Zero fail, p.13
Zero Fail, page 13
A police captain alerted a Secret Service agent coordinating security that he thought he saw Nixon volunteers trying to open doors to let demonstrators inside. The senior agent followed the captain to find White House spokesman Ron Ziegler.
“What the hell are you doing?” the agent said.
“We want a meaningful confrontation,” Ziegler said.
“There ain’t going to be no fucking meaningful confrontation,” a local police captain replied.
The crowd outside remained peaceful but kept up a steady drumbeat. They chanted the standard antiwar slogan: “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war.”
After about forty minutes, Nixon exited the civic center with Reagan and a fellow Republican, Senator George Murphy, in tow. But the president didn’t immediately leave in his motorcade as scheduled. Instead, his entourage paused for a while in a large rear parking lot that was hemmed in on two sides by demonstrators, mostly behind barricades.
But then, to the shock of the agents and police surrounding him, the president hopped up onto the hood of his limousine with the help of an aide. Nixon lifted both hands to wave a taunting “victory” sign at the crowd.
San Jose police chief Ray Blackmore opened his eyes wide “like he was watching a horror movie,” one agent recalled. The chief had been sitting in the lead car, prepared to leave in a hurry. A lead detective coordinating security said he was “startled” by such a daring move, especially in the wake of recent assassinations.
Protesters were also shocked by the gesture. A young protester said he and several around him quickly looked down at the ground for a rock or anything to throw, but “rocks were hard to come by.”
Still, police a few feet from Nixon reported some small stones whizzing past them. Nervous Secret Service agents rushed to stuff the president back into his limo, and within a minute the motorcade set off.
“They just hate to see that,” Nixon chuckled to an aide as he took his seat.
The president had whipped up the crowd. His Secret Service detail then made a last-minute change in the exit strategy, according to an account that Chief Blackmore shared years later.
Blackmore, riding in the lead car, heard the Secret Service agent next to him jump on the radio and order the motorcade’s motorcycle escort to turn left onto Park Avenue. “No, right,” Blackmore said. The plan had been to turn right, where his police officers were posted as a barrier between the avenue and the crowds. “All our strength is to the right.”
“We know that,” the agent said. “We want to feed the press to the wolves. We’re not getting along with them during this trip.” The agent told Blackmore that most of the front of the motorcade would have time to escape the protesters by quickly turning left, but the press buses bringing up the rear and left defenseless without a police barrier would be “clobbered.”
Later, on the dark tarmac of the airport as they waited to fly to San Clemente, a young aide in a pin-striped shirt took out a sledgehammer and started pounding on the side of the president’s limousine.
At least one agent was incredulous.
The aide explained, “We’re just trying to show what kind of people these [folks] are.”
The agent insisted he stop: “It’s a government car. That’s destruction of government property.”
The young staffer finally stopped pounding.
Nixon leaped to “make some hay” of the event that night, telling Ziegler to issue a statement from his plane about having rocks thrown at his car. “The stoning at San Jose is an example of the viciousness of the lawless elements in our society,” it read. “This was the action of an unruly mob that represents the worst in America.”
A headline the next day in The Sacramento Bee boomed San Jose Protesters Stone Nixon Party. Another local headline read Militants Attack Nixon Motorcade.
Both spectators and reporters at the event scratched their heads at what they considered the overblown reports of danger to the president. The police agreed that the rock throwing got started after Nixon’s V-day taunt but built after Nixon’s car was exiting. Rocks were of “minor consequence” to the president’s car, Blackmore said, but they did pelt the later cars in the motorcade and traveling press bus that shielded the backside of the motorcade.
The White House had gotten what it wanted. “San Jose turned into the real blockbuster,” Haldeman said in his recorded diary entry that night. “We wanted some confrontation and there were no hecklers in the hall, so we stalled the departure a little so they could zero in outside and they sure did.”
* * *
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BY THE FALL of 1973, Nixon’s White House was imploding. His two most trusted aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, had resigned in late April at Nixon’s request. Their resignations came after the White House counsel told Nixon he was cooperating with federal prosecutors, and prosecutors notified the president that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and other White House officials were implicated in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. The Senate and an independent counsel were making headway in their separate investigations into the White House’s ties to the Watergate break-in. A former top aide alleged that Nixon had personally discussed how to cover up the White House’s role. Butterfield had revealed a potential treasure trove of evidence that could prove it: a secret tape recording system set up in the Oval Office and West Wing offices, which recorded nearly all of Nixon’s calls and conversations. Nixon’s presidency hung on those tapes.
The Secret Service’s reputation was on the line too. The public didn’t yet know how much the White House had manipulated its protective team for its own political ends. But Rowley did, and that fall, the director could see it was about to spill out.
On September 6, The Washington Post reported that the Secret Service had agreed to eavesdrop on Nixon’s brother, on the president’s orders. The wiretap appeared to be illegal, the Post’s sources said. Nixon ostensibly wanted to prevent his financially troubled brother from embarrassing him. A day later, the Senate’s Watergate Committee sent Rowley a formal request asking him to explain the wiretap and his legal justification for it.
