Secret Nixon tapes expert Ken Hughes: At the release of the Pentagon Papers forty years ago, Richard Nixon was 'gleeful and fearful'

BLOG EXCLUSIVE : Answering today’s OFF-SET questions is Ken Hughes, a researcher with the Miller Center’s Presidential Recording Program.

Hughes joined the University of Virginia program in 2000 after more than a decade covering the federal government as a journalist. His research on the White House tapes of Richard M. Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy has focused on the politics of the Vietnam War.

The federal government has now declassified the infamous Pentagon Papers. The Nixon Presidential Library & Museum will release the complete documents on June 13, 2011–forty years to the day that The New York Times published excerpts as a front-page story.

The papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official, who, while working for the administration of Lyndon Johnson, had access to a top-secret document that revealed senior American leaders, including several presidents, knew that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable, tragic quagmire. Officially titled "United States-Viet Nam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense," – the Pentagon Papers, as they became known–also showed that the government had lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the war. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In, 1971, Ellsberg leaked all 7,000 pages to The Washington Post, and 18 other newspapers, including The New York Times, which began publishing them on June 13, 1971.

(CLICK HERE to read our OFF-SET interview with Daniel Ellsberg.)

In this interview, Hughes says: "Richard Nixon was gleeful and fearful when the Times started publishing the Pentagon Papers. Gleeful that the Top Secret Defense Department study detailed the failings of his two predecessors and political rivals, Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but fearful that the leak was the work of a conspiracy that would go on to leak Nixon's own politically damaging foreign policy secrets."

Hughes also says: "Why do we allow ourselves, as citizens of a republic, to be dependent on any whistleblower just so we can read the documents that we need to hold our government accountable for its actions? The link between Ellsberg and (WikiLeaks' Julian) Assange is that I should not have to depend on either of them or anyone else for information that I have the right to know."

The day after The New York Times published excerpts, Richard Nixon is on the phone with John Ehrlichman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, who served prison time for his involvement in Watergate.  Here’s a portion of that conversation:

Monday, June 14, 1971 - 7:13pm - 7:15pm  

Ehrlichman: —the Attorney General has called a couple times about these New York Times stories, and he’s advised by his people that unless he puts the Times on notice.

President Nixon: Yeah.

Ehrlichman:—he’s probably going to waive any right of prosecution against the newspaper. And he is calling now to see if you would approve his putting them on notice before their first edition for tomorrow comes out.

President Nixon: Hmm.

Ehrlichman: I realize there are negatives to this in terms of the vote on the Hill.

President Nixon: You mean, to prosecute the Times?

Ehrlichman: Right.

President Nixon: Hell, I wouldn’t prosecute the Times. My view is to prosecute the (profane adjective and body part deleted for this blog only) that gave it to them.

Ehrlichman: Yeah, if you can find out who that is.

President Nixon: Yeah, I know. I mean, could the Times be prosecuted?

Ehrlichman: Apparently so. [Pause.]

President Nixon: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. They . . . on the other hand, they’re going to run another story tomorrow.

What is happening in that conversation? What was Nixon’s reaction to the leak of the papers?

Richard Nixon was gleeful and fearful when the Times started publishing the Pentagon Papers. Gleeful that the Top Secret Defense Department study detailed the failings of his two predecessors and political rivals, Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but fearful that the leak was the work of a conspiracy that would go on to leak Nixon's own politically damaging foreign policy secrets. 

Nixon would later claim that he was worried about the exposure of legitimately classified information regarding negotiations over Vietnam, arms control, and the diplomatic opening to China, but the first worries you hear him express on tape are about the secret bombing of Cambodia–a secret that there was no legitimate national security reason to keep by 1971. (To learn more about that, CLICK HERE.)  

Nixon was actually eager for the press to publish the chapters of the Pentagon Papers on JFK. When his Justice Department blocked the Times from publishing, Nixon asked his aides to leak the Kennedy chapters themselves. He didn't understand why they wouldn't. Nixon didn't see anything strange about publicly denouncing the leak of the Pentagon Papers as a threat to national security and secretly leaking them himself.

