Read Online One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner - Free Book Online
Authors: Tim Weiner
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was under pressure to show nobody on his staff” was leaking information. “Here he was in this room with J. Edgar Hoover, John Mitchell, Richard Nixon, and they’re saying, ‘Let’s do some taps.’”
On the morning of May 9, Kissinger called Hoover, furious over a front-page story in the New York Times. The reporter, William Beecher, based at the Pentagon, had filed a careful report stating that B-52s had struck several of the enemy’s camps inside Cambodia. No public outcry resulted. No congressional hearings ensued. What was really happening—a massive attack on a neutral nation, concealed by falsified Pentagon reports—did not come out until 1973. *
Kissinger told Hoover that the Times story was “extraordinarily damaging” and “dangerous.” He hoped Hoover would help him “destroy whoever did this” by wiretapping reporters and their suspected sources at the NSC, the Pentagon, and the State Department; Kissinger would select the targets. The taps also remained secret until 1973. Their targets included thirteen American government officials and four newspaper reporters. Daily summaries of the White House wiretaps went from the FBI to the president’s closest aides. This continued for twenty months—until Nixon installed his own secret taping system in the White House.
The taps revealed nothing but “gossip and bullshitting,” as Nixon inelegantly put it on his own tapes. “The tapping was a very, very unproductive thing. I’ve always known that.” But it was Nixon’s first clear step over the line of the law. The president could order warrantless wiretaps against suspected foreign spies. But these were American citizens. Nixon and Kissinger later argued that the tapping was within the realm of the president’s national security powers. It was not.
Some of the targets of the taps had long assumed they were spied upon by foreign intelligence services. “But I didn’t think it was being done by the White House,” said Ambassador William H. Sullivan, a distinguished diplomat who helped Kissinger open a secret channel of communication with the leaders of North Vietnam. When Sullivan later found out that his own government was tapping him, he assumed that Nixon had ordered the surveillance in a fit of drunken rage. “It probably came from Nixon personally,” Sullivan said. “He was given to exploding—particularly in the course of an evening—if he had had a few drinks.” Sober or not, Nixon had “an almost paranoid fear that people were not trustworthy,” said Col. Richard Thomas Kennedy, the National Security Council’s staff director for planning and coordination from 1969 to 1974.
Winston Lord, one of Kissinger’s most devoted aides, was among those tapped. “You cannot square a personal friendship and total trust and intimacy with his authorizing of tapping your phone,” Lord later reflected. “You can’t run a government that way.”
Nixon’s spying on Americans went far beyond these taps, as a National Security Agency history declassified in 2013 disclosed. An NSA “watch list” began growing in October 1967, the result of LBJ’s suspicions that antiwar activists were being financed by Moscow. It kept growing under Nixon: sixteen hundred Americans appeared on the list by 1973. The official NSA history states bluntly that the program was “disreputable if not outright illegal.”
The NSA is a military intelligence service whose charter was to target foreign spies and suspected terrorists, not American citizens who questioned the president’s foreign policies. The watch list was an antecedent to the far more extensive NSA surveillance program ordered by President George W. Bush; the distinct difference was the direct targeting of high-profile American citizens as opposed to high-value foreign terrorists.
The NSA history notes that the watch list grew to include the Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald and New York Times journalist Tom Wicker—both fired
On the morning of May 9, Kissinger called Hoover, furious over a front-page story in the New York Times. The reporter, William Beecher, based at the Pentagon, had filed a careful report stating that B-52s had struck several of the enemy’s camps inside Cambodia. No public outcry resulted. No congressional hearings ensued. What was really happening—a massive attack on a neutral nation, concealed by falsified Pentagon reports—did not come out until 1973. *
Kissinger told Hoover that the Times story was “extraordinarily damaging” and “dangerous.” He hoped Hoover would help him “destroy whoever did this” by wiretapping reporters and their suspected sources at the NSC, the Pentagon, and the State Department; Kissinger would select the targets. The taps also remained secret until 1973. Their targets included thirteen American government officials and four newspaper reporters. Daily summaries of the White House wiretaps went from the FBI to the president’s closest aides. This continued for twenty months—until Nixon installed his own secret taping system in the White House.
The taps revealed nothing but “gossip and bullshitting,” as Nixon inelegantly put it on his own tapes. “The tapping was a very, very unproductive thing. I’ve always known that.” But it was Nixon’s first clear step over the line of the law. The president could order warrantless wiretaps against suspected foreign spies. But these were American citizens. Nixon and Kissinger later argued that the tapping was within the realm of the president’s national security powers. It was not.
Some of the targets of the taps had long assumed they were spied upon by foreign intelligence services. “But I didn’t think it was being done by the White House,” said Ambassador William H. Sullivan, a distinguished diplomat who helped Kissinger open a secret channel of communication with the leaders of North Vietnam. When Sullivan later found out that his own government was tapping him, he assumed that Nixon had ordered the surveillance in a fit of drunken rage. “It probably came from Nixon personally,” Sullivan said. “He was given to exploding—particularly in the course of an evening—if he had had a few drinks.” Sober or not, Nixon had “an almost paranoid fear that people were not trustworthy,” said Col. Richard Thomas Kennedy, the National Security Council’s staff director for planning and coordination from 1969 to 1974.
Winston Lord, one of Kissinger’s most devoted aides, was among those tapped. “You cannot square a personal friendship and total trust and intimacy with his authorizing of tapping your phone,” Lord later reflected. “You can’t run a government that way.”
Nixon’s spying on Americans went far beyond these taps, as a National Security Agency history declassified in 2013 disclosed. An NSA “watch list” began growing in October 1967, the result of LBJ’s suspicions that antiwar activists were being financed by Moscow. It kept growing under Nixon: sixteen hundred Americans appeared on the list by 1973. The official NSA history states bluntly that the program was “disreputable if not outright illegal.”
The NSA is a military intelligence service whose charter was to target foreign spies and suspected terrorists, not American citizens who questioned the president’s foreign policies. The watch list was an antecedent to the far more extensive NSA surveillance program ordered by President George W. Bush; the distinct difference was the direct targeting of high-profile American citizens as opposed to high-value foreign terrorists.
The NSA history notes that the watch list grew to include the Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald and New York Times journalist Tom Wicker—both fired
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