Nixon's Secrets

The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon

Roger Stone, Mike Colapietro

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781632200600
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"We appreciate Roger Stone, he is one tough cookie." - President Trump

Learn the inside scoop on Watergate, the Ford Pardon, and the 18 ½ minute Gap.

Roger Stone, The New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Killed Kennedy—the Case Against LBJ, gives the inside scoop on Nixon’s rise and fall in Watergate in his new book Nixon’s Secrets. Stone charts Nixon’s rise from election to Congress in 1946 to the White House in 1968 after his razor-thin loss to John Kennedy in 1960, his disastrous campaign for Governor of California in 1962 and the greatest comeback in American Presidential history.

“Just as the assassination of JFK prevents a balanced analysis of Kennedy and his times, the myth of Watergate prevents a reappraisal of our 37th President.” said Stone who’s book on LBJ was the second biggest selling book during the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder.

Stone reveals how the Kennedy’s wiretapped Nixon’s hotel room the night before the Nixon-Kennedy debate, and stole Nixon's medical records from his psychiatrist’s office. Stone lays out how Kennedy running mate Lyndon Johnson stole Texas from JFK through vote fraud while Mayor Richard Daley stole Illinois, and how JFK actually lost the popular vote.

Stone looks at the Nixon Presidency: the desegregation of the public schools, the progressive social programs, Nixon's struggle to end the war in Vietnam, the historic SALT arms reduction agreement with Russia, the saving of Israel in the Six Days War, the opening to China, and the disastrous decision to take America off the Gold standard.

“The mainstream media’s interpretation of the facts surrounding the Watergate episode are a fantastic and grotesque distortion of historical truth,” said Stone. “Cursory examination of the facts in Watergate will reveal that the actions which caused the fall of Nixon cannot be reduced to the simplistic account summarized by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post.”

The author outlines how White House Counsel John Dean, planned, pushed and covered-up the Watergate break-in , then sought to avoid responsibility for it. Stone examines the bungled Watergate break-in to determine what exactly Nixon’s agents were looking for and how the CIA infiltrated the burglar team and sabotaged the break-in to gain leverage over Nixon. Find out why Nixon demanded the CIA turn over the records of the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy Assassination.

Learn how a cabal of military and intelligence hard-liners spied on and
undermined Nixon to stop his pro-peace détente foreign policy, his withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, his arms limitation agreement with the Soviets, and his opening to Red China. Discover how Vice President Spiro Agnew was setup to move him out of the line of presidential succession.

Stone makes the compelling case that General Alexander Haig orchestrated Nixon’s removal from office in a coup d’état and brokered the deal for his pardon. Finally the public will learn what is on the 18 ½ minute gap in the White House Tapes.

Stone, a Washington Insider for forty years, outlines why FBI Man Mark Felt is not deep throat, why there is no deep throat, and why Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein lie about it even today.

Stone reveals how Nixon used the dark secrets he knew to avoid prosecution by blackmailing Gerald Ford for a full, free and unconditional pardon. Nixon’s secret would not only destroy his presidency—it would save him from prison and allow him to launch his final comeback—advising President Bill Clinton on Foreign Affairs despite Hillary’s attempts to block him and her being fired from the 1974 House Impeachment Committee for lying and violating Nixon’s rights.

CHAPTER ONE

THE MAN

Crucial to Nixon’s comeback were the tumultuous events of the 1960s, which created the vacuum he would fill. Nixon created a dynamic that made the return of Richard Nixon to power possible. To his credit, Nixon was well prepared when this vacuum occurred. A meticulous brooder, given to enormous self-analysis, Nixon had carefully promoted his public image and had used his stature as a former vice president and foreign policy expert to stay in the public eye. At the same time, he clearly saw the need for a “New Nixon,” better press relations, and an entirely different manner of communicated to American voters.

