I blame, uh, keyboard gremlins. Or something.
The genius of Nixon was that he secretly taped everything that was said in the Oval Office, and the stupidity of Nixon is that he secretly taped everything that was said in the Oval Office.
Sorry, dragging a day or two here. I was bummed about a certain SCOTUS decision yesterday, and then yesterday evening I nearly got flattened by a car that came zooming through a red light and decided I should sit and contemplate life for a bit as a result. :)
Anyway…
Let’s backtrack to the 24th…
Pyrrhic Victory
It’s the day after that fateful Oval Office convo between Nixon and Haldeman, where they basically laid out some prima facie obstruction of justice – they’re worried about the FBI investigation, so they’re going to get brand new CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters to tell brand new acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray that Watergate was CIA-involved and that Walters should tell Angelo Lano and his team of investigators to stand down.
And as we head into the meeting, it should be noted that both Walters and Gray are big Richard Nixon fans. Gray especially so – he wants the FBI Director gig full-time, and not just “acting”. Walters is also a fan…but he’s no one’s puppet and he’s no one’s dummy.
And so the two intel directors sit down with HR Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and those latter two men sketch things out for them. Watergate was a piece of nonsense from some rogue elements of the Committee, and those guys deserve to go to jail for it. BUT…Haldeman notes that Democrats are likely to make hay on the whole thing in the election year and the ongoing drip-drip-drip of a lengthy investigation is likely to give them campaign fodder through the summer.
Gray agrees with this readily, and hints that he’s happy to not go on any “fishing expeditions” with the FBI investigation. Give him “something” and he’ll make sure the investigation stays contained.
What follows then is a lengthy discussion on the Cuban ex-pat burglars and the ex-CIA guys involved (McCord, Barker, and Hunt). And of course in the discussion is the cashier’s checks from Mexico City. Now, you don’t need to be a genius of criminology to think “Hey, cashiers checks drawn in Mexico City and finding their way into the bank account of a Watergate burglar sure does have the whiff of money laundering to it.”
But that’s where the agreement is made. Walters of the CIA will absolutely NOT say that Watergate was a CIA operation unless specifically instructed to do so by Richard Nixon himself. Because, of course, Walters knows that Watergate wasn’t CIA. But he is finally convinced that it’s vaguely possible that an investigation into the money in Mexico might expose some asset that the CIA doesn’t want turned up.
And so that’s the compromise that Haldeman has to live with. The CIA won’t wave off the FBI from the investigation entirely, but they will tell the FBI to avoid investigating into Mexico.
As they leave the White House, Gray is happy and relieved that his FBI will be able to help the administration, as he’s been under considerable pressure since the arrests.
But Walters is pretty unhappy. As he’d write later, it had never occurred to him that the President or his advisors would ask him to wave off an investigation to help them politically. Later that day, Walters decides that he’ll make detailed “MemCons” (Memos of conversations) for any future conversations – phone or in person – with the White House. Walters’ detailed memos will be eventually very useful to the Senate investigatory committee.
Also on the 24th…
The Office Safe
E. Howard Hunt’s first stop after he and Gordon Liddy left their Watergate hotel room before the cops could raid them was at the White House, in the pre-dawn hours of June 17. He put all the listening gear he could sweep up from the room into the safe in his office.
Now on the 24th, John Dean has been asked to turn over the contents of the safe to Angelo Lano at the FBI. The Bureau has learned not only that Hunt was likely involved in the break-in, but also that he had an office with a safe in the White House. And they’d very much like to know what’s in that safe.
And so Dean has two dollies of boxes of stuff from the safe brought in. Some of it is surveillance gear. Lots of it is paperwork and nonsense, mostly opposition research on Ted Kennedy, Chappaquiddick, and the Kennedy family in general. Some of it involves forged telegrams that Hunt was making that were attempts to work a frameup of the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem as a direct order from the Oval Office. (Hunt had tried to pass off those faked cables and messages to the NYT, Newsweek, and Time Magazine. All three organizations recognized immediately that the cables were faked.)
There are two things that are NOT in the documents from E. Howard Hunt’s safe. They are two very expensive Hermes leatherbound notebooks. Inside those notebooks are key pieces of information related to Hunt’s work with the White House “Plumbers” (more on that later) and his work as part of Liddy’s dirty tricks squad with CREEP.
Dean turned those two notebooks over to Patrick Gray himself, telling the acting FBI Director that the contents of those notebooks were so “hot” that they could never see the light of day. It is very likely that the answer to “Who knew what and when?” and “Who ordered the break-in?” could be found in those two notebooks.
