Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 11

Lately, my readings of Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life have focused on Watergate.  I have two items.

1.  Aitken seems to be open to the argument of Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in Silent Coup that White House Counsel John Dean ordered the Watergate break-in to uncover information about a call-girl ring.  Aitken said that he thought that the thesis was pretty far-fetched, until he talked with Gordon Liddy about it.  Liddy would come to accept Silent Coup's thesis.  When I first read that in another book, I was puzzled.  Was not Liddy a major participant in the Watergate scandal?  Wouldn't he know at the outset that the Watergate break-in was ordered by Dean and was intended to uncover information about a call-girl ring, if that were indeed the truth?  How could Liddy come to accept a new theory about Watergate, as if he were some dispassionate observer, rather than an actual participant?

It turns out that Liddy accepted Silent Coup's thesis because that made sense to him in retrospect.  Liddy acknowledges that, while he was participating in Watergate, he did not know everything that was going on.  On page 471, Aitken quotes Liddy as saying:

"Without doubt the man who commanded and conceived the Watergate operation was John Dean.  Nixon and [Attorney General John] Mitchell had nothing whatever to do with it.  I didn't realize that at the time.  Like most other people I was fooled by Dean's facile lies.  'Oh you don't understand Mitchell's ways', he told me when I was assuming from everything Mitchell said to me that he wanted Gemstone aborted...[H]e didn't tell anyone except Howard Hunt that what he was really after was the call-girl address book and a bug on the phones that were used to book the call girls.  He duped Magruder on that one and he duped me.  I remember Magruder saying to me, 'what we want is what they've got right here', pointing at the middle drawer of his own desk.  Now he didn't mean Larry O'Brien's desk.  When the Cubans went in they didn't go near O'Brien's office in the DNC.  Hunt gave them their orders and on the second break-in they went straight to the office and the desk of a secretary called Maxie Wells.  Our look-out post from the hotel over the road was angled to that office not to O'Brien's...I thought I was involved in an operation that was politically important to the President.  I now know it was an operation that was personally important to John Dean.  Period."

On the secretary, Maxie Wells, Aitken states: "According to Silent Coup, the FBI was able to establish that Wells's desk was the burglars' target, because when the burglars were being arrested, one had tried to conceal a key that fitted Wells's desk.  For some mysterious reason, this fact was ignored throughout the investigation of the break-in."

Liddy's claim that the Watergate burglars "didn't go near O'Brien's office in the DNC" stood out to me, for it recalled to my mind Joan Hoff's claim in Nixon Reconsidered that "the Watergate burglars did not initially bug, nor were they subsequently caught in, O’Brien’s office" (page 305).  That puzzles me because I have read in more than one biography of Nixon that the burglars indeed did break into Lawrence O'Brien's office.  Who's right on this?

2.  I'd like to turn my attention now to the topic of Deep Throat, the alleged inside source that was feeding Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein information about Watergate.  Mark Felt claimed to be Deep Throat, and Woodward confirmed Felt's claim.  When Jonathan Aitken wrote Nixon: A Life, however, the identity of Deep Throat was still unknown.  Aitken notes that Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein that material had been deliberately erased from the tapes, and this was before knowledge of the missing 18 and 1/2 minutes was widespread.  For Aitken, that should narrow down the candidates for Deep Throat, for not many people were aware of the missing 18 and 1/2 minutes.  Those who were aware included Nixon, Rose Mary Woods, Al Haig, Fred Buzhardt, Steve Bull, and Major General John C. Bennett (deputy to Haig).  Aitken excludes Nixon and Woods from being Deep Throat because he doubts that they would leak stories about themselves.  Aitken also believes that Deep Throat was probably the person who deliberately erased the 18 and 1/2 minutes, since "none of the remaining four should have had knowledge, at the time of the Deep Throat-Woodward conversation, that the gap had been caused by deliberate erasures" (page 512).