And, for those who may not remember, what was the outcome of those conversations?

The President asked his Attorney General a good question: "Has the government ever done this to a paper before?"

John Mitchell said it had. He was wrong. The government had never tried to get an injunction to block a newspaper from publishing classified information. The Pentagon Papers became the first "prior restraint" action in American history. But Nixon didn't find out that he was doing something unprecedented until after he had done it.

Nixon based his decision on (1) a phone call that lasted less than five minutes with an Attorney General who gave him bad information, and (2) his longstanding hatred of the news media in general and the Times in particular. "As far as the Times is concerned, hell, they’re our enemies," Nixon said. "I think we just ought to do it." 

Every court disagreed. While lower courts granted the administration temporary restraining orders against the Times and, later, the Washington Post, which had obtained its own copy of the Pentagon Papers, in each case the courts ruled in a matter of days that the government had no right to block the publication of the Top Secret history.

And the Supreme Court, on June 30, 1971, ruled in favor of the newspapers 6-3. The First Amendment prohibits the government from imposing "prior restraint" on the publication of classified information unless it would result, in the words of Justice Potter Stewart, in "direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our nation and its people." Publication of the Pentagon Papers did no such damage before the Supreme Court ruling or after. 

Then, a day later, on July 15, Nixon is in the Oval Office with White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, (who also served time for Watergate crimes.)

Tuesday, June 15, 1971 - 9:56am - 10:37am 

President Nixon: This is a very bad situation. This guy is a radical that did it. A radical, we think. Radical left-wing—

H.R. “Bob” Haldeman: [Daniel] Ellsberg?

President Nixon: [Unclear] No, we don’t know who the hell he is. But maybe it’s him. Or maybe it’s [Leslie] Gelb. One of the two. Either is a radical. So he takes out papers and does it—now goddamn it, [pounding desk] somebody’s got to go to jail on that. Somebody’s got to go to jail for it. That’s all there is to it. And our people here just can’t, however they think about the war, can’t go saying, well, we’re doing this and that. We’ve got to fight it just like hell.

Haldeman: Yeah.

President Nixon: Ha. It really is a tough one. But I think . . . [John] Mitchellwanted to do it, I said, ‘Fine. Go.’

Do you know why they suspected Daniel Ellsberg? (I guess I am surprised they knew he existed…)

Word that it was Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the Pentagon Papers to the Times, came from an extraordinary source: Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and LBJ's national security adviser, Walt W. Rostow. 

Rostow called Alexander Haig, Nixon's deputy national security adviser, on June 13, 1971, the day the Times started publishing. The next day, Haig informed Nixon that "President Johnson and Walt are both very upset about this." 

The President laughed out loud. "Wouldn't you be?" Nixon asked. "It shows that Johnson, in effect, didn’t tell the American people the truth before his election."

Haig quoted Rostow as saying, "Now, I don’t want to cast any aspersions about who might have done this, but our strong suspicion is it’s Dan Ellsberg."

Nixon would have saved himself an enormous amount of grief–and his presidency–if he had just listened to Rostow. Haig had checked with him about his own suspicion that the leak came from Leslie Gelb, who had supervised the writing and compiling of the Pentagon Papers, and Morton Halperin, who had supervised Gelb. (Halperin had been Johnson's deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs and Gelb had been director of policy planning and arms control, for anyone keeping track.)

As Haig reported to the President, Rostow "said whoever did this could not be a good Democrat. He said he would have to be a radicalized individual." Anyone who was responsible for the biggest leak of classified information in American history (up to that time) would have to abandon all hope of ever having a security clearance again, and Halperin and Gelb were both young, up-and-coming national security intellectuals with bright futures. They were advising Democratic candidates for president. They were not about to end their careers. 

Nixon nevertheless formed a conspiracy theory around Halperin and Gelb. Both men were already on the first draft of his enemies list. Nixon feared that both had politically damaging information about him. 

Since 1969, when Halperin had worked briefly on Nixon's national security council staff, Nixon feared that Halperin would leak the secret bombing ofCambodia. The president had the FBI tap Halperin's telephone for 21 months, trying to find evidence that he was a leaker. The wiretap produced no evidence that Halperin disclosed classified information without authorization. 

