Zero fail, p.12
Zero Fail, page 12
Nixon kept banging his desk for the facts, but what he really wanted were his “preferred facts.” As the evening wore on, he told his aides to leak some fabricated “evidence” to friendly reporters. They should claim the investigation found Wallace’s shooter had ties to the left wing and the McGovern campaign. “Put it on the left right away,” Nixon told them. “Just say he was a supporter of McGovern and Kennedy. Now just put that out. Just say that you have it on unmistakable evidence.”
Haldeman took note that Bremer had a previous arrest record, which would provide concrete clues about his mental health problems. “Screw the record,” Nixon interrupted. “Just say he was a supporter of ‘that’ and ‘that’ and put it out. Just say we have an authenticated report.”
The president was focused solely on his reelection. He worried aloud that if investigators found Bremer had ties to the right wing or a Nixon supporter, Nixon could lose the White House. Sitting with Colson later in his office in the Executive Office Building, Nixon sipped a cocktail, rare for him, and mused aloud about a way to solve the problem. “Oh, wouldn’t it be great if they had left-wing propaganda in that apartment,” Nixon said. “Too bad we couldn’t get somebody there to plant it.”
Colson, familiar with Nixon’s practice of making requests in this indirect way, excused himself and called Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative. Hunt had several times worked off the books for the White House to dig up dirt on its enemies, including Ted Kennedy. Colson said he needed him to head to Milwaukee in the morning on a little mission.
But none of Nixon’s plans worked out as he had hoped. In the wake of the shooting, Director Rowley was also determined to learn everything he could about Arthur Bremer that night. The Service needed to know whether this breach was part of a bigger plot. Rowley instructed an agent temporarily stationed in Milwaukee to go check out Bremer’s apartment.
The building caretaker let the agent inside immediately. He searched the messy two-room flat and found several campaign news clippings, one with the headline Meet Nixon at the Sheraton-Schroeder, and pamphlets from the Black Panther Party and American Civil Liberties Union. A pornographic comic book featured, among other subjects, a pig named Arthur Herman who detailed his sexual plans for fellow pigs. The agent took one of Bremer’s notepads for a writing sample the Service could analyze. Spiral notebooks were filled with his disjointed thoughts and unintelligible scribbling.
“Just call me canoe, my mother liked to paddle me [sic] lot.”
“Nixon uses a night light.”
“In America, here one [sic] lived a pig named Arthur Herman.”
FBI agents, who planned to get a warrant the next morning, were interviewing neighbors and heard someone inside Bremer’s place. They burst in, and a fistfight almost broke out over who was running the Bremer investigation. When the two sides agreed to move their jurisdictional quarrel away from Bremer’s apartment, some local reporters saw an opening and asked the caretaker to let them inside. They took extensive photographs—and made an informal inventory of the suspect’s belongings.
The plan to plant evidence died. Colson’s secretary called Hunt to cancel his trip to Milwaukee. The president was furious at the Secret Service’s interference and demanded that the FBI control all the evidence in the case.
Soon after, Kennedy parted ways with his protective Secret Service team. Though it wasn’t widely known, Kennedy had been struggling with post-traumatic stress from his brother Bobby’s violent end and had been drinking heavily to cope. The Wallace shooting in Laurel had sent new waves of shock through the whole Kennedy family, especially his mother, Rose, and the senator’s young son Patrick.
Despite the fear of a family curse, Kennedy formally called off his security detail on June 5, about three weeks after Nixon ordered it. Kennedy told Rowley he no longer needed protection because he would be off the McGovern campaign trail and spending the summer with family on Cape Cod. Kennedy’s aides also told the press that the stern-faced bodyguards unintentionally added to the family’s stress, his aides said. “He doesn’t like to have to explain to his children who those men with guns are hovering around everywhere,” his press secretary, Dick Drayne, told reporters.
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THE SECRET SERVICE struggled to recover and learn from what they deemed their collective failure in the Wallace shooting. Yes, Wallace had put himself in harm’s way by ignoring Taylor’s advice. Yes, Wallace had lived, although he was paralyzed for life. And yes, their security around Nixon had frustrated Bremer and caused him to abandon his plans to kill the president.
But still they believed their security system had failed. The incident revealed what agents already knew: Security for candidates had never been as choreographed and routinized as that for the president and vice president. Many agents rotated on and off the campaign trail with such frequency that they didn’t typically work together as a cohesive unit. “Things were not as structured and the agents didn’t work together a lot,” said Joseph Petro, who protected the vice president then and later became head of President Reagan’s detail. “They were constantly being rotated. It took that tragic event to get everybody’s attention.”
In the wake of the Wallace shooting, the Service conducted more frequent and intensive drills on how to handle different kinds of attackers on a rope line. Agents and officers practiced over and over, playing the roles of detail agents and spectators on either side of the line. The drill instructor warned the agents ahead of time that a person in the crowd would play the role of the shooter and approach the principal with a gun. The drill instructor even pointed out who that person was.
“The agents were told who had a weapon,” said one former agent. “And the guys are working the rope line and they’re constantly looking at this guy waiting for the moment when he’s going to pull the gun. They know who it is.”
