"I really need a son of a bitch"

Photo: G. Gordon Liddy

President Richard M. Nixon’s voice-activated White House taping system captured a key moment on his path to self-destruction. As Nixon convinced himself that the leak of the Pentagon Papers, a classified Defense Department history of Vietnam, was just the first move by a conspiracy that planned to leak his secrets, he resolved to create a counter-conspiracy of his own. In this excerpt, he described his plans to harness the federal government’s investigative powers—including those of the Department of Defense—to gather damaging information on his perceived enemies and then to leak that information to the press. He recalled his successful use of leaks in the 1940s as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, investigating Soviet spies Alger Hiss and Elizabeth T. Bentley.

To run the operation, he wanted someone like Tom Charles Huston, author of a then-secret plan to expand the government use of break-ins, wiretaps, and mail-opening in the name of fighting domestic terrorism. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, whose agents would have had to do the breaking-in and wiretapping, nixed the Huston plan, to Nixon’s lasting frustration.

Ultimately, the President would create the Special Investigations Unit, known in-house as “the Plumbers,” to gather the damaging information he wanted to leak. The Plumbers’ existence would eventually come to light when two of its members, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were arrested for planning the Watergate break-in. When another tape capturing Nixon’s criminal attempt to obstruct the investigation of Hunt and Liddy’s prior work for him came to light, he resigned the presidency.

Date: 1971-07-01
Time: 08:45-09:52
Participants: Richard M. Nixon, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman
Location: Oval Office
Tape: 534-002 C

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(President Nixon): Nixon: It may be here that we could use [Melvin R. "Mel"] Laird. I’ll tell you why: Laird has the biggest spy apparatus of anybody, you understand. That’s bigger than the FBI on things like this. The FBI won’t get into this sort of thing. They don’t know how to handle it, Bob. They do not handle it.

Now, the main thing is whether the Laird group will get into it. Here’s what I have in mind, and I’ve got to get [Tom Charles] Huston or somebody fast, but either Huston or somebody like Huston fast. That’s why the—on the [Richard V.] Dick Allen thing. I think you’ve got to take Dick Allen on the mountaintop and see if he wants to handle this. Who said that he didn’t? You didn’t think he was the right guy, or somebody didn’t. John [D. Ehrlichman] didn’t, I think, or somebody, because he’s too [ unclear]—

(H. R. "Bob" Haldeman): Well, Dick doesn’t think he is.

(President Nixon): Dick Allen doesn’t? OK.

(Haldeman): He’ll come—on the short term, though, we can get Allen in right now and get him—

(President Nixon): Yeah.

(Haldeman): —get him pulling some people together who can do it.

(President Nixon): He doesn’t need really to come to [Henry E.] Petersen right away, does he? Does Petersen need him now right away?

(Haldeman): Yeah, but, you know, we can use Allen.

(President Nixon): Well, here’s the thing—this is the way I want it: I have a project that I want somebody to take this just like I took the [Alger] Hiss case, the [Elizabeth T.] Bentley case, and the rest. And I’ll tell you what this takes, this takes 18 hours a day. It takes devotion and dedication and loyalty and devilishness such as you’ve never seen, Bob. I’ve never worked as hard in my life, and I’ll never work as hard again, because I don’t have the energy. But this is a hell of a great opportunity because here is what it is. I want to track down every goddamn leak there is and, you see—and here’s where John will recoil. I don’t—probably we, we’ll have to tell him. You probably don’t know what I meant when I said yesterday that we won the Hiss case in the papers. We did. I had to leak stuff all over the place.

(Haldeman): Mm—hmm.

(President Nixon): Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it. [J. Edgar] Hoover didn’t even cooperate until I leaked it out. It was won in the papers. John [N.] Mitchell doesn’t understand that sort of thing. He’s a good lawyer. It’s abhorrent to him. John Ehrlichman will have difficulty. But what I mean is we have to develop now a program, a program for leaking out information, for destroying these people in the papers. That’s one side of it—how to get at the conspiracy.

The other side of it is the declassification . . . declassification. And then leaking to or giving out to our friends the stories that they would like to have, such as the Cuban confrontation. Get what I mean? Let’s have a little fun. There’s a—Let me tell you why the declassification of previous years helps us. [ Unclear.] It takes the eyes off of Vietnam. It gets them thinking about the past rather than our present problems. You get the point?

(Haldeman): Yeah. Absolutely.

(President Nixon): And, as a matter of fact, these papers in a sense, well, in a sense—well, they were about the Pentagon war papers, and so forth. It was too confusing to be the war, in my opinion. What do you think?

(Haldeman): It was another day, it was other administrations, other casts of characters, you know.

(President Nixon): Yeah. [ Unclear] I think it was, sure, it’s about the war, and so forth, [ unclear] but it is not what we’re doing in the war at this time. [ Haldeman acknowledges]

It’s not about what we’re doing. Now, you see what we need? I need somebody—I need really rather than a worker—just to give you the personality type—oh, like [John C.] Whitaker, who’ll work his butt off and do it honorably. I need a—I really need a son of a bitch like Huston who will work his butt off and do it dishonorably. Do you see what I mean? Who will know what he’s doing and will—I want to know, too. And I’ll direct him myself. I’ll pitch it. I know how to play this game.