How can what Aitken says be reconciled with Mark Felt being Deep Throat?  Incidentally, it's on account of these sorts of issues (among other things) that Ann Coulter doubts that Mark Felt even was Deep Throat, notwithstanding what Felt and Woodward said.  In this column, she states: " The fictional Deep Throat knew things Felt could not possibly have known, such as the 18 1/2-minute gap on one of the White House tapes. Only six people knew about the gap when Woodward reported it. All of them worked at the White House. Felt not only didn't work at the White House, but when the story broke, he also didn't even work at the FBI anymore."

This article puzzles over how Felt could have known about the missing 18 and 1/2 minutes and raises a possible solution: "How did Mark Felt know about the deliberate erasures on the tape when Rose Mary Woods herself did not discover the added soft-buzz erasures until November 6, 1973? Did the theorized White House lawyer somehow tip off Felt after making the soft-buzz erasures?"  In this scenario, Deep Throat was not the one who made the erasures, but a White House lawyer who allegedly made some of the erasures may have tipped Felt off about them.

Loving Those For Whom Christ Died

At church this morning, the pastor preached about Zaccheus.  Zaccheus was a hated tax collector in Luke 19, but he wanted to see Jesus, and he climbed up a tree to do so because he was small in size.  Jesus offered to come to Zaccheus' house, and Zaccheus then resolved to change his life, paying back those he defrauded and giving to the poor.

The pastor said that, even though Zaccheus had done bad things and was hated, Jesus loved him and would die for him.  That's actually a profound statement: that Jesus was willing to die for people who did wrong.  Trite?  Well, perhaps, yet profound.  Suppose that I saw people----even those I dislike because of how they have treated me----as people who are loved by Jesus, people for whom Jesus died.

Of course, this can change my attitude today.  But playing mind-tricks (in this case, telling myself religious concepts) in an attempt to change my attitude in a lasting way is a lot more difficult.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 10

On page 461 of Nixon: A Life, Jonathan Aitken states:

"...Nixon abroad had a personal style that was far more assured, confident and dignified than the image he portrayed at home.  At close quarters with his fellow Americans he could be socially inept and visually insecure.  Yet when travelling overseas, as if by the wave of a magic wand, he discarded his domestic complexes and resentments.  From the moment of arrival on foreign soil he exuded strength and often warmth.  A small part of this transformation may have been due to the realisation that he was usually being welcomed by people who admired him for his humble origins; who neither knew nor cared whether Whittier was an Ivy League university; and whose respect for his abilities went back a long time to the days when he had first begun to acquire his detailed knowledge about the affairs of their own country."

It's good when a person can find his or her niche, isn't it?  I long for social settings in which interaction with people is not such an uphill battle.  Is it all right to have that kind of longing, or does that feed into any notion I may have that my social struggles are always somebody else's fault----that the problem is my environment, not me?  Well, I don't want to get to the point where I am only blaming others without taking a good hard look at myself and what I may be doing wrong.  At the same time, there are some people and places that are more accepting and less judgmental than others.  That's just a fact.  I am not overly optimistic that I will be socially accepted in those sorts of settings, mind you, but perhaps I could thrive better in those settings than in other settings.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 9

What has been salient to me in my reading of Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life are Aitken's stories about Richard Nixon's compassion, generosity, and kindness.  Aitken tells two stories that I particularly enjoyed.

The first story was Aitken's story about the Donnellys.  Dorothy Cox Donnelly was Richard Nixon's appointments secretary when he was Vice-President, and her husband was a lobbyist who served on the Civil Aeronautics Board's staff.  Both were Republicans, and there was a strong possibility that both would be removed from their jobs once President John F. Kennedy entered office.  Their finances were fragile, and they were worried.  But Richard Nixon interceded for them with Kennedy.  Nixon asked if a job could be found for either Donnelly, and Kennedy replied, "Oh yes, sure, I remember Dorothy from your Senate office----the little one with the bun on the back of her head."  Aitken goes on to narrate that "To the amazement of the CAB, its Republican appointee was confirmed to his post a few days later on the orders of the White House" (page 292).

