In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time by Leonard Garment

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More than a quarter century after Bob Woodward introduced his Scotch-drinking, cigarette-smoking, garage-skulking friend and source in All the President's Men, the public remains enduringly engrossed by the mystery of Deep Throat's identity. Leonard Garment became fascinated himself and began his own search for Deep Throat. This is the story of that hunt and its successful outcome, a hunt conducted in quintessential Washington fashion: at lunches, dinners, and parties, through the examination of secret, classified documents and testimony, and assisted by liberal doses of political gossip and insider tips from Woodward himself.

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The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time

Copyright © 2001 Leonard Garment
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780465026142

Chapter One

Before Watergate

This book is not a history of Watergate or the events that led up to it. Yet it is impossible to understand Deep Throat's behavior, in life or in literature, without recalling certain features of the Nixon comeback and of the Nixon White House that emerged from the process.

    I first laid eyes on Richard Nixon in 1963, when he moved to New York to join the law firm in which I was a partner. In 1960, he had suffered a defeat at the hands of John F. Kennedy in a close presidential election. The thin margin by which Nixon lost did not make the experience less humiliating for him. A mere two years later, Nixon lost his race for the governorship of California. On the morning after his California defeat, Nixon told a group of assembled journalists that they would not have him to kick around anymore. Many people believed him. Nixon had finally decided, they said, that enough was enough: He would make a new professional life for himself as a lawyer in the private sector.

    In 1963 the Nixons moved to New York, far from Nixon's political roots. The Nixon family even established itself in an apartment on Fifth Avenue in the same building as Nixon's oldpolitical nemesis, Nelson Rockefeller. The choice seemed a sign of both Nixon's new affluence and his banked fires. In honor of Nixon's arrival, my law firm renamed itself, becoming Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. Nixon did his part for the firm, meeting with clients and discussing legal strategy. I even recruited him to make an argument to the Supreme Court, which he did with undisputed distinction.

    The press, lulled by the idea that Nixon had been defanged, cooperated in sounding the theme of his transformation. Journalists claimed to have discerned the emergence of a "new Nixon," a term by which they referred to their discovery that Nixon did not have cloven hooves and a tail and in fact could be a rather pleasant fellow.

    But the notion that Nixon had left politics was quite wrong. From Nixon's conversation during our first meeting in 1963, it was clear to me that he intended to return as soon as possible to the political life from which he had been ejected. Nixon's main activity in New York was the building of a foundation for his re-emergence as a Republican Party leader and presidential candidate.

    Veterans of Nixon's previous campaigns began helping him. Trusted friends like Maurice Stans and Peter Flanigan, both comfortably ensconced by 1963 in the upper reaches of New York's financial community, started building a fundraising infrastructure and making preliminary logistical arrangements for a presidential campaign. On the West Coast, Bob Finch, Nixon's close friend and his manager in the 1960 and 1962 campaigns, stood ready. Finch's two energetic and talented assistants from these campaigns, advertising executive Bob Haldeman and attorney John Ehrlichman, were also waiting, though they had not yet made up their minds about whether to join the campaign and would not do so until after the 1968 primaries.

    At the beginning, in 1963, Nixon's New York political headquarters consisted of his offices at our law firm. There, I became the first of his new recruits. His other helpers were of long standing. One was his wife, Pat, who sometimes appeared at the office to help with the mail. The other was Nixon's secretary, Rose Woods. Rose was lovely, with red hair and creamy skin, and maternal, though she never had children of her own. In those early days, she was much more than Nixon's secretary. She also functioned as his administrative assistant and access controller. She loved the Nixon family with constancy, and they reciprocated.

    Rose came from a political family; her brother, Joe Woods, was then sheriff of Cook County, Illinois. She also had her own political sophistication and shrewdness, as well as a long memory. In 1973, during the worst of Watergate, when I was acting White House counsel and the press had just discovered the 18 1/2-minute gap in Nixon's tapes. I sent Rose a cheery note advising her to get her own lawyer. "Love, Len," I stupidly signed it. She never fully forgave me.

    It did not take long after my self-recruitment to the Nixon campaign before I was joined by other new recruits, because Nixon knew that one of his major jobs in building his new political foundation would be to recruit an enlarged political staff. It is important that while doing this recruiting, Nixon was ensconced in a type of organization—a large, white-shoe Wall Street law firm—that was very different from those he had known before. It cared more about polish and intellectual sophistication, less about ideological and historical loyalties. Partly as a consequence of this new environment, some of the people drawn into Nixon's 1968 campaign were different from those who had staffed his political campaigns in the past and often different from one another.