There were other secrets that Rowley knew were bound to come out as the investigations heated up. A pending lawsuit that named Rowley personally would uncover that Secret Service agents had removed anti-Nixon protesters from public events on White House orders. Internal memos would show how Nixon aides had forced the Secret Service to make taxpayers foot the bill for expensive renovations to his California and Florida homes by claiming that the work was done for “security reasons.”
Weeks after the wiretap story, the battle over the White House tapes reached a climax. On the night of October 20, Nixon fired the independent counsel who demanded he comply with a new court order and turn over the White House recordings. The attorney general and deputy attorney general, who had refused to fire the counsel as Nixon ordered, resigned in protest. The papers called it the Saturday Night Massacre.
Two days later, Director Rowley notified colleagues that he was resigning too. He explained it was time; he’d served thirty-five years in the Service, twelve of them as director. Losing President Kennedy had felt like his worst career failure, but he’d been proud of his work with his fellow agents to make the Service stronger in the aftermath of that tragedy.
In private, Rowley acknowledged that he left with some deep regrets. He and some of his trusted deputies had resisted as best they could. But Rowley’s method had been to resist quietly, without raising a ruckus. He hadn’t been able to fully stop Nixon from making the Secret Service his tool.
Still, the departing director knew he was leaving the ship in capable hands. Nixon had tapped Stuart Knight, one of his deputies, as the new director. The president knew Knight best as the brave detail agent who had likely saved his life by helping him escape a mob in Venezuela when Nixon was vice president. Rowley knew Knight as a bright and fiercely independent leader. “This appointment is different from the past Nixon track record; he’s not a former Nixon advance man,” one administration official told a reporter when asked about Knight’s appointment. “He’s his own man—and he doesn’t owe anybody anything.”
In Rowley’s tenure, Nixon had deployed the Secret Service as if it were another arm of his political operation. He had tried to task Secret Service investigators with gathering facts about Wallace’s shooter so the president could blame the assassination attempt on a murderous liberal activist. He had tried in three cases to get agents to spy on his political opponents Ted Kennedy and George McGovern to gather political dirt. Nixon ordered the Secret Service to follow his own brother to help him learn about and control potentially damaging activity that could be used by Nixon’s enemies. He had sought to portray anti-Nixon protesters as violent mobs, and he succeeded in getting the Secret Service to flout their own security rules so he could foment a riot. He had ordered that agents push his protesters off the White House fence line and out of his sight when it annoyed him, despite rules that prohibit agents from doing that. In perhaps his pettiest move, Nixon and his aides stretched the truth to get the Secret Service to pay for renovations at his personal home and claim they were necessary for his security.
Knight pledged to continue and expand Rowley’s emphasis on training, and “to close the gap between the actual and the ideal” in the Secret Service. It was polite code for his new task: Clean up the Service’s reputation, sullied by the way Nixon had tried to abuse it.
Nevertheless, Knight wouldn’t be working for the Nixon White House for very long. Roughly nine months after choosing a new Secret Service director to replace the one he derided as a “dummy,” Nixon would leave the White House in disgrace. Ironically, a step the Secret Service took on Nixon’s orders early in his first term would play a central role in the president’s fall.
* * *
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AFTER A YEAR in office, Nixon had ordered the Secret Service to set up a unique voice-activated recording system in the White House, Camp David, and other key offices where he conducted business. Haldeman told Butterfield to make the arrangements.
In February 1971, Butterfield approached Al Wong, who headed the Service’s technical security division. He knew Wong well because his team regularly swept for electronic bugs in the Oval Office, sensitive meeting rooms, and hotels where the president stayed. When Nixon left on February 12 for a weekend in Key Biscayne, Wong’s team installed six inconspicuous microphones in the president’s desk in the Oval and four more in lamps on the fireplace mantel in the Cabinet Room. The system recorded sensitive conversations on cassette tapes stored in a bricked-in compartment in the basement.
Wong warned Butterfield that the Service had created similar taping systems for Kennedy and Johnson, and “these things don’t always work out as planned.”
Nixon had one primary question when he returned that Tuesday and Butterfield briefed him on the taping system. “On this tapes thing,” he asked, “who knows about that?”
At least four Secret Service agents and technicians had helped in the installation and knew about it, Butterfield told him.
“Goddamn it,” Nixon snapped. “This cannot get out.”
The secrecy surrounding the tapes began to unravel just after the July Fourth holiday in 1973, when Nixon’s deputy chief of staff, Alexander Butterfield, was summoned to an interview with staff for the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities who were conducting some random pre-interviews with White House staff. Butterfield hoped they wouldn’t know—or ask—too much. He thought all was well as the interview wound toward a close. But just when he thought he was going to be excused, the deputy Republican counsel, Donald Sanders, asked why the wording in a report they received was so exact. He noted to Butterfield that it had verbatim quotes from the president and senior aides, from a specific meeting.
“Were there ever any recording devices other than the Dictaphone system you mentioned?” Sanders asked.