The second story was set in 1969, when Nixon was about to enter to Presidency, while President Lyndon Johnson and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (against whom Nixon ran for President in 1968) were about to leave.  On the day of his inauguration, Nixon remembered what it was like back when he was the departing Vice-President, and President Kennedy and Vice-President Johnson were taking over.  Aitken calls it Nixon's "Cinderella-like exit from the Vice Presidency in 1960, when all facilities, including his car, were withdrawn at the stroke of midnight" (page 371).  Aitken narrates how Nixon resolved to treat Humphrey differently when Humphrey was exiting the Vice-Presidency:

"In addition to the warm public and private tributes he paid to his election opponent, Nixon personally supervised all the arrangements for Humphrey's last hours in Washington.  These included putting an Air Force jet at the ex-Vice President's disposal, choosing a bouquet of Muriel Humphrey's favourite flowers to be handed to her as she got on to the aircraft, and attaching to them a handwritten note of presidential thanks for the couple's twenty-five years of public service.  The son of Hannah Nixon had not forgotten the importance of small acts of kindness."

Bruce Mazlish, in In Search of Nixon, said that Nixon could be generous from a position of strength, but he usually could not ask for help himself.  What are reasons to be compassionate for others?  So we can feel good about ourselves and have power as benefactors?  Because we don't want someone else to experience the pain that we experienced?  Because we have genuine compassion for people in a predicament?  Because we believe that we have an obligation to do so, either to God, or to the goal of creating a humane and generous society?

These are all reasons that people are generous.  Some may be generous for a mixture of one or more of these reasons.  In a number of people, one reason may predominate.  I hope to be generous out of a genuine sense of compassion, or a recognition of the shared humanity and vulnerability of both me and also the person I am helping.  There has been a tendency within me to treat people who need help as charity-cases for my benevolence, and perhaps the reason for that is that I have a hard time appreciating their humanity, since I am primarily looking to make myself feel better, or I think that looking at their humanity will turn me off from them, since I don't particularly like people.  (I can, say, help a blind person as a blind person who needs my help, but, once I look at the blind person as simply a person, I can begin to feel alienated from him or her, the same way that I feel alienated from most people.)  What I should remember is that we are all selves, that even those who may not like me are people with thoughts, feelings, experiences, and lives, and thus they deserve my compassion when they are experiencing hard times, the same way that I would deserve compassion were I experiencing hard times.

Psalm 133

Psalm 133 states in the King James Version, which is in the public domain:

1 A Song of degrees of David.  Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!
2 It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron's beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments;
3 As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the LORD commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.

There are a variety of ideas about the historical reference-point for this Psalm.  Some relate it to II Samuel 19:9, 14, in which all of Israel united in asking David to return and re-assume the throne (after David had fled due to Absalom's revolt).  Others apply it to Hezekiah's Passover festival in II Chronicles 30, which drew some pilgrims from Northern Israel.  V 3 mentions Hermon, after all, and that was in the north.  A third view is that the part about Aaron was added later, and the Psalm originally was just about the beauty of unity among brothers.  W.O.E. Oesterley argues that it concerns Israelite family life, such as brothers living together, and the institution of levirate marriage (in which a man marries his brother's wife when the brother dies, in order to raise up offspring for the deceased brother).  I'm somewhat drawn to the second interpretation, the one about Hezekiah's passover.  According to II Chronicles 30, Northern Israelites came to Jerusalem from the north (v 3),  Northern and Southern Israelites were united during that festival, and the festival was at Jerusalem, the site of the Aaronic priesthood (v 2), which brought blessing to Israel.

Unity.  The concept gives me the heeby-jeebies, since it sounds to me like uniformity: everyone believing the same way and having the same mission.  But I'm more comfortable with the notion that people should be united in love: united in the acceptance of love as an important way of life, and in the practice of love.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 8

For my blog post today about Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life, my focus will be on the Nixon Administration's enemies list.  This will not be a comprehensive post, going into what many authors have said about the topic.  Rather, I just want to highlight some passages that I found interesting.

