the CIA director told his most senior officers that
Nixon had ordered the Agency to stop Allende (if necessary, by backing a
military coup) and to keep their plans hidden from the secretary of state, the
secretary of defense, and the American ambassador to Chile. The planned coup failed but in 1973 the coup
Nixon commanded would come, inaugurating seventeen years of dictatorship in
Chile, a generation of political repression and thousands of deaths.
Pg.
121: The Pentagon Papers, commissioned
by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967 and completed just before Nixon
took office in 1969, detailed the history of the Vietnam War, beginning with
the first American involvement in the conflict in 1954. The gist was that America’s military and
civilian leaders had been lying to one another, and to the American people,
about the course and the conduct of the war.
Pg.
122: Daniel Ellsberg had been a marine
lieutenant with a Harvard degree and had served two years in Vietnam. He believed the Pentagon Papers had the power
to cause the scales to fall from the eyes of the American public and they would
demand peace in Vietnam. He gave six
thousand pages of the papers to a New
York Times reporter. This reporter was named Neil Sheehan, a reporter who
had covered Vietnam going back to 1962.
Among items in the Papers was the revelation that the Kennedy
administration had aided and abetted the military coup that led to the killing
of President Diem of South Vietnam in November 1963, only three weeks before
JFK was assassinated. (The Supreme on
June 30 ruled 6 to 3 allowing the Times to publish stating, ‘Only a free and unrestrained
press can effectively expose deception in government.’) Note: few people before
or after publication ever read these papers: I did.
Pg.
138: In 1971 Nixon told Haldeman to set
up a meeting in which he intended to fire J. Edgar Hoover for refusing to
conduct illegal bugging and break-ins against Nixon’s political enemies. (However,
Nixon backed off of this as he was afraid what Hoover could do to Nixon if he
was fired.)
Nixon also
wanted proof that Kennedy was directly complicit in the murder of Diem. Howard Hunt got to work using an old
typewriter, a copying machine, a razor blade and Scotch tape to forge a set of
diplomatic cables that could directly pin the Diem killing on President Kennedy
as he had been unable to find incontrovertible classified documents proving the
link. However, he did find that the
driving force behind the 1963 coup had been the newly appointed American
ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Nixon’s running mate in the
1960 presidential election. On his sixth
day in Saigon, Lodge had cabled Washington: WE ARE LAUNCHED ON A COURSE FROM
WHICH THERE IS NO TURNING BACK: THE OVERTHROW OF THE DIEM GOVERNMENT. At the White House, JFK approved, overruling
his closest advisers.
Pg.
142: Pakistan was created by the
catastrophic British Partition of India in 1947, which led to hundreds of
thousands of deaths as Muslims and other minorities fled to the newly created
West Pakistan and East Pakistan (it is 1,200 miles from one to the other). The animosity between the East and West
exploded into violent conflict in the spring of 1971, after General Yahya’s
opponents attained a measure of power after the first free elections were held
in East Pakistan. General Yahya, who
ruled from West Pakistan, imposed martial law on the East. His soldiers killed his opponents, a toll
that ran well upward of one million.
American diplomats who witnessed the onslaught bluntly called it
genocide and sent the ‘Blood Telegram’ to Washington boldly condemning the
Nixon administration. Nixon deliberately
did nothing. ‘Don’t squeeze Yahya,’ he
wrote in a note to Kissinger, underlining the first word three times. However, India (with Russian help) attacked
West Pakistan and deposed General Yahya.
East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971.
Pg.
160: The meeting that authorized the
Watergate burglary was held on February 4, 1972. Present at the meeting were Jeb Magruder,
John Dean, Gordon Liddy, and John Mitchell.
The plan OK’d focused on the bugging and wiretapping of President
Nixon’s political opponents. Its targets
specifically included the offices of Lawrence O’Brien and the Democratic
National Committee at the Watergate Hotel. (On June 17, 1972 James McCord and
his crew of four Cuban Americans broke into the Watergate).
In all $706,000
was collected from thirteen contributors who were given ambassadorships by
Nixon after the 1972 election. Nixon was
worried that the Democratic National Committee knew who contributed to CREEP
(the Committee to Re-elect the President: $20 million was collected, the White
House was awash in cash).
Pg.
216: Nixon was reelected on November 7,
1972. Though it was the first election
in which eighteen-year-olds could vote, the turnout was a mere 55 percent, on
of the lowest recorded in the twentieth century. Nixon took forty-nine of the fifty states and
won 60.7 percent of the popular vote to McGovern’s 37.5 percent.
Pg.
223: Over twelve days at Christmas 1972,
714 B-52 sorties dropped bombs around the North Korean capital—a force greater
than each of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. North Vietnam struck back with surface-to-air
missiles. They brought down a total of
fifteen B-52s. Forty-two pilots and
crewmen were killed and twenty-four captured.
However, Hanoi did agree to resume the Paris peace talks in January of
1973.
Pg.
231: Mark Felt, the second highest
ranking FBI member, was not the only source reporters had at the FBI; at least
four top agents fed the press. But Felt
indisputably leaked to Bob Woodward at the Washington Post and to Sandy Smith
at Time magazine. A corporate lawyer for Time ordered Smith to reveal his
source; the attorney then called his good friend John Mitchell, which was how
Nixon knew that Felt was leaking information.
Pg.
240: On March 21, 1973, John Dean met
with Nixon and made the tapped ‘Cancer within, close to the presidency…’
presentation. He went through Liddy’s
million-dollar plan, including all the codes and involved black bag operations,
kidnapping, providing prostitutes to weaken the opposition, bugging, mugging
teams. Now the burglars demanded
hundreds of thousands of dollars in blackmail to keep silent. Haldeman had handed over $328,000 in CREEP
founds for payoffs. Dean then said these
people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years. Nixon said ‘We could get that’.
Pg.
282: On August 29, 1973, Judge Sirica
ordered Nixon to deliver to the court nine White House tapes. Nixon had an ever-shifting set of schemes to
avoid turning over the tapes. One was to
fire Archibald Cox. Another was to
create highly edited summaries of transcripts.
On October 1st, Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods took a tape
that included a conversation among Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman from June
20, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in. This became the famous 18 minutes missing
from the tape incident.
Pg.
286: The Saturday Night Massacre: On
Saturday, October 20, 1973, Attorney General Richardson received an angry call
from Al Haig ordering him to fire Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who
was investigating official misconduct on the part of the president and his
aides. When Richardson refused and
resigned, so too did William Ruckelshaus, the deputy attorney general. Haig then turned to Bob Bork and Bork
complied by firing Cox.
Pg.
293: The IRS discovered that Nixon had
paid only $792 in income tax in 1970 and $878 in 1971 on a salary of
$200,000. It turned out Nixon had
donated his pre-presidential papers to the National Archives and received a
huge deduction, but his lawyers had backdated the deed of gift to dodge a
change in the tax laws.
No comments:
Post a Comment