Being Nixon : A Man Divided by Thomas Evan

Author:Thomas, Evan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2015-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Department of Dirty Tricks

John Dean drove a Porsche, liked cocktails and attractive women—he once used the White House switchboard to track down a woman who had refused to give him her phone number—and was quick-witted and eager to please. In his memoir Blind Ambition, Dean recalled his job interview with H. R. Haldeman: “I watched as he checked me out and saw a reflection of his own taste in clothes. I was wearing black wing-tip shoes; he was wearing brown wing-tips. He had on a white button-down collar shirt; mine was blue. My suit was as conservative as his. Later I discovered that he and I shopped at the same men’s store in Washington.”1

Nixon liked having sharply dressed, alert young men on his staff. He wanted to surround himself with youth and can-do vigor. He had seen the way President Eisenhower brought along promising young men, including himself, readying them for greater responsibility. Eisenhower had kept watch on his young charges, and if they failed to live up to his expectations, he had them removed. But Nixon lacked Ike’s cold-blooded adroitness as a manager.

Though he periodically threatened to cut federal agencies in half, Nixon did not like to fire anyone. He kept around old hangers-on. One was Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s tutor in “rock ’em, sock ’em” politics, who was tainted by an influence peddling scandal in the mid-1950s but still gave Nixon behind-the-scenes political advice.

The brand-new White House counsel ran into Chotiner on his first visit to the White House Mess in July 1970. Still uncertain about his duties, Dean was puzzling over what to do about an “action memorandum” that had landed on his desk. The subject was: “Request that you rebut the recent attack on the Vice President.” An attached “confidential memo” explained that a new muckraking magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly had published a bogus memo linking Spiro Agnew with a secret plan to cancel the 1972 election and repeal the Bill of Rights. Dean had inquired about the “action memo” directive in Haldeman’s office and learned that it had come straight from President Nixon. Reading his morning news summary, the president was often inspired to write notes in the margin demanding action.2 But what action? The word came back from the president: “It was requested that as part of this inquiry you should have the Internal Revenue Service conduct a field investigation on the tax front.”

In his memoirs, Dean claimed that he was troubled about opening a tax audit of a publication just because it had published a scurrilous article. So, as he ate lunch at the White House Mess, he asked his new acquaintance Murray Chotiner, an old hand at this sort of thing, what he should do. Bemused, Chotiner responded, “I tell you this, if Richard Nixon thinks it’s necessary you’d better think it’s necessary. If you don’t, he’ll find someone who does.”3 Dean was learning from an old hand, but the wrong lesson. Eager to get ahead, Dean did not realize that when the president gave an outrageous order, he often expected it to be ignored.

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