Richard Nixon, in his book In the Arena, talks a bit about the enemies list.  On page 249, he states: "During Watergate, much attention was paid to the 'enemies list' that a member of the White House staff had prepared.  I never saw it.  Regrettably, some on the list were my personal friends."

(On another topic, as I look at that same page of In the Arena, I see a noteworthy passage that I must have missed when I read the book the first time around.  Nixon says that Harry Truman in the 1948 Presidential election implied that Nazis were supporting his opponent, Republican Thomas Dewey.  Nixon also states that "Ideally, candidates should hammer each other without destroying each other."  That brought to my mind a couple of things.  First of all, I wrote a post in which I critiqued Pat Buchanan's claim that those who supported Harry Truman's "give 'em hell" campaign against Dewey were hypocritical to then criticize Nixon's hard-hitting Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas.  If Truman was somehow linking Dewey with Nazism, however, then I'd say that Truman's campaign was more below-the-belt than I thought!  Second, while Nixon criticizes campaigns that destroy the other candidate, there are people who contend that Nixon actually destroyed his opponents, Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas.  Roger Morris on the American Experience documentary about Nixon said that Nixon's campaigns destroyed them politically, and nearly personally, and that this engendered a lot of bitterness.  But back to the White House enemies list!)

Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Richard Nixon's youngest daughter, talks some about the enemies list in her biography of Pat Nixon, entitled Pat Nixon: The Untold Story.  On page 376, Julie argues that White House Counsel John Dean, who would reveal the existence of the enemies list in his testimony before Congress against the President, was himself the one who came up with it:

"Among the most titillating revelations from Dean were the 'enemies lists.'  Dean produced a memo, composed by himself, on 'dealing with our political enemies.'  In addition to a list of twenty prime political opponents, whom Dean recommended that the Administration target, were several lists of names running into the hundreds, which were to be referred to in determining who received White House jobs and invitations.  In his book, With Nixon, Ray Price points out that when he learned from Dean's testimony of the existence of the lists, he called them 'Dean's enemy lists,' because 'after all, it was Dean who proposed the unused plan to 'screw our enemies,' and Dean who collected the lists in his filing cabinet.'"

Julie goes on to argue that the Joint Congressional Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation found that the tax audits of those on the lists were no more severe than they were for others.  She also states that there were some on the list who were there "for no apparent reason."  She tells the story of how heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, who was on the list, still extended to her parents an offer of friendship, for he realized that they "had nothing to do with the lists" (page 377).

Going on to Richard Nixon's memoirs, Nixon states the following on page 441 of volume 2:

"[John Dean] talked about my attempt to have the IRS do checks on our political opponents with no attempt to show how widespread the practice had been among the Democrats in previous years.  The fact that we had hired a political investigator was treated as a sinister innovation, when in fact checking up on the political opposition has been part of politics since time out of mind.  We paid our investigator with political funds; other administrations had even used the FBI.  Dean produced an 'enemies list,' which even he has since admitted was vastly overplayed by the media."

Here, Nixon does not necessarily contradict what he said in In the Arena, but his focus is different: he justifies doing research on his political opponents, and even having the IRS do checks on some of them, on the grounds that this was customary in politics.

Jonathan Aitken refers to John Ehrlichman's statement that Nixon was assigning people odd jobs for investigation, some of them having to do with investigating political opponents, or the motives of a writer who criticized Julie.  Ehrlichman became concerned that this type of work "could not legitimately be funded by the taxpayer" (Ehrlichman, quoted on page 417).  Eventually, John Dean would do some of that work.  Aitken refers to Dean's August 16, 1971 memorandum, "Dealing with Our Political Enemies," which (according to Aitken) recommended that a list be compiled of the Administration's political enemies and that "various government agencies such as the IRS should be encouraged 'to screw them'" (Aitken cites for this page 104 of Silent Coup).  But Aitken says that Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman denied seeing the memorandum and that "no action was taken to implement its recommendations" (page 418).  On page 419, however, Aitken quotes Charles Colson's statement that the atmosphere at the White House tended to reward people who brought "negative intelligence" (Colson's words) on the Administration's political opponents.