Above all, Nixon was extraordinarily disciplined, while at the same time stiff, formal, and seemingly uncomfortable in his own skin. His appetite for hard work was extraordinary. He paid careful attention to what he ate, opting for a healthy diet long before that became popular. He had a solemn rule of eating only half of whatever was on his plate. He exercised religiously and essentially kept the same weight from the time he was forty-five years old until his death. His chief of staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman would call Nixon’s discipline “unnatural.” Although he hated campaigning, he did it with gusto and focus, carefully honing his words and messages and fencing with the press. From 1952 until 1969, he traveled literally millions of miles on the road on behalf of Republican causes and candidates. Nixon would spend more than 250 days a year on the road carefully tending the party gardens and garnering IOUs.

While he famously listened to Victory at Sea and Richard Rodgers, Nixon would also have classical music piped in to his New York study and later the White House, which he would listen to while reading. He smoked a pipe. He had an extensive knowledge of wine and an excellent cellar. He wore reading glasses but was virtually never photographed in them. This of course does not fit the common perception of him as a middle-class boob of pedestrian tastes, a man JFK said “had no class.”

Also, while many thought Nixon had “ice water in his veins,” he could show what one aide would call “a subliminal sentimental streak.” Nixon aide James Bassett remembered meeting Nixon for lunch on the Upper East Side. Nixon was carrying a wrapped package. “It’s a doll,” he said.

“For Julie and Tricia?” Bassett asked.

Nixon frowned. “No, it is actually for a little crippled kid I read about in the paper this morning. She is in a charity hospital. It said she wanted a doll. So I am going to drop this off after we are finished.” Bassett noted that it would be a good story for the press. “If you leak this to the newspaper,” he said, “I will cut your balls off.”1

* * *

Ironically, it was Nixon’s deep secrets that would plant the seeds of his downfall and provide the leverage to avoid federal prosecution and jail. The terrible secrets of Richard Nixon not only guaranteed his tumble from supreme power, but also would assure his own survival and lay the groundwork for his final public rehabilitation, which reached its zenith at the time of his death.

Twenty years after his death, the public remains fascinated with Richard Milhous Nixon. His mawkish and uncomfortable mannerisms and political persistence generated the pop culture persona of the most durable American political leader of the last third of the century. Nixon’s extreme features, heavy jowls, and stiff manner made him a magnet for caricature and satire at the hands of the counterculture. Headshops featured black-light posters of Nixon and Agnew depicted as Hells Angels bikers. Nixon bongs and pipes were readily available. One outfit in San Francisco even produced Tricky Dick rolling papers. Impressionists David Frey, Rich Little, and Randy Credico would imitate the thirty-seventh president. His dark eyebrows, five-o’clock shadow, and V for victory sign were all parts of a public persona of Nixon reflected in the brutal cartoons of the Washington Post’s Herblock. “Here he comes,” a party chieftain said in one iconic cartoon as Herblock drew Nixon climbing out of a manhole from the sewer.

Yet, Nixon had what all truly successful politicians had: the gift of charisma. As a young man his black-Irish coloring and intense eyes made him handsome despite his oversized head and ski-jump nose that would later serve cartoonists so well. As Nixon matured, his features changed. As his hairline receded, the Nixonian widows peak became more pronounced. His face was darkly lined and jowly. Somehow these changes made Nixon more, not less, compelling. Even as Nixon’s face aged, his smile remained sunny and dazzling, particularly in contrast to his otherwise stern manner. His staff and peers found his presence utterly commanding.

Nixon was a man of contradictions, both great and flawed, both good and bad. He had the loftiest of ideals, but sometimes used the shabbiest of methods. He was a loner, a striver. He could be transparent or opaque in his motives. He could be amazingly blunt or quite equally duplicitous. He could be both perceptive and naive. When he asked me why a former high-level Eisenhower administration official who had often escorted Rose Mary Woods had never married her and I told him the gentleman was gay, he was shocked.

In his book, Don Fulsom, who claims that Nixon was gay and that he and Bebe Rebozo were lovers, is wide of the mark. The charge is false. I saw Nixon’s reaction when I told him one of his aides who wore flamboyant jewelry was gay. He was stunned.