Nixon feared Gelb because of Tom Charles Huston, a White House aide. Huston claimed that there was a Pentagon study on all the events leading up to the 1968 bombing halt and that Gelb had a copy in a safe at the Brookings Institution.

There's no evidence that this report ever existed, but Nixon was desperate to get his hands on it. (Nixon claimed he wanted to use it to blackmail Lyndon Johnson, but he probably wanted to find out what information it contained about his interference with the bombing halt negotiations. As a presidential candidate in 1968 Nixon had sabotaged theParispeace talks by secretly urging the South Vietnamese to refuse to participate in them before Election Day. Nixon knew that LBJ had collected an impressive file of CIA, NSA and FBI reports on Republican interference with his bombing halt negotiations, since Johnson had threatened to expose the information shortly after the 1968 election.) 

Huston's White House career caught fire after he made the tantalizing claim that there was a bombing halt report at Brookings. Nixon put him to work on lifting restrictions on domestic intelligence gathering, a project that produced the notorious Huston Plan, which called for the use of break-ins, wiretapping, mail openings and other means to collect information.

The official purpose of the Huston Plan was to combat domestic terrorism, but Nixon wanted to use it to get his hands on that (non-existent) bombing halt study. On June 17, 1971, four days after the publication of the Pentagon Papers began, Nixon ordered his aides to break into Brookings. "Now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it," Nixon said. "I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it."

If J. Edgar Hoover had agreed to the Huston Plan, Nixon could have used the FBI to carry out illegal break-ins. Since Hooverhad blocked the Huston Plan in 1970, Nixon, in the days following the publication of the Pentagon Papers, committed the impeachable offense of creating the Special Investigations Unit.

The SIU became known later as the Plumbers, because they worked on leaks. The Plumbers came up with an elaborate plan to firebomb Brookings and send a phony team of firemen to remove the safe. According to one of the Plumbers, G. Gordon Liddy, the White House rejected the plan because a fire truck would be too expensive. 

No investigation, legal or illegal, found evidence that either Halperin or Gelb had taken part in the leak of the Pentagon Papers. Nixon destroyed himself chasing a mirage. 

Eventually, Nixon ordered his Plumbers Unit to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to steal documents. Were the conversations ordering that break-in captured on tape, too?

The Plumbers came up with the idea of burglarizing the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding. E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent, wanted to "build a file on Ellsberg that will contain all available overt, covert and derogatory information. This basic tool is essential in determining how to destroy his public image and credibility." Toward that end, Hunt proposed that they "obtain Ellsberg's files from his psychiatric analyst." 

The Plumbers were still working Nixon's conspiracy theory as well. When the co-director of the Special Investigations Unit, Egil "Bud" Krogh," pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate Fielding's Fourth Amendment rights, he listed the burglary's aims, and at the top was this: "To ascertain if Dr. Ellsberg acted alone or with collaborators." 

John Ehrlichman, Nixon's chief domestic adviser, approved the burglary. There are no tapes of Nixon learning of or authorizing this break-in before the fact. A few days after the break-in at the psychiatrist's office, Ehrlichman obliquely informed the President that something hadn't gone quite right:

Ehrlichman: We had one little operation that aborted out in Los Angeles, which, I think it's better that you don't know about, uh—

President Nixon: OK.

Ehrlichman: —but we've got some dirty tricks underway that may pay off.

Nixon knew, however, that the Plumbers were carrying out illegal acts, because that's what he created his little secret police for. It was his most self-destructive act. 

When DC police arrested the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972, in a break-in planned by Hunt and Liddy, Nixon faced a bleak choice. He could either allow the FBI investigation of the Watergate break-in to uncover the work that Hunt and Liddy had done as Plumbers, thereby revealing that Nixon had committed impeachable offenses, or he could order a cover-up, itself an impeachable offense.

People like to say, "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up," but in Nixon's case, if he hadn't ordered a cover-up, he might have lost his presidency sooner. It wasn't the crime and it wasn't the cover-up, it was all those earlier crimes that he had to cover up if he wanted to stay in power. 