    Thus Nixon's years in New York turned out to be more than a fueling stop. They brought people into his entourage who made his campaign even more diverse than is usual in such enterprises. Because of the diversity, the 1968 campaign was riven by special kinds of internal clashes and tensions. Once the Nixon administration took office in 1969, the clashes and tensions worsened. These struggles were the breeding ground out of which Deep Throat emerged.

    The polyglot nature of Nixon's new crew suited him very well. First, he wanted competence and was smart enough to know it came in all political colorations. Indeed, though Nixon later became known for his opposition to the counterculture, as a personal matter he was quite ready to deal with people who differed widely by ideology, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, you name it. The readiness stopped abruptly when he received any sign that such people disliked him; but his 1968 campaign reflected his initially open attitude.

    Nixon was also after the "fresh" look that a varied staff connoted. Perhaps the most important advantage of the campaign's early diversity, however, stemmed from the fact that Nixon was not a happy campaign camper. Most of the time he preferred to be left alone to make his own decisions about strategy and issues. These decisions emanated from a coherent view of the world but not an ideologically consistent one. So Nixon did not want a staff that would lock him in ideologically. A politically fragmented group, he calculated, would not be able to apply enough pressure in any one direction to cause him serious discomfort.

    Nixon also wanted to preserve his freedom to alter a particular opinion or position if it was politically expedient for him to do so. He wanted aides who were loyal to him, not to some ideology, and who would stick with him through his shifting policy stances.

    If diversity was what he wanted, diversity was what he got. When it came to Nixon's speechwriters, his balancing act worked pretty well. One of the first staffers to join the group was Pat Buchanan, who arrived shortly after Nixon settled into the firm's offices at 20 Broad Street. Buchanan joined Rose Woods in the small office adjoining Nixon's and started to do all of the nascent campaign's routine political writing—letters, speeches, articles, memos to possible political allies. He was to become one-third of the presidential speechwriting team.

    Buchanan hailed from a Father Coughlin—style, America First family in Washington, D.C. He had been an editorial writer before joining the campaign and could talk about one subject while simultaneously writing about another, pausing in conversation only to rip pages of perfect copy out of his machine. He was quick-tempered and sometimes a bully but a cheerful and witty one.

    As the campaign rolled on, Buchanan became Nixon's one-man right wing. Having done so, Pat never changed—not in the campaign or the White House, not as a columnist and TV personality after Nixon's resignation, and not as a candidate for president (as I write this, it seems that Pat will be the Reform Party's candidate for president in the 2000 election). Most of the large policies that emerged from the Nixon White House, whether on détente, China, desegregation, affirmative action, or welfare, were anathema to Pat's ideology. Buchanan's opposition to recognizing the Communist regime in China was so implacable that Nixon at one point considered cutting him loose over the issue. Yet on one of the Sunday TV shows recently, Buchanan said, with unalloyed, unembarrassed affection, that Richard Nixon was "like a father" to him.

    Ray Price, the second member of Nixon's speechwriting troika in the campaign and the White House, had been editorial page editor of the New York Herald Tribune and the author, in 1964, of the first editorial in the Herald's history that supported the Democratic rather than the Republican candidate for president. This did not make Ray a liberal; he was a sensible, humane Republican. But such details did not matter at the early stage of the campaign. Ray was fresh, moderate, and extremely talented, all those things that spoke well to the press of the "new Nixon."

    It was a telling fact about Nixon that Ray, of all his White House staffers, was the one who became closest to him and most a part of the Nixons' small extended family. Ray was quietly sick about the worst parts of Watergate, but he had also seen a great deal of Nixon at his best. Price wrote Nixon's resignation speech in 1974 and, after Nixon had resigned, continued writing for the former president. He truly remained "with Nixon"—the title of Price's fine memoir—until Nixon's death.

    Bill Safire, the final major member of Nixon's speechwriting team, had floated in and out of Nixon's professional life since the day in 1959 when Safire, working as a public relations man, got then- Vice President Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev together at a display of a "typical" American house in Moscow. The ensuing "kitchen debate" almost won Nixon the presidency in 1960.

    Safire was in those days a connoisseur of technique, not ideology; he could scribble to his political right or left (or both at once) with ease and had an easy back-and-forth relationship with the press. Under Bill's wisecracking manner, however, lay immense self-discipline. During the campaign and in the White House, he would walk into a meeting, take off his watch, and lay it on the table; if the meeting ran longer than it was worth, he would simply walk out. When he stayed, it was often to take notes for his book on the Nixon administration, which he was writing while on the White House staff. The book, titled Before the Fall, would become a major contribution to the Nixon canon.