Dean gives those notebooks to Gray, because Dean is starting to suspect that at some future point he’ll be required to testify under oath…and he wants to be able to say that he turned everything over to the FBI withough perjuring himself, even though he knows that a loyalist like Gray will never turn those notebooks over to Lano and the FBI investigators.
For his part, Gray doesn’t even bat an eye, and hides the notebooks under a pile of shirts in a storage box in a closet in his home. Eventually, he’ll burn them, and destroy any possible written evidence of who approved the break-in and who knew about it.
That will all have to be sussed out the hard way.
Wildly fascinating as always!
Glad you are okay!
Ditto! And yikes!
I’m impressed that you’re writing this and packing for a move all at the same time. Thanks… it’s great stuff.
OK, so I’m a bit behind. Let’s catch up. :)
The Martha Situation
Let’s skip back to June 25 of 1972. That morning across the country, UPI White House correspondent Helen Thomas (yes, that Helen Thomas) breaks a story that apparently Martha Mitchell – the celebrity wife of CREEP chairman John Mitchell – is being held against her will in a hotel suite in California. And as crazy as that story sounds, it’s essentially true.
When John Mitchell left California the weekend of the burglary, he was understandably in a state. And after delivering his press statement about “The committee doesn’t know any of these guys,” he knew his wife Martha would be in a state once she saw how baldly he was lying. He left her with a couple of bodyguards, including an FBI agent named Steve King. King had firm instructions: Do not let Martha see anything on TV about the burglary. Do not let Martha see a newspaper.
And yet, by Monday the 19th, Martha had seen the papers, and had seen James McCord’s face – he’d once been her bodyguard – and knew her husband’s “We don’t know those guys” statement to the press was utter BS. King and the Mitchell’s 11-year old daughter Marti kept Marth calm most of the day, but by the evening Mrs. Mitchell had had a few drinks and tried to light a cigarette. Her hands were trembling so badly that she ignited the entire match book and burnt her hand pretty badly. King summoned the hotel doctor to bandage Mrs. Mitchell’s injury.
It wouldn’t be the last time the doctor was summoned.
Two days later, Martha feigned sleep and was left alone. She grabbed the hotel room phone and got through to Helen Thomas at UPI, one of the reporters she most trusted. On the phone, she told Thomas that she (Martha) was being held against her will in a hotel suite in California, and that she knew she was being held because of the dishonest and criminal goings-on with the campaign.
Steve King caught wind of the conversation happening and came running, frantically making a play for the phone. Thomas heard the commotion on the other end of the line, and heard Mitchell yell “Get away!” and then the phone line went dead. When she tried to call back, she was told that Mrs. Mitchell was “indisposed.”
The next morning, Mitchell tried to get away through the hotel lobby. Apparently King all but tackled her, trying to hold her as she kicked to get away. Somewhere in the struggle, a pane of glass in the hotel door was shattered, and Martha got a cut on her hand that required medical attention from the hotel doctor as well. Apparently she struggled so much at this point that the doctor administered a heavy sedative.
But by that afternoon, Thomas’s story had broken, and people were asking questions. Mitchell phoned some friends in California, and they agreed to accompany Martha back home. Home, in this case, was the Mitchell’s New York penthouse, and not their place in Washington DC. Martha refused to back to DC. Once in New York, Martha told her full story to Thomas – including the fact that she was physically abused by Steve King.
Sadly, at this point CREEP and the White House had already done a few days worth of work playing up Martha Mitchell’s instability and drinking issues. The story really didn’t “break out” much past the UPI story from Thomas, and would be forgotten for a good while.
Oh, and Steve King? Guess whose campaign he raised funds for in Wisconsin in 2016? And guess who got rewarded for that with an ambassadorship to Czechia in 2017?
Anyway. Onward.
The state of the Watergate investigation was still very much early days – as you’d expect – just 10 days after it happened. But here’s a quick roundup of that chaotic 2nd week:
1. Counsel present at all interviews
Angelo Lano and his FBI team of investigators want to talk to CREEP personnel. The White House and CREEP feign full cooperation, but John Dean has gotten agreement from FBI Acting Director Gray that all interviews will be conducted with CREEP counsel present. This is going to create a rather ridiculous spectacle soon enough, but for the time being you can imagine that no one at CREEP is being particularly forthcoming thanks to having a CREEP lawyer sitting beside them during interviews.