From your point of view, what is the value of releasing the complete Pentagon Papers now?

I hope people will notice how much the Obama administration's public reaction to Wikileaks resembles the Nixon administration's public reaction to the Pentagon Papers. Both administrations denounced the leaks as "theft" of government documents, both claimed the leaks damaged U.S. diplomatic relations, and both prosecuted the alleged leakers under the Espionage Act, a law designed to punish spies for foreign powers, not confidential sources for American journalists. 

We know why Nixon reacted that way. Thanks to the White House tapes, we know he was worried that the leak of the Pentagon Papers might be the first step toward the leak of his own politically damaging secrets, like the secret bombing of Cambodia, which backfired terribly, destabilized the Cambodian government, and led to the 1970 invasion of Cambodia and, ultimately, to the Khmer Rouge genocide. And the Johnson tapes show that Nixon had reason to fear what the CIA, NSA and FBI said about Republican interference with theVietnam negotiations during the 1968 presidential campaign. 

I wonder if somewhere in the files of the Obama administration there's a document like NSSM-1–the *other* document that Daniel Ellsberg leaked, the one people don't remember so much. On the first full day of the Nixon administration, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger sent National Security Study Memorandum 1 to the Pentagon, State Department and CIA, asking them fundamental questions about the Vietnam War. Could South Vietnam handle the North Vietnamese army without U.S.air and artillery support? Without U.S. ground troops? How long would it take to train and equip the South to survive without American troops?

The answer was unanimous: “All agencies agree that RVNAF [the Republic of South Vietnam’s armed forces] could not, either now or even when fully modernized, handle both the VC [Vietcong] and a sizable level of NVA [North Vietnamese armed] forces without U.S. combat support in the form of air, helicopters, artillery, logistics and major ground forces.” In other words,South Vietnamwasn't going to survive without American troops. Nixon's choice was to either (1) keep U.S. soldiers fighting and dying inVietnam for the foreseeable future or (2) withdraw them and watch North Vietnam take over the South. . 

Nixon never admitted that those were his only two options. He had won the 1968 election promising "peace with honor," and neither option was peace. He couldn't win reelection if he withdrew the troops in 1969, or 1970, or 1971, because the South would collapse before Election Day and he would be branded as a president who lost a war. He also couldn't win reelection if he acknowledged that the South would never be able to survive on its own and that he would keep American ground forces inVietnamas long as it took–which, according to NSSM-1, would be forever. 

Nixon avoided both of these politically unpalatable options. Instead he announced an exit strategy that couldn't work as advertised: “Under the new orders, the primary mission of our troops is to enable the South Vietnamese forces to assume the full responsibility for the security of South Vietnam.” The internal government consensus that South Vietnamwould never be able to assume full responsibility for its own security–that it would not survive without major U.S. ground forces–remained classified Top Secret.

Throughout his first term, Nixon would announce partial troop withdrawals, saying that each one proved that his plan to train the South Vietnamese to defend themselves was working. But he left enough American forces in Vietnamto keep it from collapsing before Election Day 1972. (CLICK HERE for a chart showing how Nixon timed troop withdrawals to the election.)

Nixon’s exit strategy for Vietnam sounds disturbingly like Bush’s for Iraq (“Our military is helping to train Iraqi security forces so that they can defend their people and fight the enemy on their own. Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down”.)

And like Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan (“We will shift the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan security forces, so that they can eventually take the lead in securing their country. That’s how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our own troops home”).

I have to wonder whether there are officials in the Pentagon, State Department and CIA whose best judgment is that the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq will not survive without American ground forces. If they had gone public with this judgment in 2007 or 2008, it would've hurt the Republicans politically. If they come forward with this judgment in 2011 or 2012, it would hurt the Democrats politically. So I'm not surprised that the Obama administration has prosecuted whistleblowers. 

If you disagree, please read Jane Mayer's story about Thomas Drake, a former NSA official. (CLICK HERE for the New Yorker article. )

The government's case against Drake has collapsed. (CLICK HERE for the New York Times article.)

