Bill Clinton, now playing the role of president-as-garrulous Lonely Guy, was going on and on last week about the underling who wants his job, Al Gore.
Gore’s honesty has been challenged, and rightly so, by Bill Bradley, whose own candidacy may be tanking faster than any National Basketball Association team in recent memory, with the possible exception of the Bulls.
At a White House press conference, which one now fears may be an event taking place every 48 hours as his term gets closer to ending, Clinton was generally pretty loyal toward Gore. He commended his “brutal honesty” on several matters, though he didn’t go after Bradley for raising essential doubts.
If only Spiro Agnew had been so lucky.
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The day after the latest Clinton policy wonk-a-thon, I checked into a recent home away from home, the National Archives in College Park, Md., to listen to more of the many previously unpublicized tapes from the Richard Nixon presidency.
Several employees wondered where I had been, and I found myself apologizing for having spent time in sunny South Carolina, attending the GOP primary festivities, which concluded Saturday. The archivists do get lonely.
Then it was back to some of 3,700 hours of Nixon tapes, of which more than 2,000 still haven’t even been listened to by archivists before their ultimate public release. That means that there will be Nixon tapes coming the public’s way for years.
I had been told of a “rhinoceros” tape from archivists, who kept egging me on to listen to a July 20, 1971, conversation among Nixon and top aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman. It involved Agnew.
Agnew was a former Maryland governor and a Greek-American who initially brought seeming political strengths to the Nixon ticket in 1968, though he had a low national profile. He was ultimately forced to resign in 1973 after pleading no contest to income tax evasion amid a bribery investigation dating to his days as governor.
For a period, he was a plus to Nixon, especially as a big-city ethnic who appealed to the party’s right wing. But he began wearing out his welcome, alienating the media and, in ways it’s now clear he could not imagine, began losing the respect of his boss.
That’s evident in the July 20 conversation that came as Agnew was on a grand tour of much of the world, hop-scotching about Europe, Asia and Africa. The African trek included representing the U.S. at the inauguration of a new president in Liberia and a stop in Kenya.
Some reports making their way back to the U.S. were short of flattering. In particular, as one listens in, there was the impression that Agnew was not burning the midnight oil in his vice presidential labors overseas.
“I never saw (someone) to have done it in a more leisurely way. I didn’t realize . . . Bob (Haldeman) told me he plays golf every goddamn day on these trips. That’s utter stupidity,” Nixon says.
“I don’t know about every day,” corrects Haldeman.
“Well, Bob, he shouldn’t play at all,” says a peeved Nixon.
Ehrlichman, ever the snoot, piles on.
“I don’t think he has missed a country. I don’t think,” Ehrlichman says, seemingly disregarding Haldeman’s qualifier about alleged daily golfing.
Nixon picks up with his view of a vice president’s role when overseas, which he concedes can involve smoke and mirrors.
“You have to make it appear the trip’s for work,” says Nixon. “Not over there on a goddamn vacation. I feel that way, anyway. Spending more hours on the golf course and not having enough time to shake hands with people on the street. Jesus Christ, when I went on these trips with my wife, we worked our butts off, and it made an impression. I had nothing substantive. He had far more of substance than I had. But our trips really had better effect because you were out there, talking to the people, visiting hospitals and going through plants.”
Haldeman says the media are getting restless with Agnew. “They’re making that point. `I didn’t just come along for a camel drive.’ “
Ehrlichman, the top domestic adviser, opines that “this trip is going to end up an enormous negative.”
Haldeman: “Think so?”
Ehrlichman: “Yup.”
Haldeman: “I’m not so sure.”
Ehrlichman: “I just really think it is . . . (there’s) a devastating piece in one of the news magazines.”
Nixon: “The Negro kid?”–apparently reference to a black reporter covering the White House.
Ehrlichman: “Oh, no, the news magazines. Time or Newsweek. Climaxed the report by saying that one of the highlights of this trip was an evening in Kenya or somewhere in Africa where he and his personal physician and very attractive red-headed secretary came down from their hut to watch a pair of rhinoceroses copulate.”
Nixon: “Bull—- . . . really?”
Ehrlichman: “Yeah.”
Nixon: “Must be quite a sight,” seemingly more taken with the image of the animals doing their thing than the image of the lazy-bones vice president watching it all.
Ehrlichman: “Look at those f—— rhinoceroses.”
“Rhinoceri,” says Haldeman, playing the role of White House English teacher.
“It’s a sort of Roman emperor act he’s putting on. Big entourage,” says Ehrlichman.
“That’s a mistake,” says Nixon. “We’ve overdone it. Believe me. We’ve overdone it. The security business. Because they shot Kennedy and Bobby. Everybody, they all take along Secret Service. Christ, I went (as vice president) with two.”
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Ehrlichman: “But people will make allowances as long as there seems to be work being done.”
Nixon: “Yeah. Does he have quite a staff with him?”
Haldeman: “Yeah.”
Ehrlichman: “That’s your point about fraternizing. I am afraid he’s in a position now that he has no leverage with the Secret Service. Because he’s debased the currency.
“One of the boys,” Nixon says, derisively.
“I think he likes it,” responds Haldeman.
Nixon then discourses on his eight years as vice president and how frugal and austere he was. He then moves, for no apparent reason, to a president’s treatment of subordinates, bashing Lyndon Johnson, who “treated people shamefully at times.”
The subject then turns to ambition and leadership and, for some reason, Nixon picks out Donald Rumsfeld, a former congressman and at the time a domestic adviser to Nixon. He would later hold other top posts, including secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford, and has long been a prominent and successful Chicago businessman.
“You take a Rumsfeld,” says Nixon. “(Unintelligible) by himself, he is a very serious (unintelligible) over the years. Here’s a guy who could be for real. Rumsfeld doesn’t have it, in my opinion.
“Yeah,” says Haldeman, ever the lackey.
Focusing back on Agnew and the job of vice president, Haldeman claims: “The sonofabitch could have taken the place (the White House) over. That’s the problem with the vice president. He’s a constitutional officer, and the job is what he makes it.”
Then, Nixon ends things with an interesting flash of candor after Ehrlichman has flattered him, mentioning his glory days as vice president.
“Actually, John, a lot of my stuff, what I had, was greatly overestimated. Sure, the trip to Latin America, and Khrushchev,” references to memorable moments in his vice presidency, including trading insults with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a trade fair in Moscow.
Haldeman says that the vice president “not only has to be qualified to be president but has to have an ingredient that will make his role as vice president complementary to the president, supplementary to the president, contributory to the president.”
Oh, there is another long conversation in the archives. It’s between Agnew and Nixon upon Agnew’s return home.
In the grand tradition of managerial spinelessness, Nixon breathes not a word about any unhappiness with Agnew’s performance.
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.