In fact, Nixon could be quite naive. In the late 1950s, the US State Department made jazz great Louis Armstrong a “goodwill ambassador” and underwrote a series of concert tours in Europe and Asia. On his return from the first two tours, based on Satchmo’s ambassadorial status, Armstrong and his entourage were waived through customs without a search. Yet, upon a later return, upon landing at Idlewild Airport in New York in 1958, he was directed to the customs lines. Custom agents had been tipped off that contraband was being imported into the country. Armstrong joined a long line of travelers lined up for inspections. Unfortunately, the jazz trumpeter was carrying three pounds of marijuana in his suitcase. Once Armstrong realized he was about to be busted and would bring shame on the country he was traveling on behalf of, he began sweating profusely.

Just then the doors swung open and Vice President Richard Nixon, in step with his security detail, swept in the room followed by a gaggle of reporters and photographers. Nixon, seeing an opportunity for a wire photo with Armstrong, went up to the jazz man and said, “Satchmo, what are you doing here?”

“Well, Pops [Armstrong called everyone Pops], I just came back from my goodwill ambassador’s tour of Asia, and they told me I had to stand in this line for customs.”

Nixon grabbed both of Satchmo’s suitcases and said, “Ambassadors don’t have to go through customs, and the vice president of the United States will gladly carry your bags for you.” Whereupon Nixon “muled” three pounds of pot through United States Customs without ever knowing it.

When Nixon was told what happened by Charles McWhorter, who served as a traveling aide to Nixon (who heard the tale from one of the jazz musicians traveling with Satchmo), a startled Nixon exclaimed, “Louie smokes marijuana?”2

Nixon had a passion for secrecy and compartmentalizing his dealings. He could play twenty different hands of political poker with none of the other players aware that there were other games going on or who was playing or being played.

No one knew everything about Nixon. His own campaign manager and advisor, Attorney General John Mitchell did not know that Nixon, as vice president, had approved a CIA alliance with organized crime to assassinate Fidel Castro until 1971, three years after Nixon was elected president. This alliance, known as Operation 40, would morph into the Kennedy assassination. Nixon was familiar with many of the CIA operatives involved. The assassination stemmed from the CIA’s deep hatred of John Kennedy in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Nixon was a shrewd judge of his adversaries and ever-shifting allies.

He was in awe of Jack Kennedy but said LBJ was an “animal,”3 Gerald Ford was a “dumb-shit,”4 Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, who helped fund Nixon’s election to the US Senate, a “crook,” called Bobby Kennedy a “little SOB,”5 and said Teddy Kennedy was the “best politician in the family,”6 all the while searching for dirt to use to end Teddy’s career. He said Nancy Reagan was “a bitch”7 and that Ronald Reagan “made it look easy.” 8 Nixon was a shrewd judge of his adversaries and ever-shifting allies.

Particularly, his appetite for work both physical and intellectual was prodigious, but both were less than his love of intrigue, intelligence, and gossip. His appetite for political intelligence was voracious. We spoke every Saturday morning on the telephone at 10:30 a.m. He would invariably start the conversation by saying, “Is this a good time?” as if anyone would turn down an hour’s conversation with one of the most intriguing and reviled men in the world. I carried memos to the White House and an endless stream of verbal messages to senators, governors, and congressmen. Having served as a House member, he was always interested in the rising stars of the House. “Who are the nut-cutters?” he would ask. “Tell them Nixon says . . .,” he would instruct. He wanted the dope on everybody, “who’s screwing whom” and who had talent. He was never impressed, but would become a steadfast supporter and back-channel advisor once the Gipper got to the White House. First Lady Nancy Reagan was careful to listen on the bedroom extension to the extensive phone conversations between her husband and Nixon. It was Nixon who would persuade Reagan to appoint General Alexander Haig as secretary of state.

“Richard Nixon’s comeback . . . is a story of determination, perseverance, and political brilliance almost unseen in US politics,” said former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan. “Nixon not only survived and recovered, but went out to revive, unite, and led to victory a Republican party which in 1965 and 1966 had been outnumbered two-to-one in both Houses of Congress. His 1968 victory, which began a string of five Republican triumphs in six straight presidential elections, was little short of miraculous.”9 Nixon’s presence on five national tickets would be surpassed only by Franklin Roosevelt, and only because he ran unsuccessfully for vice president in 1920.