    The speechwriters managed to work together, well if not always harmoniously, all through the campaign and most of the way through the White House years. With the political operatives, however, the planned creative tension was not so successful.

    I helped create the divided Nixon political staff by becoming one of his major recruiters. In contrast with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who were experienced and therefore cautious about joining the campaign, I was wholly without experience of Nixon past (before meeting him, I was a conventional liberal Democratic Nixon-hater, and not even much of that), and therefore had no qualms about throwing myself into the project of Nixon's future.

    As a long-time trial lawyer, I had acquired the skill of locating expert talent. As a long-time political agnostic, I did not much care about the ideological coloration of that talent. I ran around visiting with everyone from Edward Teller to Dick Gregory, and my recruits were a very mixed ideological bag. In the beginning, this diversity was an advantage, reinforcing the notion of a Nixon who had entered a fresh, non-troglodytic phase.

    A few of the people I unearthed in my political star search were distinguished policy types, such as Martin Anderson and the now-fabled Alan Greenspan. Alan and I first met when we were both jazz musicians playing with Henry Jerome's band. After those early musical days, however, we could not have diverged more sharply. I stayed a jazz musician—always riffing, verbally if not musically. Alan, always mostly silent, with a slight smile on his face, proceeded to direct his attention inward, to the ordering of numbers and economies. I am immensely proud to have been the occasion for his entering public life.

    Mostly, however, I recruited nuts-and-bolts political operators. In this endeavor, one of my greatest small claims to fame was bringing Nixon the young John Sears. Actually, Sears just turned up at my office one day in 1964. He had attended Notre Dame University and Georgetown Law School. His early ambition had been to become a psychiatrist; but during his college years he entered politics, as a partisan of John F. Kennedy. When I met Sears, he was clerking for Judge Adrian Burke of the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, and making the rounds of Manhattan law firms looking for a post-clerkship job. He clearly wanted a place where he could not just practice law but engage in politics as well.

    Then barely twenty-five, Sears was very good looking—tanned, brown-haired, hazel-eyed, glistening like a baby seal. He was also poised and strikingly articulate, one of those young men who seem to know too much for their age. He was impressive enough in that first meeting so that even before it was over, the next step seemed obvious: "Let me introduce you to Mr. Nixon, John." They talked. When Sears and I left Nixon's office, Sears worried about whether he had made a good impression. But shortly afterwards, the candidate phoned me to say, "Get me Sears."

    Sears thereupon joined Nixon Mudge. He worked for me on a variety of legal matters and performed skillfully. But soon Nixon clasped the young man to the bosom of his political family and commandeered his time. Nixon polished Sears's natural political skills, then turned the young man loose to persuade and organize delegates to the Republican convention.

    Sears was also a talented political writer. I saw as much when he worked with me and Bill Safire on the speech Nixon gave at the University of Rochester on academic freedom. Sears would also help me in the development of the campaign's advertising, an enterprise I managed along with Roger Ailes, Frank Shakespeare, and Harry Treleaven.

    In the main, however, I did not see much of Sears during working hours. I did, however, see him many nights. After a day's politicking, he would come to my office at the law firm, where I kept a bottle of Scotch. We drank it straight and smoked cigarette after cigarette. We talked for hours about politics and theology.

    Sears was widely read, from Aristotle to current politics, and full of Catholic metaphysics and Irish charm. He had an intensely psychological approach to political operations. He could also talk about the relationship between the nature of the Triune and the tripartite structure of American government and make it seem both plausible and poetic. Amid our clouds of smoke and Scotch, we plotted and dreamed about winning the presidency. We would go until two in the morning.

    Sears was my favorite among the new Nixon recruits. He was also the favorite of Nixon himself, who gave him a wide variety of jobs to do. Nixon, who had campaigned hard for Republican candidates in 1966, spent election night that year at the Drake Hotel in New York watching the news of Republican victories roll in. Sears, along with Buchanan and Nixon himself, phoned each winning Republican with congratulations. Much later, when Nixon was at home in his apartment, he phoned Sears, still at the Drake, to have the young man read the happy results to him again.