2. Making Liddy
It wasn’t until the week after the break-in that a secondary search of some of the notepads recovered from the hotel rooms of the burglars revealed an important name: “George”. In another set of notes, “George” became “Mr. Gordon”. Didn’t take long for the FBI investigators to put that together as G. Gordon Liddy. And that would lead to…
3. Adios, Gordon
So yeah, ridiculous, kabuki theater, here we come. CREEP sends out a very public memo “urging” all employees to fully cooperate with FBI investigators, or else. When it’s Liddy’s turn to be investigated, he very loudly, and very explicitly proclaims that he will not cooperate. Liddy is then ushered into the office of one of his co-conspirators, Jeb Magruder, and Magruder fires Liddy for not cooperating. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
4. Haldeman and Nixon have read about Martha Mitchell and have a new idea to walk through at their June 29 morning situation meeting.
And I’ll cover that tomorrow. :)
Taking the Fall
It’s just before 9:30 am on June 30, 1972, and a car and driver are taking former Attorney General (and current chairman of the Committee to Re-elect) John Mitchell from his Watergate penthouse to a morning meeting in the Oval Office with Nixon and Haldeman.
And he has strong suspicions as to what kind of meeting it is going to be. Since arriving back in Washington the previous week just a day after the Watergate break-in story, his schedule has changed. A lot. Right after the break-in, it was constant update calls and strategy calls with his deputy (Magruder) and his counsel (Dean), as well as various colleagues at the White House.
But as the week goes on, there’s a shift. He can hear Magruder’s phone. If anything, it’s picked up in call volume. And both Magruder and Dean seem to be constantly jumping from meeting to meeting. People at the Committee scramble to set up interviews with the FBI (with counsel present), while calls from White House insiders seem to go directly to others.
And John Mitchell’s phone has gradually gotten quieter and quieter, with the only real interruptions being calls from Martha, who is at their apartment suite in New York. She’s getting ready to do an on-the-record, tell-all interview with Helen Thomas about how she was held against her will in California, and there’s nothing that Mitchell, CREEP, or the President can do to stop that.
Mitchell has also noticed his own meeting schedule is becoming more and more barren. Dean and Magrude both have to cancel a couple of regularly scheduled morning strategy meetings. A call from staffers to Ehrlichman and Haldeman respectively “push” a regularly scheduled meeting with the White House advisors that had been set for Wednesday.
If being in the Nixon re-election campaign was a mob movie, John Mitchell knew that he’d be the guy about to get whacked.
Thus he’s incredibly unsurprised when Haldeman and Nixon welcome him into the Oval office, all smiles and “Hail fellow, well-met.” Haldeman discusses how much the Watergate story has sucked, and how it has the potential to maybe hurt the President in November. Haldeman thinks they can cut the investigation off by giving up Liddy and Hunt and the 5 burglars.
But for appearances’ sake, it might be that some accountability needs to be shown with the Committee, perhaps? And, uh, John, we can’t help but notice that things at home seem a little bit turbulent. We know you love Martha, John, so you know, maybe if you had some more time…
Then Nixon chimes in, nodding and encouraging. It would be perfect, really. Everyone has read about Martha, and God love her, but she seems to maybe be having a hard time right now. If the campaign said that maybe you needed some time to spend with your dear family right now, anyone who criticized any of that would be a real sonofabitch.
And just like that. It’s another major early inflection point to the entire saga. Neither Nixon or Haldeman asks Mitchell if the Committee Chairman knew about break-in. Or authorized it. Neither man asks who might have known on the Committee. If they had – and the answer was basically “Magruder, and maybe a couple of others” (which seems very possible) – it’s possible that Watergate becomes a historical asterisk in the 1972 landslide campaign. Haldeman and company would’ve happily pointed the investigation at those that Mitchell might’ve named, and that would’ve been that.
But no one asks those questions. And Mitchell doesn’t offer up that information. And a resigned, somewhat bemused Mitchell simply asks that he be given the letter to sign, and he’ll sign it.
By the early afternoon of the 30th, Haldeman has in-hand a signed letter of resignation from the Committee to Re-elect chairman, that states that John Mitchell is looking forward to spending more time with his family.
Which is also a lie. John and Martha will maintain separate residences and be divorced within two years. And we won’t hear too much from him until the Senate committee hearings that are over a year away. And sadly Martha will be dead of multiple myeloma just a few years after that.