Agents swiveled their heads back and forth from the spectators in front of them to the mock gunman in the crowd. They tried to anticipate his move and readied themselves for the fastest dive or lunge. No matter how many times they did the drill, the result was the same. “They never once stopped him before two shots,” the former agent said.
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THE PRESIDENT’S INSTANT reaction to Governor Wallace’s shooting—to use it against his enemies—was just a tiny piece of a much larger stealth operation run by Nixon’s top aides and allies. He and his political operatives had big plans in the works for how to tarnish the liberal left and ensure the president’s reelection.
Just a month after the shooting, though, some of the president’s henchmen got caught. On June 17, 1972, D.C. police arrested five men for breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate hotel complex at about 2:30 a.m. The Washington Post reported that one of the men caught with bugging devices during the break-in had previously worked for the CIA. That man, James McCord, also worked as a security consultant for Nixon’s reelection campaign.
Most of the public and press soon forgot about the small, odd burglary. It would take a little more than two years, a team of FBI agents followed closely by two local Washington Post reporters, and a Senate investigation to eventually uncover the evidence that Nixon both knew about his top aides’ role in the break-in and ordered a cover-up from the earliest days.
But inside the White House that summer, Nixon and his aides were apoplectic about FBI agents’ tracing the burglary back to them. Though his government was then investigating the Watergate break-in, Nixon suggested bending more rules, breaking more laws.
The president obsessed over the loyalty of his senior officials. He persisted in his wish to use Secret Service agents as White House listening posts. Both topics—loyalty and spying—dominated a long conversation the president had with Haldeman that July at Camp David.
“I don’t suppose there’s any way we’ve got any line on the McGovern camp through their Secret Service?” Nixon asked.
“We sure ought to try but I don’t know how to do it,” Haldeman replied. “We got some potentials….to my knowledge we’re not using them, and I am not so sure we should. If we get caught at that…” The chief of staff didn’t finish his sentence.
In their Camp David chat, Nixon ran through a list of top officials then working in government and rated their loyalty to the White House. At each name, the president and his top deputy debated who should be dropped in favor of a more faithful yes-man.
They talked first about acting FBI director Pat Gray, who was leading the investigation. Nixon felt he had to go.
Next, Nixon shifted to the director of the Secret Service. “Incidentally, that’s one thing we’re going to change,” Nixon said. “Who the hell’s that—Rowley—the head of it?”
“We can change that chapter,” Nixon scoffed.
“Yeah, yeah, we should,” Haldeman agreed. “The problem is we’ve not had an idea of who we wanted to put in.”
The chief of staff said he had been monitoring the Secret Service’s deputy director, California native Lilburn “Pat” Boggs, and been pleasantly encouraged. He said Boggs appeared obedient and might meet their loyalty standard. It was Boggs who had alerted Nixon chief domestic adviser John Ehrlichman on the night of the Watergate break-in to the arrest of a former CIA operative.
“We’ve run some tests and he’s worked out awfully well,” Haldeman said. “He is the one guy in all this investigative area we’ve been able to trust and who’s done what we’ve told him to do.”
“I want one who’s our boy,” Nixon said. “I’m not going to screw around on that score.”
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JUST AFTER LABOR Day, as the Nixon and McGovern campaigns heated up, Nixon again pushed to have the Secret Service tail Senator Kennedy.
In a September 7 sit-down, Nixon instructed Haldeman and his deputy Alexander Butterfield to have Bob Newbrand, a senior agent based in the Miami field office, reassigned to lead the new Kennedy detail. Nixon knew Newbrand from when he’d served on his vice presidential detail, and White House aides considered him highly loyal to Nixon.
The president said he wanted Newbrand’s shift to help catch Kennedy in something politically embarrassing so they could leak it to the press. The junior senator was rumored to be having an affair with New York socialite Amanda Burden. Nixon had been fixated on the idea ever since his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had told Nixon some stories of seeing Kennedy proposition and stalk a different woman at a Manhattan society event.
“Rowley is not to make the assignment,” Nixon told Butterfield. “Does he understand?”
“He’s to assign Newbrand,” Haldeman said.
“Does he understand that he’s to do that?” Nixon asked.
“He’s effectively already done it,” Butterfield answered. “And we have a full force assigned, forty men.”
“A big detail is correct,” the president said. “One that can cover him around the clock, every place he goes.”
Nixon and Haldeman laughed.
“And…Rowley doesn’t bitch, now,” Nixon said later to Haldeman.
“He won’t bitch,” Haldeman assured him.
“And you’ll talk to Newbrand?” Nixon said.
“And I’ll talk to Newbrand and tell him how to approach it, because Newbrand will do anything that I tell him to,” Haldeman said. “He has come to me twice and absolutely, sincerely said, ‘With what you’ve done for me and what the president’s done for me, I just want you to know, if you want someone killed, if you want anything else done, anyway, any direction.’ ”
“We just might get lucky and catch this son of a bitch and ruin him for ’76,” Nixon said of Kennedy. “That’s going to be fun.”
