A Dark and Lonely Mind
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
A Dark and Lonely Mind Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes Edited by Stanley I. Kutler Free Press. 675 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers; author, "A...
...But nothing—absolutely nothing—raised his hackles like the Internal Revenue Service...
...Increasingly jealous of Kissinger's celebrity and pristine reputation, he privately accuses him of being a willing participant in Watergate...
...Oh, God, of course...
...You don't agree...
...Woods appears to be the one person Nixon does not feel compelled to lie to...
...As the tapes demonstrate, Haig, the new White House Chief of Staff, is a master at fueling Nixon's paranoia, while Ziegler does everything possible to keep the President focused and calm...
...She knows everything and follows orders faithfully...
...Early in 1996, following a 22-year battle, this bulldog historian won the release of President Richard M. Nixon's Oval Office conversations regarding the Watergate scandals, secretly taped from June 1971 through July 1973...
...Nixon's relationship with his Assistant for National Security Affairs and later Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, is more complicated...
...I'm going to fight these bastards to the end...
...Seven years ago I reviewed his exhaustive The Wars of Watergate in these pages (NL, May 14-28, 1990...
...Called the Fifth Nixon, she spends more time with her boss than anyone else (including, I suspect, Pat Nixon, whose name is never mentioned in these voluminous transcripts...
...keep whacking, whacking, and whacking...
...Woods and Nixon speak in a kind of personal code...
...That's what they're after...
...Nixon had been audited following both his Checkers speech in 1952 and his bitter California gubernatorial defeat 10 years later...
...Don't let him give you that crap...
...Chuck Colson is both a nut and a loyal soldier...
...Nixon: But I had to do it...
...Lewis: No Goddamn thing, of course —just a bunch of schoolboys...
...It's not the motive to get the President...
...Absolutely...
...Any tougher than Adams?No...
...At another point he explains to Nixon why the Watergate affair is more serious than previous Presidential scandals...
...Now here's the point...
...Nixon: [Henry] knew what was going on in the Plumbers activities...
...The new transcripts add a mountain of fascinating evidence without radically altering the original story...
...Nixon: Oh, well, the hell with missing them...
...Goddamnit, they were after me...
...Nixon: That's why we have been brought into this world...
...They're after me, the President...
...Ziegler: It's the Watergate...
...You then move on to the other aspects of the case, which is what we're dealing with here...
...The moral lessons of Watergate do not penetrate his world...
...Woods has a motherly touch...
...And I feel the same way...
...He was President actually...
...Woods...
...Nixcon...
...You see, 1RS is full of Jews, Bob...
...Nixon: Of course, it's going to be hard, Rose...
...He lies to evangelist Billy Graham, a close friend, saying: "I can assure you nobody in the White House is involved [in Watergate], but campaign people, they do silly things...
...Kissinger: I said...
...Nixon: Chicken shit...
...that's what a lot of people have experienced in their own lives...
...The President hated many things in this world, from Harvard intellectuals to the Washington Post...
...They've gone after [Bebe] Rebozo...
...Lewis: Of course they are...
...Ziegler: Oh, was he...
...The transcripts provide no evidence to support this allegation, and Nixon does not raise it again...
...All right...
...Keep, keep fighting," Nixon replies...
...The worse things look for Nixon, the more obsequious Kissinger becomes...
...Kissinger: That's what he says...
...After reading 600 pages of taped transcripts, one conversation sticks most clearly in my mind...
...Nixon: Look, I—I don't like those activities as much as Henry...
...You can fill any position, Hobe...
...It only delays the inevitable...
...But I—I lump that in the wiretapping...
...he is a lying machine with the throttle opened wide...
...Lewis: Well, you're going to miss them...
...He also repeats the story of Sherman Adams, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's trusted special assistant, who resigned in disgrace after accepting gifts in return for political favors...
...Theirtaped conversations always begin with Kissinger stroking the President, reminding him of their mutual accomplishments and assuring him that Watergate is a minor bump on the road to Presidential greatness...
...So let your assholes know that they're going to get this, Henry...
...He employs the Alger Hiss case, for example, to remind his subordinates that witnesses appearing before Congressional committees "have got to be prepared, because any clever person up there will murder them," which is exactly what Congressman Nixon did to Hiss in 1948...
...That's right...
...Nixon: That's what I think...
...Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers...
...That kind of crap...