These are great; keep ‘em comin’! Though I hear in my head “It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper told the band to play…” or whatever.
So the firehose of events starts to back off a bit now, but that’s good. Because there’s other stuff to cover about this. For instance – it’s time to start slowly rolling out the many crimes (or criminally adjacent actions) that Nixon and those surrounding him probably committed.
And we’ll start with the first in a chronological order. It’s a doozey, maybe one of the most consequential and impactful political bits of malfeasance in modern history in America. And I’ll also note that there’s plenty of eyebrow-raising shithousery to lay on the Democrats in this thing, too…but…well, you’ll see. And you can decide for yourself.
Walter and his box of secrets
It’s 49 years ago today (go ahead and work THAT rhyming meter into a Beatles song) and a guy named Walt Rostow is alarmed at what he’s seeing on his television set. White House counsel John Dean is giving his senate testimony (God willing, we’ll get there) and Rostow has gone from dread to outright horror at what Dean is saying. Walter knows something that John Dean doesn’t know. Heck, what Rostow knows is something that no one else in the world does. Not really.
The next day, Rostow removes a heavily sealed banker’s box from his home and hops on a plane to Texas. He presents himself at the LBJ Presidential Library and hands the box over to the curator there and gives him solemn instructions: put the box in storage and do not open it for 50 years.
To understand the too-hot secrets that were in the box that Walter Rostow delivered to the LBJ Library in 1973, we need to flash back to the 1968 presidential election. So let’s do that real quick. (Narrator: Chris is now going to talk about elections, and the chances of any of that being “real quick” are slim and none.)
Nixon was a late entrant into the '68 election. He was old school and conservative, and party consultants believed that the flavor du jour was a new, modern Republican embodied by the two original frontrunners for the nomination: Moderate George Romney of Michigan, and liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller. But Nixon was exactly what Republican voters wanted, and he’d win the nomination fairly easily.
And in November, he’d oppose two men. Incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey seemed to win the Democratic nomination by default after Edmund Muskie dropped out and after the horrific murder of Bobby Kennedy in June. To say that Democrats were pretty unenthused about Humphrey is an understatement. He was a dissapointment to a party that thought it would get RFK as a nominee…and Humphrey represented the LBJ administration and it’s failed Vietnam war policy.
There’s a third candidate in 1968, too: George Wallace. Wallace was a segregationist old school Dixie Democrat who was appalled that his party was now the party of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. He was in the race as a spoiler, and hoped to skim votes away from Humphrey in the deep south – which he’d do, for sure.
In fact, for much of the late summer in 1968, Humphrey was running just 3-5 percentage points ahead of Wallace, and both were far, far behind in polling to Nixon. And then on the last day of September of 1968, things got interesting.
Hubert Humphrey announced in a nationally televised speech that he’d break with the Johnson Administration and approve an immediate cessation of bombing in North Vietnam. (Johnson’s official position was no bombing ceasefire until the North Vietnamese agreed to honor a DMZ separating them from South Vietnam. Since the North Vietnamese viewed South Vietnam as an artificial country created by its former imperialist overlords and run by corrupt politicians in hock to those same western governments, that was, as they say, a no-go.)
Humphrey began to see his poll numbers rise. And then there was news of breakthroughs at the Paris peace talks, which had mostly gone quiet. There were rumors of getting delegations from both South and North Vietnam together at the same table, talks of impending mutually-agreed ceasefires, and the like.
And Humphrey continued to gain on that news.
Now, it’s important to understand that in this era, campaigns for President ran a bit differently. Election day, 1968 was on Tuesday the 5th. On Monday the 4th, Humphrey and Nixon would have a pre-election debate “forum”: they’d answer questions at the same time, but separately on competing television presenations. Crazy, right? (The practice of pre-election debates effectively ended in 1980 when incumbent Jimmy Carter had a bit of a disastrous debate with Ronald Reagan. It likely didn’t change the outcome, but it certainly increased the magnitude of Reagan’s landslide win.)
And heading into that final weekend of the campaign, LBJ did something that history should probably judge him a bit harsher for doing: in a nationally televised prime time announcement, President Johnson announced an unconditional cessation of bombing and artillery bombardment of the North Vietnamese. It was something that was CLEARLY politically motivated, because as the idea of real peace talks and an end to an unpopular war loomed, Humphrey gained even more and more in polls. He’d pulled even by that weekend, and even a little bit ahead of Nixon in the Harris Poll.
Part 2 incoming. I didn’t realize how long this was getting!