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HALDEMAN HAD TOLD Butterfield to call the Service about making Newbrand the detail leader, but Clint Hill resisted the change when the White House staffer called. Hill, now the assistant director over protection, explained that the detail was already chosen and the men were ready to ship out. The two men hung up.
Assistant Treasury Secretary Gene Rossides then called Hill about Newbrand. Hill repeated that the Service had already selected a team. The Treasury appointee stopped him. “You apparently don’t get the picture, Clint,” Rossides said. “This is not a request, it is an order.”
Hill knew that Newbrand, a loner who seemed to steer clear of agents, was close to Nixon staff and suspected something was fishy. Hill would always feel protective of the Kennedy family, but more than that, he was insulted at the idea of using agents for political purposes.
Hill shared his suspicion with Jim Burke, the deputy assistant director in charge of field offices, and Newbrand’s boss. Burke called Newbrand at his field office to warn him there should be no political spying or funny business on the detail.
On September 8, the day the new detail was to start, Butterfield told Haldeman’s secretary he needed to talk to the chief of staff urgently about Kennedy. It’s unclear what Butterfield was so eager to tell Haldeman. But as they spoke, Haldeman wrote a terse note about the boss in charge of deploying Secret Service agents: “Hill knows will happen.”
At 3:15 p.m., Haldeman called Newbrand in his Miami office. It’s unclear who won the tug-of-war for Newbrand’s loyalties—the Secret Service’s code of honor or Nixon’s chief of staff. Newbrand’s assignment leading the Kennedy detail ended in two months, when Nixon won reelection and beat McGovern by a landslide in the first week of November. No embarrassing pictures or startling stories about the young senator publicly surfaced.
Newbrand’s career fared well afterward with Nixon’s blessing. He became a Secret Service spokesman during Nixon’s second term and was later promoted to head of the Miami field office.
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NIXON’S INTENSE RESPONSE to the Wallace shooting highlighted a few of the president’s personal flaws that would eventually lead to his resignation and ruin. Because he saw his political rivals as demons, he convinced himself he was the righteous victim, entitled to manipulate government for his own gain. Nixon grew inured to ordering his aides to skirt and break the law.
But the episode also highlighted the way a president’s behavior can shape and taint the Secret Service. Under Nixon, the president and his aides displayed an arrogance toward the Service that hurt its morale and mission.
In 1969 and 1970, Nixon’s lawyer and staff had pressured the Secret Service to approve and pay for pricey purchases and renovations at Nixon’s private San Clemente and Key Biscayne homes. By having the Service label the expenses as necessary for security, Nixon was able to get taxpayers to buy new den furniture and fabrics to freshen the décor of his California estate. He also got them to pay for a new sewer line and new heating system in his home in Key Biscayne and to restore a crumbling gazebo his wife enjoyed because it overlooked the ocean. Nixon and his close friend Bebe Rebozo owned homes near each other in Key Biscayne; Nixon aides asked the Secret Service to pay for a helipad and docking equipment for Rebozo’s yacht, and a “booster transformer” to help power a sauna bath in the friend’s home, according to work orders.
One of the president’s legal assistants bragged at her success in getting a new exhaust fan for the house fireplace labeled a security expense when Nixon complained it didn’t draft properly. “Ken Iacovone informed me that SS would pay for the installation of the fireplace fan after I informed him that it definitely was placed for security purposes and how would he like it if you know who was asphyxiated ever,” she wrote.
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DIRECTOR ROWLEY, CONCERNED about the expenses added to his agency’s tab, privately pleaded with the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee responsible for overseeing the Secret Service’s budget to visit San Clemente with him, but the chairman never found the time. “I think what he was trying to tell me is that the White House hot shots were trying to get him to take the rap for a whole lot of imprudent spending,” Democratic representative Tom Steed of Oklahoma told Washington columnist Jack Anderson in July 1973. “They were trying to put the rat on poor old Rowley’s back.”
Nixon also tried to use the Service to help him stage political theater. More than once, he ordered agents to remove protesters from speeches.
The most dangerous example unfolded on a visit to San Jose on October 29, 1970. Nixon and his staff infuriated agents by trying to provoke demonstrators crowded outside the civic center, where Nixon was giving a speech in support of Republicans, including Governor Ronald Reagan, before the midterm elections.
The agents had learned in the days before the event that White House staff hoped to gin up unflattering photographs of an unruly mob in order to generate public sympathy for Nixon and the Republicans. Larry Newman, an agent working on the advance preparations, listened incredulously in the hotel bar as a White House aide described the plan to bring in “dummy” demonstrators to appear violent and damage property. “If you do that, you’re going to get people hurt, and we’re going to arrest you,” Newman said. “Look, don’t even try it.”
When Nixon arrived for his 7 p.m. speech, a crowd of more than a thousand had gathered outside. Most were San Jose State students who had migrated to the civic center after participating in a peaceful antiwar rally nearby. Mixed in were some others picketing the valley’s high unemployment rate, as well as some militant activists. There was also a large overflow crowd of people who couldn’t get tickets to attend the Nixon speech. This motley crew held signs, chanted, and generally waited for the president to emerge.