...Haldeman: Yeah...
...The entire agency, he fumed, can "kiss my ass...
...Nixon: (Unintelligible...
...When pressing his Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman, to resign, Nixon says: "Let me tell you, yes, [it's] tough...
...Nixon intended to parcel out the material selectively, to enhance his reputation and refute the very charges that eventually brought him down...
...ixcon: Assholes...
...That's all...
...Nixon: Billy Graham tells an astonishing thing...
...He thinks you're going to come out of this eventually stronger...
...Nixcon: And they are great men...
...Ziegler, the President's cheerful young press secretary, grew close to Nixon after Haldeman and Ehrlichman were forced to resign in April 1973...
...Woods: Oh, yeah...
...Kissinger: I think you should...
...Julie: Hey, Dean doesn't have any damning documents, does he...
...Watergate junkies will scour it to find out what White House Counsel John Dean said to the President about the relationship of his aide, Charles Colson, with burglar E. Howard Hunt...
...Nixon: They may kill me in the press, but they will never kill me in mind...
...But forget it...
...To my thinking, these manuscripts are most valuable as a window into the mind of Richard Nixon, a dark and lonely compartment where the ghosts of Watergate resided...
...Ziegler...
...Then you add the cover-up...
...Nixon says much the same thing to Presidential Counsel John Ehrlichman, claiming that "Eisenhower, properly so, felt that the Presidency had to be protected...
...At one point Ziegler defends White House Counsel Leonard Garment, a valuable Nixon ally, against Haldeman's ugly anti-Semitic attacks...
...Ron Ziegler is a good guy...
...They hate my guts...
...But later that evening, in a phone call to his old friend HobartD...
...I know it isn't just wiretapping...
...The President is not simply a liar...
...Oh, I don't worry," he adds...
...He never wanted to come down here...
...My view is that it is not...
...what you do is kick him again...
...That the public is beginning to identify with you as somebody who gets kicked around and endures and overcomes it...
...Nixon: It's the Watergate story...
...At a White House meeting about amnesty for war resisters, he summarizes Abraham Lincoln's position on this matter and asks everyone to read Carl Sandburg's biography...
...Instead, he preserved a record of Presidential corruption and paranoid thinking that leaves the reader absolutely numb...
...Watergate scholars will read Abuse of Power to learn more about a crisis that involved three branches of the government and two political parties...
...And he lies to his daughter, Julie Eisenhower...
...My God, Adams was Eisenhower's alter ego...
...to assume that all of the Congress and all of the press have the objective of destroying the President...
...Nixon: Oh, the cover-up...
...Alexander Haig brings out the worst in everyone...
...President...
...Nixon: Didn't work...
...Nixon: Who are they after...
...No historian, to my knowledge, ever conspired to burglarize the National Archives and the Brookings Institution in pursuit of better footnotes...
...Jeane Dixon [the self-styled prophet] tells us that May and June are going to be pretty bad...
...They] get caught up in the emotion of it...
...Nixon not only lies consistently to his aides, he-also rates them by their willingness to perjure themselves before grand juries and Senate committees...
...Boot-licking is never enough...
...How Nixon came to this conclusion is unclear...
...Yet even these initial transcripts, running to more than 600 printed pages, offer an astonishing account of a White House under siege and a President fighting desperately to stave off humiliation...
...Nixcon: They do, don't they...
...The transcripts give the reader a chance to differentiate among Nixon's advisers...
...Ziegler...
...That's the worst...
...cause he was the master of the whole cover-up...
...Nixon: Oh, no, no, no, no, don't worry about that...
...Right in the can...
...I'm just praying that God has given you enough strength to take this...
...By the time he became President, he viewed the IRS as a Left-wing, Jewishled conspiracy on a mission to destroy him and his friends...
...I know some of the names, and boy, I—they want a brutal fight, they're gonna get one...
...They've gone after [Robert] Abplanalp...
...Nixon's historical range is impressive...
...In conversations with Nixon she agonizes over the grief that Watergate has caused the people she cares about...
...As the scandal spreads, Nixon looks to Woods for emotional support...
...One of the final transcripts—in July 1973—has him telling the dejected President that public opinion may be turning his way...
...Reviewers of the tapes have poked fun at the President's windy recounting of historical events...
...Even veteran Nixon-watchers may be shocked by the level of dishonesty revealed in these tapes...