Walter and his box of secrets, part 2
So yeah, LBJ’s politically motivated bombing “pause” is something that history should probably judge him unkindly for. Not because stopping bombing other human beings is wrong, but because of how nakedly political the decision to do so the weekend before election day 1968 was. It’s the ultimate October Surprise. Or in this case, more of a Halloween/November 1st surprise.
But it came as no surprise to the Nixon campaign. They’d known since about the first week of November that Johnson was going to pause the bombing of North Vietnam to get the NVA serious about peace.
And here’s where America’s own Lord Varys enters the picture: I give you the one and only Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had originally made a name for himself in academics as an expert in international affairs, the cold war, and communism in general, and parlayed that reputation into a position in the Rockefeller campaign as foreign policy advisor. He also served as one of the primary US negotiators at the Paris peace talks, which had mostly only been attended by one side or the other, and sparingly. Kissinger considered himself both a Republican and a liberal in most of his political views.
But to add to that, Kissinger was also one of the most ambitious, self-promoting, devious and duplicitous serpents to ever serve in the White House. He loved to be involved in quasi-honest parlor intrigues and scheming the way I love toasted ravioli.
And so as a US delegate and negotiator in Paris, Kissinger had been counseling the White House all spring and summer of 1968 that their smartest diplomatic move to make was to pause bombing of North Vietnam. And in late September/early October, both Humphrey and LBJ let the negotiators in Paris know that this was now a serious consideration, and would be happening “imminently.”
Which – political considerations aside – was great news for the peace negotiators. And Henry Kissinger wasted no time in getting a back channel that he’d been using with Nixon and John Mitchell himself to let them know all the secret happenings in the Vietnam war peace negotiations. Henry, you see, was angling for a job with a future Nixon administration. He had been their “mole” since Rockefeller had dropped from the race in the winter of 1968…
And Nixon and his 1968 campaign manager John Mitchell have already come up with a strategy for this eventuality. So let’s introduce to this story the woman for whom the entire sordid series of events is named: Anna Chennault. History will record all of this as the “Chennault Affair”.
Chennault was a Chinese national who was the widow of WWII air hero Clare Chennault of the American “Flying Tigers” squadron in China. She fled the country when Maoist forces took it over, and moved with her husband to the US. She was a player in Republican politics (having blamed Truman for the loss of China to the communists), and was Nixon’s largest fundraiser/bundler in the 1968 election.
And Anna Chennault knew some people. Specifically, she seemed to know a lot of official South Vietnamese diplomats. That included South Vietnamese ambassodr Bùi Diễm – and Chennault arranged at least two meetings with candidate and private citizen Richard Nixon and Diễm in the summer of 1968. We don’t know exactly what those meetings consisted of, but we do know they were long meetings, and that both parties left those get togethers agreeing to stay in communication – with Mrs. Chennault as the go-between.
And so, throughout October with Anna Chennault as the carrier of secret messages, John Mitchell --acting explicitly on behalf of Nixon and at Nixon’s behest–told the South Vietnamese peace delegation to “hold fast”. If they didn’t buckle now at the peace table and accept an offer from LBJ, they’d get a better deal from an incoming Nixon as president than they were going to get from the Johnson or Humphrey administration.
The Vietnamese were obviously perplexed about how to play all that. And especially after LBJ’s announcement that final weekend before the election. The on-again, off-again nature of expected peace talks involving both sides and a potential end to the war loomed as a real possibility. Except when it seemed like things were off-again. News updates came fast and furious throughout the days and nights that weekend, hope for peace rising and falling with each breathless dispatch – kind of an early precursor to the 24-hour news cycle as we know it today.
And then late Sunday/early Monday, it all fell apart. The South Vietnamese refused to be seated at the peace talks at the same table as the Viet Cong. They were out. And the Viet Cong were out. And the peace negotiators weren’t sure they were in, either. No gang! Or peace talks.
And so all day Monday on election eve, and all through their separate televised public forums that evening, Nixon hammered Humphrey and Johnson on the failed peace talks. “We had been told,” Nixon said, “That the White House had all their ducks in a row, and that this was a done deal. And now it isn’t.” The implication for American voters was clear: The Johnson Administration – of which Humphrey was a key part – had once again been caught either in a lie or an over-promise or fabrication about the Vietnam war. And American exhaustion on those lies and half-truths and over-promises were what pancaked Johnson in the winter of 1968 originally.
