One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner Read Free Book Online Page A

consistently a martinet, Haig worshipped Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the vainglorious commander relieved for insubordination by President Truman during the Korean War. In 2007, Haig called him “the greatest military man I had ever met.” Like his hero, Haig was a rarity in American history: a political general.
    He had a unique way with words, a never-ending battle between politics and the English language. A classic example: “I’ll have to caveat my response, Senator.” Caveat is Latin for “let him beware.” In English, it is a noun meaning “warning.” In Haigspeak, it signaled he was saying something that might or might not be true.
    Mitchell’s contribution to the White House staff was another man who had his struggles with the truth: John Wesley Dean III, a thirty-one-year-old Justice Department lawyer whom the attorney general had relied on to conduct background briefings for reporters. Dean served as Nixon’s legal counsel and liaison with federal law enforcers. His first assignment from Nixon was to order an IRS tax audit against Scanlan’s , a short-lived satirical monthly magazine that had published a patently absurd article claiming that Vice President Agnew had a secret plan to repeal the Bill of Rights. Using the IRS as a political weapon was at best unethical, arguably a felony. Dean got it done. “I had clearly crossed the line for the first time, and it had been very easy to do,” he said in 2006. “With hindsight, I can see that it was an abuse of presidential power.”
    Dean had replaced John D. Ehrlichman as the White House legal counsel; Ehrlichman was Haldeman’s indispensable man. The two invariably were twinned in the eyes of the public and the press for their rhyming names, their unsmiling demeanors, their Teutonic bearing. But their roles and their characters were utterly different. Haldeman had far more clout as the White House chief of staff. Ehrlichman was not his counterpart in rank or influence. But they relied on each other to make the machinery of the White House hum.
    They had been close friends for more than twenty years, since their days as undergraduates at UCLA after World War II. Haldeman had recruited Ehrlichman as an advance man for Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign, the thankless but vital role of planning and setting up rallies and speeches so a candidate’s days and nights run without disasters.
    Nixon himself had asked Ehrlichman to coordinate the advance work for 1968. Ehrlichman agreed—on one condition. He was “convinced that Nixon’s drinking could cost him any chance of a return to public life.” He had seen Nixon drunk during the 1960 and 1962 campaigns and the 1964 Republican convention, and he made him take the pledge: “If he wanted me to work for him he would lay off the booze.”
    Ehrlichman became the president’s chief adviser on domestic policy, handling the problems the president found the least pressing, such as health care and welfare. His powers were thus limited during Nixon’s first years in office by the president’s lack of interest in the lives of the poor and the dispossessed. But he became essential in Nixon’s campaign for reelection; he called himself the president’s “house detective” in matters of political intrigue. The record reflects that Ehrlichman had daily access to Nixon, a privilege shared only by Kissinger and Haldeman; he met with the president on 1,005 occasions over the course of five years and three months. So he knew Nixon’s mind as well as anyone. And he saw its dark side with clarity.
    “From the first time he ran for office, as a young Congressman, he was engaged in combat,” Ehrlichman said late in his life. “There were them and there was us; and he never ever saw it any differently. He was surrounded by enemies.”

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    “He will let them know who is boss around here”
    N IXON AGONIZED daily over how to use diplomacy and deception, bombast and bombs, in Vietnam. Grasping every