Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician 1962-1972

pillbox-hatted ceremonial uniforms.

The press ridiculed the result. The Chicago Daily News was reminded of movie characters from The Student Prince. The Buffalo Evening News thought “even ushers at old-time movie palaces were garbed with greater restraint and better taste.” “Ruritania, D.C.,” scoffed The New York Times.

Mort Allin, in the News Summary, informed Nixon that Newsweek had used a photo from a 1925 movie, The Merry Widow, and that Life used a photo of Emperor Francis Joseph for comparison.

Nixon was defiant. He wrote on the News Summary, “H—I want our staff to take RN’s position on this regardless of their own views—remind them of K’s line—a W.H. staffer does not have independent views on W.H. matter. H—Have Klein take the offensive on the slovenly W.H. police we found.” Happily for the police, his defiance didn’t last, and soon they were back in less colorful uniforms.

His rage against the press did last. When John Gardner criticized his budget, Nixon wrote: “H & E—He is to be completely cut off from now on. This is an order.”

When Walter Cronkite was quoted by Allin in a critical remark, Nixon circled his name and scribbled furiously, “A Nothing!” He didn’t much like Cronkite’s competitor, either; at his insistence, Jeb Magruder mounted a campaign to discredit David Brinkley, including such actions as having Don Kendall of Pepsi-Cola, an old Nixon friend and client, complain to the NBC corporate heads about Brinkley.

Hugh Sidey was another target. “H—I’m inclined to think Sidey is under orders,” Nixon wrote on one report. “No Contact with him for 30 days will shake him—order this to all hands.”12 When Sidey mentioned in a column Nixon’s lavish private homes and his wealthy friends, Nixon commented, “Freeze him completely for 60 days.”13 He also instructed Magruder to “initiate some letters to the editor comparing RN with LBJ, Ike, and JFK on this score.”

The obsession with the press and PR in the Nixon White House was never ending. On February 27, after his morning conference with the President, Haldeman sent a note to the staff. He began, “There is a need for some cold, tough decisions regarding the amount of time spent being king vs. that spent as leader of the government. Perhaps we should consider a drastic shift—reducing the ‘king’ time to a bare minimum. We also have to recognize that some of the time has to be spent just in being a nice person.”

(Ten years earlier Ann Whitman, Ike’s secretary, had observed in her diary, “The Vice-President [Nixon] sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.”)

Haldeman went on to call for some “deep thinking” about the presentation of the President, “recognizing always that it actually gets down to what is the best television.”

Nixon loved television, especially when he could use it to speak directly to the people from the majesty of the Oval Office, with all three networks carrying his speech on prime time (after the networks caught on and began dividing up the chore, with two showing their regular programs, Nixon’s ratings sank, and he cut back drastically on his TV time).

Nixon also brought Caspar Weinberger and John Ehrlichman in on his plans. On September 20, at Camp David, he subjected them to a two-hour monologue on how things were going to change after he got his mandate. He wanted Weinberger to prepare a radically austere budget for fiscal 1973. He wanted Ehrlichman to get cracking on the reorganization, not only of departments (Nixon wanted to reduce the Cabinet to eight departments; there would be four new ones, Economic Affairs, Human Resources, Natural Resources, and Community Development, plus four traditional ones, State, Defense, Justice, and Treasury) but by finding new people to replace the current officeholders.

NIXON’S ANTICIPATED MANDATE not only strengthened his tough-guy and mean-streak attitude toward McGovern and the Democrats, and toward his own Cabinet and the federal bureaucracy,...

...whereas Eisenhower downplayed the importance of the press, Nixon exaggerated it; whereas Ike wooed the press, Nixon went to war with it.
NIXON’S HATREDS extended far beyond the reporters. He was constantly railing at “they,” threatening to “get them.”
One day late in the first term, Nixon was sitting around with Kissinger, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson. They were discussing some of Nixon’s enemies (in this case, antiwar Democratic senators). Nixon said, “One day we will get them—we’ll get them on the ground where we want them. And we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist—right. Chuck, right?”

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As President, Nixon had struck back at his perceived enemies by going outside the law. He had used illegal wiretaps and other forms of electronic surveillance to spy on government employees and newspaper reporters. The Justice Department, at his urging, had undertaken a widespread program of bugging and infiltrating radical groups (which was declared illegal in June 1972). Nixon created, set the tone for, and gave the objectives to the Plumbers, an unauthorized, unknown intelligence-gathering and covert-operation unit operating from within the White House. It was in an atmosphere established and encouraged by Nixon that agents of the President of the United States made forcible illegal entries into Dr. Fielding’s office in Los Angeles, and Larry O’Brien’s office at the Watergate in Washington, in the first instance to try to steal material that would incriminate or embarrass Daniel Ellsberg, in the second instance to leave a bug that would allow Nixon’s people to listen to O’Brien’s phone conversations.