And the craziest thing about all of this, maybe, is that LBJ knew about everything the Nixon campaign was doing. In mid-October, his National Security Advisor – who happened to be Walter Rostow – came to the president to tell him that he’d been told by the CIA that the Nixon campaign was up to “something” regarding the Paris peace talks. The CIA knew this because they were, of course, bugging the talks and both the North and South Vietnamese. That’s also how Johnson knew that it was Henry Kissinger giving the Nixon campaign the inside scoop on everything involved with the talks.
And so LBJ got approval from J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to bug the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington. Which is how they discovered that Anna Chennault was acting as a middle-man between the embassy, the peace talks, and the Nixon Campaign. And which is how they heard Chennault assure the Vietnamese delegation that she was acting specifically on behalf of candidate Nixon’s personal directive.
We don’t know what might’ve been said directly between Mitchell/Nixon and the South Vietnamese in that final weekend. But we do know they talked directly by phone. (Hoover refused LBJ’s request to bug all the phones at the embassy, specifically declining to bug the ambassador’s personal office phone.) And whatever was said was enough assurance to the Vietnamese to convince them to walk away from the peace talks, collapsing that discussion for a good long time.
LBJ, for his part, made four important phone calls that last week. Two were to Nixon directly – man to man – to warn him and his campaign off meddling in the peace negotiations. LBJ’s warning was direct. Nixon denied any knowledge, not knowing that LBJ was surveilling the peace talks and the Vietnamese embassy and knew Nixon was lying to him. LBJ also called highly influential Republican senator Everett Dirksen twice. In both calls he told Dirksen explicitly what he knew, and what Nixon and Mitchell were doing. And told Dirksen to go directly to Nixon to tell him to knock it the fuck off. Johnson even went there: “It’s TREASON!” And Dirksen, apparently freaked out in ways that the unflappable old senator never was, did relay his great concern to Mitchell…but to no avail.
That left LBJ and Walt Rostow sitting in the Oval office that Monday afternoon before the election, contemplating their next steps. Rostow told LBJ that he HAD to go public and tell the world that the reason the peace talks had collapsed was meddling from the Nixon campaign. LBJ considered it, but in the end decided he couldn’t. He worried about the exposure of covert operations and assets that would happen if he went public, as well as the effect such an accusation might have on the future of democracy in the country. And so he urged Rostow to remain silent.
In the end, the conclusion that the collapse of the peace talks just before election day had a material effect on the election outcome is pretty undeniable. Humphrey lost to Nixon by just 0.72%. Humphrey lost by razor-thin margins in New Jersey, Vermont, Ohio, and Missouri – and a lot of political historians think that the peace talks collapse was probably the cause.
And so what might’ve been. Nixon won the White House in 1968. Within a a year and a half of his swearing in after running on a plank of ending the Vietnam War, he instead expanded it with the invasion of Cambodia, which everyone is free to speculate might’ve been one of the promises made on that pre-election weekend. And instead of US forces drawing down and out of Vietnam by June of 1970 as Humphrey imagined, they’d stay and fight and die in the country until 1975.
It was a secret that Nixon and Mitchell eventually let Haldeman in on. And all three men lived in mortal fear of ANY White House investigation turning up evidence of their interference in the Paris peace talks in 1968. Specifically, they believed that Henry Kissinger would spill the beans on the whole subject if he was interviewed about ANY potential White House wrongdoing, whether it was related or not. And they also believed that Kissinger may have in fact prepared a dossier on the so-called “Chennault Affair” that was in possession of policy wonks under lock and key at the Brookings Institute in DC.
The three guys outside the White House who also had all the facts were LBJ himself, Rostow, and Senator Everett Dirksen, who got the entire scoop from Johnson that last weekend. Dirksen died of an undiagnosed lung tumor in the fall of 1969. LBJ died of a massive heart attack just two days after Nixon’s second inaugural in 1973.
And so the only guy who knew all the details of the Chennault Affair by the time of the summer senate hearings on Watergate in 1973 was Walter Rostow, who realized that because there were no consequences to the peace talks interference in 1968, the Nixonians thought they could do about anything they liked. And he fully recognized Watergate as an outgrowth and inevitability of that way of thinking.
Inside that heavily sealed box that Rostow turned over to the LBJ library were secret FBI and CIA tapes and transcripts of phone calls and intercepted memos that laid out the entire Chennault Affair as the Johnson administration knew it, in detail. Rostow didn’t want any custody over that evidence anymore. He knew if he went public with it on the heels of Dean’s damaging testimony to the senate committee on Watergate, the combination of those scandals would likely sink the Nixon presidency. And so whether it was the right thing to do or the wrong thing, Walter Rostow decided it was best to just let the proceedings play out and if impeachment happened, well, good.
