Same As It Ever Was

by digby

In light of today’s predictable revelations that the administration is spying on the press, Rick Perlstein has given me permission to publish an excerpt from his forthcoming book “Nixonland”.

The trust in President Nixon might have been shaken somewhat on Day 101, when the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee repeated something he first said in October of 1966: time to declare victory and go home. “Common sense should tell us that we have now accomplished our purpose as far as South Vietnam is concerned,” Vermont’s George Aiken proclaimed. It was time for an “orderly withdrawal.” It might have been shaken more on May 9, when after six straight days with nothing on the front page of the New York Times about the fighting in Vietnam, a tiny item in the bottom right corner obscured by a feature on Governor Rockefeller’s collection of primitive art revealed that bombing was taking place in Cambodia.

In a May 14 [1969] TV speech from the White House the president announced, “The time is approaching when the South Vietnamese will be able to take over some of the fighting fronts now being manned by Americans.” Columnists vied with each other to predict the draw-down numbers: 50,000, 100,000, even 200,000. He also offered simultaneous mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese forces (He counted on short memories, having charged of LBJ’s non-simultaneous withdrawal proposal in 1966, “Communist victory would most certainly be the result of ‘mutual withdrawal.'”) It came the week Gallup made phone calls for its polls released June 1. That poll gave him an approval rating of 65 percent. Maybe, a nonplussed public concluded, if any had noticed the Time’s dispatch, Cambodian bombing was what it took to bring the horses into the barn.

Henry Kissinger was not nonplussed. On the morning of the 9th, a Germanic screech rang out from the porch of the Key Biscayne Hotel:

“Outrageous! Outrageous…. We must crush these people! We must destroy them!”

He referred to the Secretaries of Defense and State, whose offices he suspected had leaked the existence of Operation Menu to the New York Times. He rang up Melvin Laird, pulling him off the golf course at Burning Tree Country Club: “You son of a bitch!” (Laird hung up.) Or maybe it had come from the NSC office in the basement of the White House. “If anybody leaks anything, I will do the leaking,” he had told his people at one of their first meetings. The thought of a runaway staff was enraging — not just for diplomatic reasons but for what it suggested to the security-besotted bulldogs around Nixon about an NSC top-heavy with Harvard grads and Kennedy vets.

Kissinger’s rage had been building at leaks since an early April New York Times piece appeared anticipating troop pullouts. It flared in May, when the Times’ Pentagon correspondent reported modifications in nuclear strategy being considered by the Pentagon, then of administration deliberations over the North Korean spy plane shoot-down.

The Cambodia article wasn’t even damning. It was flattering. The point of “Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested” was how nicely the Cambodian government was cooperating with the U.S. military. It concluded that “there is no Administration interest at this time in extending the ground war into Cambodia or Laos.” It might not have even been based on leaks: a London reporter had made aerial photographs of bomb craters close enough to the border to raise suspicions, and the Times’ enterprising reporter had gone to check things out.

That wasn’t the point. The point was that they feared the White House’s secrets were being betrayed.

Kissinger called J. Edgar Hoover and told him it was time to move forward on a project they had discussed: wiretaps of the homes and offices of NSC staffers Morton Halperin, Daniel Davidson, and Helmut Sonnefeldt; of Melvin Laird; and of Secretary Laird’s senior military assistant. Thus did the FBI learn about things like Mrs. Halperin’s concern for the surgery of a relative in New York, and the three Halperin boys’ favorite playmates–and that when reporters asked Mr. Halperin to leak Kissinger statements, he steadfastly refused. The tap on Mel Laird was more productive: Kissinger drew a bead on the activities of a hated bureacratic rival. What he didn’t find was any leakers. So the program was extended, on May 20, with wiretaps on two more NSC staffers.

A reporter was next. This time, however, it wasn’t Kissinger working through the legal channel of the FBI. It was the President, tapping one of Henry Kissinger’s friends, in a way that Henry Kissinger couldn’t find out. John Ehrlichman knew just the guy: he got John Caulfield, a new addition to the White House staff, a former detective of New York’s version of the Red Squad who had known Nixon since he’d protected him on the campaign trail in 1960. Caulfield called a friend, who’d worked sweeping Nixon’s hotels for bugs during the 1968 campaign. They cased the target’s Georgetown townhouse and told Ehrlichman the job would be very, very difficult. Ehrlichman insisted they go forward, because national security was at stake. So they scrounged up some phone company credentials and shimmied up a pole to affix a bug to the writer’s phone wire.

He was Joseph Kraft, the same journalist who’d lectured his fellow media professionals to stop coddling liberals. Nixon was tapping Kissinger’s favorite journalist friend to keep tabs on the aide who was supposedly closest to him. Which was only fair. Kissinger was working towards opening an entirely separate channel to glean the secrets Nixon might keep from him.

I hesitate to even comment on this; the implications are so painfully obvious. As time goes on, it has become clear that this administration has in essence been nothing more than a GOP mulligan. Nixon: Part Deux.

The claims that these encroachments on civil liberties are benign are disproven by the actions of another Republican administration within my own lifetime. Many of the architects of today’s imperial presidency learned politics and policy in the Nixon era. It’s almost unbelievable that it could play out like this again, in virtually the same way, but it has, even the infighting. It’s a recurring Republican nightmare. They are asking us to ignore history, specifically their own history, and just “trust them.” Why would this country ever be so foolish?

And once again, the establishment press gets hoist with its own petard.

Perlstein’s “Nixonland” will be released in a few months. about a year. He’ll be taking questions at the second Firedoglake book salon meeting about his Goldwater book, “Before The Storm” next Sunday.

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