    In 1967, with Nixon still not officially in the race, Sears was one of the two Nixon agents who attended the Republican governors' conference to keep the governors from jumping to other candidates. Sears also spent a large amount of time with the press, especially since the campaign, until June of 1968, did not have a full-time press secretary. Sears quickly acquired friends and admirers among these journalists, who recognized a gifted political analyst when they saw one.

    Sears was also a favorite of Rose Woods. He was often in Rose's office, talking with her and with her office mate, Pat Buchanan. He remained friends with both of them long after the 1968 campaign. In becoming Rose's friend, Sears also became, in due course, the friend of Jack Caulfield. Caulfield was a former New York City policeman who had belonged to the elite unit that protected visiting dignitaries during their visits to the city. In this capacity he met then—Vice President Nixon during the presidential campaign of 1960. Caulfield kept in touch with the Nixon camp during the 1960s and grew especially close to Rose Woods.

    When the 1968 Nixon campaign took shape, Caulfield moved into a security job within the organization. He was a cheering presence within the campaign—New York-tough and a decent, friendly human being. After the election, in April of 1969, Caulfield went to work for John Ehrlichman in the White House. Sears remained friends with Caulfield, too.

    The fact that Sears was a favorite of Nixon and Rose Woods did not, however, make him a favorite of John Mitchell; quite the opposite. Mitchell was another one of my recruits to the campaign. For better or worse, I have the letter to prove it—from President Richard Nixon, thanking me for my suggestion to him in 1968 that Mitchell become his campaign manager. At the time, Mitchell was Nixon's law partner and mine, having merged his law firm into ours.

    Mitchell's old firm had specialized in arranging the bond financing by which states and municipalities build their schools, their bridges, and the political reputations of their governors and mayors. As a result of this specialty, Mitchell knew a vast amount of detail about state and local politics and was heavily involved in political issues. I have always suspected that when he agreed to the merger, he did so partly with an eye to becoming involved in the Nixon campaign.

    Mitchell was his own man from the start, seemingly confident and in command. Indeed, that was a major reason why Nixon chose him as campaign manager. Nixon knew that in his previous two campaigns, he had functioned largely as his own campaign manager and that the blurring of roles between manager and candidate had been one source of the misjudgments that had cost him these elections. Nixon thought that with Mitchell at the head of the campaign organization, there would be no question about who was in charge. In this Nixon was right. Throughout the 1968 campaign, Mitchell managed the organization and the candidate with pipe-smoking imperturbability.

    Mitchell was certainly not a bad man, as the cliché machine painted him during and after Watergate. But Mitchell, in contrast to Sears, knew less about politics than he was thought to know and, more important, considerably less than he should have known. Mitchell was the master of a narrow piece of the political world, municipal financing. From this fact he made the faulty generalization that he was similarly the master of all of politics.

    After the 1968 campaign, Mitchell strode with his overconfidence into his post as attorney general—and into a jungle. Even during the campaign, Mitchell had never opposed Nixon outright, instead trying to divert him and muttering a lot. After the election, Mitchell no longer managed Nixon. Instead, Mitchell was in thrall to Nixon like any other aide, beset by the pervasive anxieties about power that afflict all political subordinates and afflicted Nixon's inner circle with special intensity.

    Mitchell had to compete for Nixon's favor with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger, and much less savory characters in the White House. Yet Mitchell, because he was attorney general, had managerial responsibilities at the Department of Justice and thus had to make his bids in the White House power game from a base half a city away.

    In the process, Mitchell lost his footing long before he fell.

    Intimations of Mitchell's future troubles appeared in the 1968 campaign, where the most pervasive internal battle was between those who believed in political technique above all and those who insisted on the value, intrinsic and instrumental, of ideas in politics. Mitchell's laconic tough-guy stance put him habitually in the camp of the former. More, underneath Mitchell's confident exterior lay a deep unsureness about himself. Therefore he would not brook disagreement. If I had not enjoyed such senior stares in the campaign, he would have treated me as a major antagonist. As it was, Mitchell's insecurity led to flare-ups between him and what must have seemed to the older man like an impossibly self-assured Sears.

    Nixon had a special affection for Sears—as he did for the other young men I recruited to his campaign, like Tom Evans and Bob Ellsworth, later U.S. ambassador to NATO. Because of Sears's particular closeness to Nixon, Mitchell was unable to act brutally enough toward the young man to force him out of the campaign altogether. Mitchell was also unable to keep Sears from building his own relationships with fellow politicians and the press.