...Thank you, Mr...
...As a result, their conversations often end with the President threatening to expose the liberals who criticize him for the "buggings" and "other bullshit" that he says they have been getting away with for years...
...The problem is that Kissinger—an East Coast Ivy League Jew—reminds Nixon too much of his enemies...
...Woods: It's going to be very hard...
...Dean is just going to make a lot of charges...
...It goes to the activities of G. GordonLiddy [who planned the breakin] and Hunt, which is beyond the wiretapping...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense," "Worse Than Slavery" Thank you, Stanley Kutler...
...Above all, Ziegler tries to contextualize the daily attacks on Nixon...
...It shows a baffled Nixon, unable to comprehend that a burglary, a cover-up, and endless lying are grounds for serious criticism, much less an impeachment proceeding...
...Bob Haldeman is a mean-spirited martinet...
...In an emotional televised address on April 30, 1973, Nixon announced the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, "two of the finest public servants,"he said, "ithasbeenmy privilege to know...
...The last conversation in Abuse of Power has Kissinger praising the President for both the "tough" but "very pleasant" approach he takes toward his Watergate critics and "the meritorious things you have done for the country...
...Yet Nixon uses history to make some telling points...
...This tap business, it's gonna catch some of your friends...
...He's just talking...
...Kissinger: I just had a call from Norman Mailer...
...Haldeman: Right...
...Kutler intrudes minimally with superb summaries that provide essential background material...
...Most important, Nixon sets a new standard in the search for primary sources...
...Ziegler...
...Nixon: I've got the strength...
...Lewis: No, of course...
...You have to...
...Nixon: That's right...
...Her words are sometimes wacky, but her shoulder is strong...
...Nixon: I'm going to publish the names...
...June may be worse than May...
...In a discussion about political tactics for the George McGovern campaign, he moves effortlessly into sports history by noting that "when you got a fellow who is under attack like this...
...Howard Hunt is simply a nut...
...He says for the first time in his life, he is beginning to like you...
...Right...
...John Dean is bright, capable and remarkably naïve...
...Nixon also taunts Kissinger about the wiretaps Kissinger himself has demanded to trace leaks of information from his staff to the media...
...They finish each other's thoughts...
...Lewis: Of course...
...Nixon described this decision to numerous people as the most difficult one he ever made, adding that he loved both men like brothers...
...Ziegler: That kind of stuff...
...I just want you to know what a radical Leftist is thinking...
...He even assures Nixon that the press "has had it" with Watergate and things are looking up...
...But anyway...
...He was with him at the heart attack...
...Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats...
...John Ehrlichman worries exclusively about himself...
...My heart aches for John Mitchell," she says of the former Attorney General...
...He was the carry-outer of the thing...
...ixcon: Isn't it a shame it's all about a crappy little thing that didn't work...
...They've gone after John Wayne...
...Haldeman: Yeah...
...Woods: Well, you particularly...
...I mean theCanuckletter [false accusations against Senator Edmund Muskie] and the [Senator Henry] Jackson letter [concerning homosexuality...
...I mean, it's like Dempsey going in for the kill with Firpo...
...Nobody ever got a Goddamn thing out of this damn bugging...
...Where Haig and the President see only conspiracy, Ziegler sees the give-and-take of national politics...
...correct...
...He was—he was clear up to his ankles himself...
...And they're gonna get it Goddamned soon...
...They're going after, you know, every one of our people...
...Nixon: You know, having to tell two men who didn't—who refused to resign, to tell them they had to was the toughest thing...
...The IRS is battering the shit out of him...
...But everything will turn out fine and to be of stout heart and all that...
...Lewis, editor in-chief of Reader's Digest, the real Richard M. Nixon emerges...
...All the tapes show, at this point, is that his inability to purge the 1RS or to use it consistently against his opponents remained one of the great regrets of his Presidency...
...Nixon: That's right...
...A bus e of Power, the first of several installments, covers just 201 of the 3,000 hours to be made public...
...The conversation then turns to the Watergate break-in...
...Nixon's point is not that Adams admitted his guilt, but rather that he spared the President further grief by quickly leaving town...
...And uh, he led us for 10 months—[chuckles...
...Henry was the one that was, Christ, pounding the desks, squealing about it and so forth...
...The most devoted staffer, by far, is the President's longtime personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 19