But this first crime by Nixon and Mitchell also represented the seal broken even before being sworn in on potential criming by Nixon and his aides. The first time you crime is the toughest, they say. It’ll make all the future crimes that will be committed a whole lot easier to get approved.
This is an F’ing great thread with many great Triggercut posts but I think the one just posted, #92, is gonna be hard to top, in terms of the big picture. I knew much of this from history class as an undergrad, but I’ve never seen it laid out like that.
Incredibly well done, Trig. Hats off.
yes, this is fantastic, thank you very much @triggercut
I was barely born as all this unfolded, and we never covered any of this in any of my schooling. On a trip to disneyland, when i was maybe 10, something came up on the radio about nixon/watergate and I asked my dad about it. His response was that he got his hand caught in the cookie jar, and really, i never ever looked too deeply into it, so this is all pretty much new to me.
And if impeachment doesn’t happen, then not so good. I’m not getting Rostow’s motivation in not going public but also giving up control of the evidence. I can see wanting to not go public initially, in case Nixon is sunk by the already ongoing investigation threads. But if Nixon goes free, don’t you want to have the ammo for a second round after realizing that it’s now a thoroughly criminal organization (and LBJ’s worries about the future of democracy)?
Like, was he actuall pro-Nixon and trying to bury the story? Loyally honoring LBJ’s wishes? (Despite having originally been the one urging for a public release, and the “effect on the future of democracy” concern having become quite obsolete.)
Rostow was kind of an interesting cat. And the thing of it is, by 1973 he was already kind of a national pariah, because as LBJ’s national security advisor, the idea to go all in, and go big in Vietnam had come at least partially from him. And he fully endorsed plans from the Pentagon to increase troop levels, bombings, etc. there.
And so he was already kind of persona non grata around the US. Typically guys who are that close to the president in the White House can pull an easy post-administration paycheck by getting a university professorship or doing the lecture circuit. But Rostow knew that NO ONE wanted to hear the guy who was so wrong on Vietnam come talk about any damned thing.
I guess in his mind, the ultimate decision to not call out Nixon and Mitchell in 1968 was going to be just another thing that he was going to get flayed for. Another thing he’d feel guilty about the rest of his life. And he just wanted to walk away from all of it.
One other thing to mention, btw, is how the “Chennault Affair” came to attention. It wasn’t completely unknown in 1968. Theodore White’s “The Making of the President, 1968” has a few paragraphs on it. But in White’s retelling from the year after the election (that book came out in 1969), Chennault telling the South Vietnamese delegation to back off at the Paris peace table was the act of a free-agent anti-communist all on her own, and her efforts weren’t impactful. Which we have since learned is wrong on all counts.
And during election week – but after election day – apparently a reporter at the Christian Science Monitor had been tipped off to a big chunk of the story, including the Nixon campaign’s role in it. It wasn’t a flattering story to LBJ, since a big part of it took him to task for the timing of the bombing “pause”. But that reporter did have a lot of Nixon’s role in everything, and the reporter went to the White House to confirm the story and get quotes.
And for whatever reason, the Monitor killed the story, and it never ran.
The contents of Rostow’s files started to come out in the 90s and early aughts. And Anna Chennault herself started talking about it on the record in the 1980s. She felt hard done by, because she’d been the go-between for Nixon and Mitchell, and also Nixon’s biggest fundraiser in 1968…and got nothing for her efforts, not even an ambassadorship.
It also took a fair few years to get ALL of the White House secret recordings of the Nixon administration transcripted fully. Once done, and once a decent amount of the Chennault Affair was known, it became possible to go through those recordings and link ambiguous references to that into White House conversations. Especially when discussing the need to commit a future crime when the Pentagon Papers go public.
The real final piece of good evidence discovered so far turned up in 2003 or so, in John Mitchell’s papers. There’s a note from the last week in October of 1968 in one of his date books to have “Mrs. Ch” tell the “SVN” to stand firm on not sitting down at the peace table. And it appears in a date book that is full of things Mitchell did at the behest of Nixon as his campaign manager. That backs up a statement that Mrs. Chennault said SHE was told on the phone by Mitchell, namely that Mitchell assured her that the requests he was making of her were coming directly from Nixon himself. Per Chennault, she was assured by Mitchell that he was “Speaking for Mr. Nixon.”