And if you don't think a President would prolong a war to win an election, please watch the educational videos I made from my research on the Nixon tapes at  fatalpolitics.com.

Both Daniel Ellsberg and WikiLeak’s founder Julian Assange (below) are considered by some to be heroes, and by others, criminals and traitors. What connection do you see between the two leakers?

Why do we allow ourselves, as citizens of a republic, to be dependent on any whistleblower just so we can read the documents that we need to hold our government accountable for its actions? The link between Ellsberg and Assange is that I should not have to depend on either of them or anyone else for information that I have the right to know. 

There's a much better way to combat needless and harmful government secrecy–by having Congress set up Independent Review Boards on the proven, successful model of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. 

Independent Review Boards would solve the biggest problem with the declassification process. Under the status quo, declassification lies largely in the hands of the agencies that did the classifying in the first place. The CIA decides what we get to know about the CIA, the Pentagon decides what we know about the Pentagon, State decides what we know about State, etc. There's an old rule: No man can be a judge in his own case. Well, no government agency can be the judge in its own case–except under our current, broken system.

When Congress set up the JFK Assassination Records Review Board almost two decades ago, it solved that problem–but only for one kind of government record. The law set up a Review Board that was independent of every federal agency. Congress required agencies to provide the Review Board with the documents it "had reason to believe" it needed.

The Review Board released many documents that agencies had previously classified Top Secret. And what damage to American national security resulted from taking declassification decisions out of the hands of interested agencies and putting it in the hands of an independent Review Board whose mandate was to disclose all the relevant information that it safely could? None. Not one life was lost, and many valuable lessons were learned. 

Independent Review Boards would strengthen our republic and our national security by providing us with the information we need to hold our government accountable. And that, incidentally, would make groups like WikiLeaks dry up and blow away. 

The Miller Center has some 3,700 hours of Nixon tapes. Have you heard them all?

Has anyone? Is there a Guinness World Record? Who has listened to all 3,700 hours and lived? 

The Nixon Library has 3,700 hours of White House tapes, and has so far made public more than 2,000 hours. I've listened to hundreds of hours of the tapes that have been released to the public, but I don't have access to the rest. 

It would take you more than a year of full-time listening to get through all the available tapes once, and you would find most of them maddeningly incomprehensible. You can make out most of the words on Nixon's telephone tapes, because both parties are speaking directly into a microphone in their handsets, but most of Nixon's tapes were recorded using a voice-activated system wired to hidden microphones in the Oval Office and Nixon's other office in the building next door to the White House.

Since the office tapes captured one-on-one, face-to-face conversations between the President and his closest aides, they're the most historically important and the most revealing ones. But the sound quality of the office tapes is bad-to-dismal, since no one's speaking directly into a microphone. The system wasn't designed for clarity, but for invisibility. To understand the office tapes, you have to listen to them over and over. Just hearing them once won't give you much information. 

That's why, in addition to making the tapes available through whitehousetapes.net, the Presidential Recordings Program of the University of Virginia's Miller Center transcribes tapes of particular historical interest. It's much easier for people to read transcripts than to deal with the tapes. 

Making transcripts, however, is very time-consuming. The National Archives once estimated that transcribing 1 hour of a White House tape takes about 100 hours of work. Sadly, that estimate is not far off. A person devoting a 2,000-hour work year exclusively to the task would manage to transcribe only 20 hours of tape–less than 1 percent of the total number of Nixon tapes currently available. So it would take more than 100 work years to do them all. 

I think this may be the first time I've ever done the math. Do you know any rich people who might be willing to fork over enough money to hire, say, a few dozen full-time Nixon tape transcribers? 

June 20, 1972 – Oval Office recordings, tape 342: This is the tape that has the famous 18 and ½ minute gap, supposedly erased by Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods. You know what was erased, don’t you?

Well, let's see . . . it's a June 20, 1972 conversation between Nixon and White House Chief of Staff  H.R. "Bob" Haldeman  . . . and we know that Nixon and Haldeman plotted the Watergate cover-up on tapes from June 21 . . . and June 22 . . . and June 23 . . .  so let's think . . . hmm . . . I don't know.

It's a mystery.