UPDATE: Was Dean responsible for the enemies list?  On page 297 of President Nixon: Alone in the White House, Richard Reeves states: "Beginning on January 25, [1971?,] one of those new assistants, George Bell, began to work on implementing a new Nixon idea: organizing the staff to prepare lists of friends and enemies."  Reeves narrates that Haldeman saw a few of the lists, put together by Bell and Charles Colson, and was asking for clarification about them.  If Reeves is correct, then Dean probably was not solely responsible for the enemies list. 

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 7

Richard Nixon has been accused of sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks during his 1968 run for U.S. President.  Did Richard Nixon, using Anna Chennault as a go-between, try to convince South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to back out of the Paris Peace Talks, thereby depriving the Democrats of an opportunity to take credit for a peaceful resolution of the Vietnam War?  Did Chennault, speaking for Nixon, claim to Thieu that he could get a better deal from Nixon were Nixon to become President?

Overall, Jonathan Aitken in Nixon: A Life, appears to be skeptical about this.  Aitken acknowledges that prominent Nixon campaign adviser John Mitchell spoke once with Chennault about the peace talks, but he doubts that Nixon was personally involved in Chennault's activities.  Aitken says that Nixon regarded Chennault as a "self-promoting chatterbox" (Aitken's words), and he seems to be saying that Chennault acted on her own initiative, since she opposed Lyndon Johnson's proposed deal with North Vietnam.  Aitken on page 366 states that "The telephone intercepts had...specifically recorded Mrs Chennault telling the South Vietnamese embassy that Nixon did not know what she was up to", yet Aitken goes on to say that "She may well have taken Nixon's name in vain during her conversations with her friends in Saigon..."

On the preceding page, Aitken says that "even if Nixon, through Mitchell, was something more than an innocent bystander in the contact with Mrs Chennault, he was certainly not a guilty party to the breakdown of the peace talks."  According to Aitken, Thieu had his own reasons not to participate in the Paris Peace Talks, and he did not need prompting from Chennault or the Nixon campaign to act as he did.  Regarding Lyndon Johnson's belief that Nixon was sabotaging the peace talks, Aitken says that LBJ was paranoid, and he contends that neither the wiretaps on the phones of Spiro Agnew and John Mitchell, nor the bugging of Nixon's plane, uncovered "any evidence of collusion" (page 465).  (NOTE: I have read in a couple of places that the allegation that Nixon's campaign plane was bugged was false.)  Moreover, according to Aitken, the reason that Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey did not go public with the accusation that Nixon sought to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks was that he did not believe that Nixon would do such a thing.

Aitken's narration of this appears to be rather contradictory, but he still offers perhaps the best defense of Nixon that I have read so far.  Was there solid evidence that Nixon was working through Chennault to sabotage the peace talks?  Or were Mitchell and Chennault acting on their own initiative?  Aitken does well to cast doubt on Chennault's claim that she was speaking for Nixon to the South Vietnamese, as she herself claimed on a few occasions that such was not the case.  But, as I say here, using Stephen Ambrose's biography of Nixon as my source, "Lyndon Johnson apparently had evidence that Nixon adviser John Mitchell, claiming to speak for Nixon, had asked Chennault to try to persuade Thieu to back out of the Paris Peace Talks."  Would Mitchell claim to speak for Nixon, without that being the case?

The answer to the question of whether Nixon knew about the activities of Mitchell and Chennault may revolve around how involved Nixon was in the details of his campaign.  There were times when Nixon was supposedly obsessed with the details of his campaign and intimately involved in what his campaign did.  But there were also arguably times when he had a more hands-off approach when it came to what his underlings did.  Watergate, in my opinion, is a good example of that.