Although late to see the GOP’s lurch to the right under Goldwater and the power shift in the party from the eastern establishment to the Sunbelt conservatives, once he comprehended it, Nixon would court and nail down the right as a prelude to his comeback bid.

No review of Nixon’s life can be complete without an understanding of his tortured relationship with the medium of television. Skillful use of television would save Nixon’s skin in the effective Checkers speech of 1952, destroy his chances after the disastrous first debate with JFK in 1960, and lead many to give him up for dead after the televised meltdown of 1962. His mastery and control of the medium would both pave the way for 1968 comeback as well as provide the televised backdrop for his fall in Watergate in 1974. “The American people don’t believe anything’s real until they see it on television,” Nixon would tell me.10

His discomfort in his own skin, physical gracelessness, caricaturist’s dream features, and a propensity to sweat and appear shifty on TV made his mastery of the medium all the more compelling. In doing so he would change how the game of presidential politics was played, this change most recently evident in the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in 2012.

Nixon was an introvert in an extrovert’s business. Painfully shy, private, and reserved, alcohol would prove a social lubricant. It was only after a few cocktails that his tongue would loosen and he would become loquacious. It was then that I would learn some of Nixon’s darkest secrets.

* * *

Late one night while working with speechwriter William Safire, Nixon pondered his greatest character trait. Safire recalled that “Nixon tried to encapsulate his more recent predecessors in a single word or phrase: ‘Truman—a fighter. Eisenhower—a good man. Kennedy—charisma. Johnson—work. Me—what?’ I did not have a good answer that night in 1970; I do now. Nixon—an inspiring resilience.”11

One thing was for sure, by 1962, according to virtually every pundit, Nixon was done in politics. These men and women did not count on Nixon’s resilience. “I, Richard Nixon, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” said Nixon on January 22, 1969. Only six years after his California self-immolation, Richard Milhous Nixon finally grabbed the elusive prize that had narrowly evaded his grasp in 1960 and appeared hopelessly out of reach after 1962. He staged the greatest comeback in American political history.

Nixon’s razor-thin loss to JFK scalded him and sent him into a deep depression. Getting worked over by the efficient Kennedy machine with their hardball tactics and Madison Avenue imagery, Nixon self-managed a defensive, unfocused campaign, driving him to the brink of collapse with fatigue. More importantly he let Kennedy dominate the dialogue and with it, the outcome. Lost in history, though, is the fact that JFK was stalled in the polls in the closing weeks and Nixon’s superhuman effort was closing the gap. The late movement in the polls was in favor of Nixon. He triumphed in the last three of the four debates. Contrary to the conventional history, the TV audience grew in the last of the four debates and virtually matched that of the first.12 It was considered Nixon’s best debate. Nixon closed fast but not fast enough . . . or did he? As we shall discover, voter irregularities in Illinois and Texas probably cheated Nixon out of his come-from-behind victory. In addition, a case can be made that Nixon actually won the popular vote while losing the Electoral College.

“They say RN is paranoid,” Nixon’s veteran advance man Nick Ruwe told me. “You’d be paranoid too if the presidency had been stolen from you.”

Nixon would drive himself to nervous exhaustion in his effort to catch and pass Kennedy. Kennedy paced himself while his wealthy father paid for an outstanding professional staff and media campaign. “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes,” the elder ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Nixon’s the One!
• Chapter One: The Man
• Chapter Two: “Your Good Dog”
• Chapter Three: Murray and the Mob
• Chapter Four: The Great Train Robbery
• Chapter Five: Ike and Dick
• Chapter Six: Stolen
• Chapter Seven: “California Needs a Decisive Leader”
• Chapter Eight: The Wilderness Years
• Chapter Nine: The Bright Young Men
• Chapter Ten: The Big Enchilada and Rise of the Merchandisers
• Chapter Eleven: The Comeback
• Chapter Twelve: Plastic and Steel
• Chapter Thirteen: A New Beginning
• Chapter Fourteen: The Break-ins
• Chapter Fifteen: Gemstone
• Chapter Sixteen: Nixon and the Bushes
• Chapter Seventeen: Woodstein
• Chapter Eighteen: “Pardon Me”
• Chapter Nineteen: Fighting For His Legacy
• Photo Insert
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index