Butterfield had decided before walking in the door that he wasn’t going to lie to a direct question.
“Yes,” he gulped.
In the room, the investigators buzzed with electricity. Butterfield felt panicky as he sensed their excitement. Here was the evidence the Senate investigators needed in order to prove the president’s role in the burglary cover-up. One of Nixon’s right-hand men had let out the secret the president most wanted to keep locked up tight.
For the next year, Nixon fought hard—all the way to the Supreme Court—to keep from releasing those tapes. Nixon’s lawyers argued that these secretly recorded conversations were protected by executive privilege. But nearly a year after Butterfield revealed their existence, on July 24, 1974, the court voted 8–0 to compel the president to turn over the tapes.
Fifteen days later, Richard Nixon, the thirty-seventh president of the United States, resigned.
CHAPTER 7
A CASUAL WALK TO CHURCH
“Hi, Bobby. I think you better come on over. We’re going to go to St. John’s in about twenty minutes.”
President Reagan’s deputy chief of staff, Mike Deaver, was calling the ranking Secret Service supervisor on the White House compound that Sunday with an abrupt change of plans. The new president and his wife wanted to go to church across the square from the White House front gate. Both Reagans were eager to stretch their legs, breathe some fresh air. They wanted to walk.
It was just before 11 a.m. on March 29, 1981—and Bob DeProspero was in charge of the president’s watch. Ronald Reagan had been inaugurated just two months earlier, and DeProspero had been named the second in command of his detail. Either DeProspero or the head of the detail, Jerry Parr, had to be on the White House grounds at all times in case the president wanted to leave the presidential cocoon.
DeProspero was surprised to hear this talk of a walk to church and wrinkled up his nose. The senior agent, better known as Bobby D, had earned a reputation as a rigid boss who didn’t like shortcuts or surprises. A former wrestling coach, he demanded that his agents maintain a constant intensity in the face of exhaustion and boredom. “Never let up” was one of his favorite mantras.
Since Reagan’s election, Bobby D had several times reviewed the ground rules with Deaver. The Service didn’t take presidents on impromptu trips off the complex. The detail needed at least an hour’s heads-up. Now DeProspero, sitting at his office in the Old Executive Office Building, exhaled deeply into the black telephone receiver.
“Mike, I thought we agreed you were going to give me tiiiime,” DeProspero said in a mild Southern accent that stretched out the vowel sound.
“I know, I know, I can’t help it. They just decided to go,” Deaver said hurriedly, mild irritation in his voice. Deaver had served as one of Reagan’s closest aides from his time as governor, and part of his job was burnishing Reagan’s image.
“Let me get the cars up here at least,” DeProspero said.
“No. We’re going to walk,” Deaver replied.
DeProspero paused before politely laying down the law.
“So, Miiiike,” he said slowly, in a controlled, almost pedantic tone that brought out his Southern accent even more. “You can’t do that.”
Deaver cut him off and gave the final order instead.
“Bobby, I suggest you get over here,” he said. “Because we’re going to be leaving shortly.”
With that, the White House deputy chief of staff hung up.
DeProspero had to dash. The president of the United States was about to walk across a public park and down Pennsylvania Avenue with absolutely no security plan in place. The detail supervisor put down the receiver, jumped up from his desk chair, and jogged down the hall toward the West Wing.
He talked into the radio microphone in his sleeve the whole way. He alerted his shift in W-16, a ready room under the Oval Office that agents used as a base, to get themselves and the limo motorcade ready. POTUS was on the move.
DeProspero still hoped he would arrive in time to undo Deaver’s plan. He dashed through the Executive Office Building courtyard to a basement-level ramp that emptied onto West Executive Avenue, rapidly rolling around in his mind ways he could stop this jaunt. As he trotted through the West Wing lobby, he found the newly minted President Reagan and the First Lady outside the Oval Office in their coats, ready for their walk.
The Secret Service man saw them and felt stuck. They were going.
As their small entourage walked together out the Northwest Gate, DeProspero flanked the president on his right side, just behind his shoulder. He confirmed on the radio line through his sleeve that his agents would bring the limo and follow-up car to the church. No matter what Deaver said, Bobby D was putting the president behind bulletproof glass and armored doors for the return trip to the White House.
Eight agents from the shift had made the mad dash to gather their gear for the walk. They fell into formation and created an amoeba-shaped barrier around Rawhide and Rainbow—the Reagans’ code names. Crossing Pennsylvania Avenue and then entering Lafayette Park, the Reagans beamed, delighted for any chance to be outside again. Nancy Reagan had been floored by her inability, since the election, to simply go for a walk or meet friends for dinner. Now she was inhaling the chill spring air and taking in the park’s budding magnolia trees. The president waved with a wink when a few shocked pedestrians recognized the famous couple out for a stroll.
Deaver walked close behind the Reagans, too. For most of the six-minute walk, DeProspero and Deaver bickered in a low whisper. They resembled two married people who hadn’t finished a spat before arriving at a party.