    However, Mitchell did what he could. He placed Sears in the noncentral location of the Nixon campaign's Washington office. After the convention, Mitchell assigned Sears the less-than-enviable job of traveling with vice presidential candidate Spiro T. Agnew. The original plan was for Sears to shuttle back and forth between the Nixon and Agnew campaigns, keeping track of Agnew's mouth and maintaining communication between the two operations. But he ended up traveling with Agnew full time.

    Mitchell usually acted in the campaign in alliance with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. It was not that the three men were fond of one another; instead, they were in competition with each other to see who was the toughest, most effective manager.

    In the early, pre-convention days of the 1968 campaign, while we New York—based recruits ran around without much adult supervision, Haldeman and Ehrlichman watched expectantly and apprehensively from the sidelines. The two men still bore wounds from the ill-fated, excruciating Nixon campaigns of 1960 and 1962; they were watching to see how Nixon fared in New York and handled himself in the primaries. They would make their own judgments about whether Nixon could make it. If they decided to join the campaign, they would further determine the terms on which they would get aboard. They intended to run things—and, with the help of Mitchell exercising his campaign manager's prerogatives to keep the candidate in line, they did.

    Haldeman and Ehrlichman must have known going in that despite the good early omens, there remained a major obstacle to their ability to control matters around Nixon; and that was Nixon himself. The portents for 1968 may have been favorable, but Nixon's personality had not fundamentally changed. He would always be tempted to take the controls himself and, in grabbing the reins, perhaps do things dangerous to himself and those close to him. From conversations with Haldeman and Ehrlichman in later years, I have come to think that the two men were quite aware of this danger. They assessed its size and decided to risk it. They were, after all, political men.

    Haldeman, once he decided to join the campaign, became and remained the undisputed top manager in the Nixon entourage. One of those he displaced was Rose Woods, whom he moved outside the advisory circle and tried to assign exclusively to writing letters. Rose responded with a cordial and lasting dislike of Haldeman.

    Haldeman maintained his dominant position, however, because of his intelligence, skill, and thoroughgoing identification with his boss. More accurately, Haldeman identified, as perfectly as any staffer I have known, with the tough exterior that Nixon presented to most of the world. Haldeman's own toughness, in turn, encouraged Nixon to act consistently with this tough self.

    Nixon also had a profoundly emotional, thoughtful interior to which Haldeman did not speak. (Haldeman had his own interior complexity, but never the twain did meet.) It was the walled garden of Nixon's soul, harboring the "goodness" he had taken from his mother, Hannah Milhous Nixon, and other sensitivities. I saw some of this side of Nixon during the 1968 campaign, when Nixon would call me late at night, after all the campaign stops were over, and talk himself to sleep, worrying and meandering in free association.

    Haldeman, convinced that the emotional part of Nixon was dangerously vulnerable, led the men around him in trying to keep the sad, soft side first of the candidate and then of the president under control and to keep Nixon himself talking the cold-blooded language of political instrumentalism. In the 1968 campaign, Haldeman succeeded—barely.

    Ehrlichman was different from Haldeman, more so than the press treatment of the two men recognized. Ehrlichman did not have any personal or political connection of his own to Nixon that placed him in the inner ring of power. Instead, Ehrlichman was, at first, at the center of events simply through his friendship and old school ties with Haldeman. Thus Ehrlichman, as opposed to Haldeman, had to cling to his place in the inner circle by will, wit (which was famously coruscating), and bulk.

    Ehrlichman sustained his morale amidst all this clawing by daring to be decent in small things—not small in policy importance but small in the daily calculus of White House power. Thus Ehrlichman played major and essential roles in creating the Environmental Protection Agency, endowing the arts, helping desegregate the public schools of the Deep South without violence, and creating a new regime under which American Indians, for the first time in this country's sorry history with them, were given the legal means and resources to begin, finally, a course of self-determination.

    None of this, however, made him a powerful independent voice when it came to the political activities that were ultimately to bring about Nixon's downfall.

    Some of the individuals that Haldeman and Ehrlichman brought with them to the campaign and the White House achieved measures of independence in indirect ways. The most interesting of them was Ron Ziegler, the fulcrum of Haldeman's communications system, lifted out of Disneyland—yes—into Republican politics via the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. (After all, as Ziegler had to endure hearing myriad times, how far was it from Fantasyland to briefing the White House press corps?) But Ron was not your average advertising apparatchik; for instance, he not only could repeat verbatim the jungle tour spiel he had given when he was a guide at Disneyland but could deliver it backwards. Forget the memory skills thus revealed; undertaking to learn the thing in the first place illuminated a corner of Ziegler's mind that was demented in the best sense.