Ken Hughes’s book Chasing Shadows has the full, fascinating story in it, and that was my biggest source here. It reads a bit dry at times, but it is complete, and he sources everything he has to Nixon tapes, memos, date books, and contemporaneous reporting.
Has Rostow’s mystery box been unsealed from the LBJ library yet? Or are they letting that ferment until his requested fifty years are up?
Yeah, it’s been fully opened up now. They didn’t wait the 50 years. :)
So…not a lot has been happening, 50 years ago these days.
But some stuff has been. Stuff that’s difficult to assign exact dates to, other than knowing that they occurred in the first 2 weeks of July.
I mean, how dead is the Watergate beat 2-3 weeks after the break-in? Carl Bernstein has been returned to his regular duties on the Virginia local desk at the Post. Bob Woodward is on a two week family vacation.
Dead.
But stuff is happening.
1. Get out of Jail Free Card
One interesting thing as the calendar flips to July, 1972: all five Watergate burglars remain in jail and haven’t yet bonded out. And E. Howard Hunt is furious about that.
Throughout the shoddy planning stages of this operation (and others), G. Gordon Liddy assured Hunt and his compatriots that they were working for the President, and that if they were ever to be jailed, they should shut up and wait for assistance from on high. “We’ll get the same treatment the Agency guys get,” assures Liddy. Full legal aid; financial help for the families; strings pulled; pardons if needed.
But none of that is happening yet, and Howard Hunt has hired his own criminal defense lawyer and is thinking about contacting the FBI and rolling over. What Hunt doesn’t know is that money has been approved – direct from the White House, in that June 23 Oval Office meeting – and is on the way.
John Dean’s been assigned that particular bit, and he is not only rounding up the money, but also trying to find the most circumspect, secret way to deliver it. Dean decides to use a fringe-y character named Tony Ulasewicz to be his point man on disbursement of funds. Ulasewicz is a former cop and current private detective who’s done a ton of dirty work for the White House, including being their point man on digging up dirt on Chappaquiddick.
Ulasewicz, after making some surreptitious phone calls (he’ll always use a revolving set of pay phones; in fact he’ll use so many pay phones that he’ll start carrying around one of those old bus driver change-making things.) He discovers that Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, is in regular contact with the wives of the jailed burglars. She’ll be the point for getting the money turned around.
The five now also have an actual criminal defense lawyer, and not Douglas Caddy who wanted nothing to do with the case (in fact, Caddy told his and Hunt’s mutual bosses at the Robert Mullen Company about this, and the Mullen Company subsequently relieved Hunt of his duties there.) All five burglars are now represented (by the same lawyer at this point), and after Dorothy Hunt delivers the first cash from Ulasewicz and Dean (literally bundled hundreds and twenties in brown paper bags), they’re finally free on bail shortly after the July 4 celebrations.
But the five men and their families need money. They’re un-hireable, and no longer able to pull CREEP paychecks. In a memorable phone call in the first week of July, Ulasewicz tells Dorothy Hunt to find out from all the families what they’d estimate their individual monetary needs for a given month might be, and to get back to him.
The next day, though, before Dorothy Hunt can finish getting that info, Ulasewicz calls her again. Actually, he says, making these payouts is pretty dangerous. The amount of money isn’t what scares him, it’s the number of payment drop-offs that bothers him. Each drop-off risks exposure, and so he and Dean would much rather handle things in some lump sum payouts.
So, Ulasewicz says, have the families of the burglars estimate what they’d need financially for, oh, let’s just say…five months. Yeah. Five months. Tell me tomorrow what everyone will need for five months and I’ll get that to you right away, says Ulasewicz.
And so Dorothy Hunt calls all the families of the burglars and works with them over the phone to figure out how much money they’ll need for the next five months for their “first” payout.
But when James McCord’s wife tells her husband about this conversation, instead of relief, McCord feels his blood run cold.
Five months. That covers payment for living expenses through…November of 1972. McCord starts to get a sinking feeling that this isn’t going to be the “first” payout. It’s going to be the only payout, to keep everyone quiet until election day. And after? A voice in his mind that he’d always paid attention to when he was in the CIA, one that maybe screamed at him to not put tape on a door lock a couple of weeks ago, is screaming at him again now, and telling him that after November he and the burglars and Liddy and Hunt will be left to twist in the wind.
This time, he might hear that voice. And he might act on what it’s telling him.