    Briefing the press is an art form. Ron was very good at it. But part of the art form is obfuscation. Another part consists of a stubborn refusal to follow lines of logic where they lead, at least publicly. Therefore outsiders did not know how smart Ziegler was. By the end of Watergate, from which he emerged unscathed, it was clear that he was very smart indeed.

    Another kind of independence was the route chosen by Richard Whalen, who was later to speculate about the identity of Deep Throat in the Washington Post. Whalen was a respected journalist by the time he joined the Nixon campaign. Before the nomination, he worked with the speechwriters to produce some of Nixon's most memorable early lines. Whalen was also close to Sears. It was foreordained that once Haldeman and Ehrlichman appeared, the chunky, grouchy Whalen would sooner or later run up against the tough new Nixon campaign regime.

    Whalen's first collision with the new order occurred at the Republican convention in Miami. Haldeman and Ehrlichman had arrived. Whalen tried to get to the hotel floor where Nixon's suite was located. Ehrlichman would not allow it: Whalen did not have a badge of the proper color, and the new management refused to issue him one.

    Whalen finally got his badge, but the next run-in was worse. Just after the primaries, the campaign staff gathered at Mission Bay in San Diego to plan for the general election campaign. One evening John Mitchell, slightly in his cups, let loose at Whalen with a mess of invective about writers, their inflated notion of their importance to political campaigns, and the need to keep them in their place.

    Whalen told me about Mitchell's abuse later that night and was out of the campaign the next morning—literally—trudging away from the hotel carrying his suitcases. He was prescient. But while Whalen left, the rest of us avatars of the "new Nixon" stayed, thinking that we could make our own independent way among the "realpoliticians."

    The only reason that there were not more of these fractures is that Nixon tried to keep the various parts of his campaign organization working in separate, parallel political universes. For instance, I recently reread Jules Witcover's excellent book The Resurrection of Richard Nixon and was reminded that shortly after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Nixon convened a large meeting of veterans of his previous campaigns at the Waldorf-Astoria to weigh Nixon's future as a party leader and possible presidential candidate.

    At the time the meeting took place, Nixon had long since recruited me to his fledgling campaign. More specifically, the invitations had already gone out for a reception to be held in Nixon's honor at my home in Brooklyn Heights for the purpose of introducing him to the overwhelmingly Democratic Brooklyn bench and bar (the reception, when it finally took place, was a great success). But I did not know about the conclave of Nixon old-timers, and they certainly did not know what I was doing.

    I can see the logic of the compartmentalization: I had no experience of Nixon to bring to the question of whether he should run again, while not many of the Nixon veterans could possibly have known or cared about a bunch of Democratic lawyers in Brooklyn. Nixon was extremely talented at inventing and maintaining such divisions, which so suited his temperament. For instance, I do not remember ever having seen Mitchell and Sears in the same meeting with the candidate.

    Nixon wanted everyone around him to know that he was the only one with all the information necessary to make proper decisions. Indeed, during the 1968 campaign he employed a private pollster—Joe Batchelder, Senior, the father of a law partner of mine—who reported to Nixon alone. Nixon used him as a check on the information that came to him from his regular campaign polling apparatus.

    Nixon was always juggling his self-created separate constituencies. Sometimes he nearly dropped the ball. Once during the campaign, forgetting that he was now the new Nixon, the old Nixon remarked publicly that the DuBois Clubs, a network of Communist front organizations, had chosen their name in order to mislead people into thinking they were Boys Clubs. Sears was shaken. I was shaken. Nixon told us to relax. He said the press would forget about the remark in a week. He was right.

    However, this same insistence on proceeding in parallel or even contradictory tracks was to play a role in creating both Watergate and Deep Throat. I remember the day in 1969, for instance, when I heard that one Charles Colson, who had been raising money for Nixon in another part of the campaign swamp, had been named special counsel to the president. "Who the hell is that?" I asked.

    It was a mark of the fragmentation of the Nixon campaign that I hadn't known of Colson's existence, let alone his closeness to the president. Colson was in those days the man who declared that he would walk (or was it drive? or roll?) over his grandmother for Richard Nixon. If Haldeman habitually shored up Nixon's tough side, Colson whipped that toughness into a caricature of itself. Colson became the man who most vigorously stirred up the demons that had accompanied Nixon to the presidency.

    Colson is a very different man today from the one he was then. The same force of personality that he brought to his White House job is now deployed in the salutary service of prison reform.

Continues...

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