The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [230]
The clouds of criticism of his Cambodian action infuriated the President even before the San Jose incident and sharpened his always active sense of persecution. “A siege mentality” pervaded the White House, according to Charles Colson of the staff. “It was now ‘us’ against ‘them.’ ” The palace guard, according to another observer, “genuinely believed that a left-wing revolution was a distinct possibility.” The resort to secret surveillance of “enemies,” undercover methods of harassment and espionage, breaking and entering, wiretapping without warrants became a full-fledged operation. A White House staff member assigned to watch radical terrorist groups drew up a plan for unleashed police power and unauthorized entry as a tool of law enforcement. Signed by the President, the program existed as policy for five days until the FBI, perhaps jealous of its own prerogatives, advised its abandonment. The search for the source of leaks on the secret bombing expanded until it reached seventeen wire-taps on members of the National Security Council and on several newspapermen. As with the elusive COSVN, no leaks were discovered; the stories proved to be the ordinary enterprise of the press.
Right of dissent is an absolute of the American political system. The readiness to attempt its suppression by and on behalf of the Chief of State and to undertake and tolerate illegal procedures laid the lines to Watergate. With continued frustration in negotiations, and prolonging of the war into another year, these procedures increased and grew to excess on publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. A collected record of mostly classified government documents originally authorized by McNamara in an effort to uncover the roots of American involvement, the Papers were purloined by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official now an ideologue of anti-war convictions, and made available to the press and certain members of the House and Senate. Although the record did not go beyond 1968, the sensitivity to leaks of the Nixon-Kissinger team was extreme, especially so because they were working in secret to bring off the re-opening of relations with China and a summit meeting with Moscow and did not wish Washington to be regarded as incapable of confidential relations. A “plumbers” group to locate leaks was established in a basement office next door to the White House, and orders came “right out of the Oval Office” (according to later testimony) to get something on Ellsberg. The result was the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office with the object of framing him as a Soviet agent, an enterprise of doubtful utility for, if successful, it could well have spiked Nixon’s intensely desired summit with the Russians. Fortunately for their employer, the plumbers came away empty-handed, but no matter what they might have discovered about Ellsberg it could not in any case have discredited fourteen volumes of photocopied government documents. Folly at the top was clearly seeping down. Here too, in the absence of scruple against lawbreaking, the morality of the Renaissance Popes re-appears.
Signals of trouble were rising from Congress, which had been content so far to be hardly more than a spectator of the affair tormenting the nation. Congress, said a member, “is a body of followers not leaders.” Since it may be presumed to follow what it senses to be the trend of public opinion, its torpor is evidence that until Cambodia the silent majority probably was a majority. When Nixon’s first six months in office brought no cease-fire as his campaign had promised, the anti-war Senators, Mansfield, Kennedy, Gaylord Nelson, Charles Goodell and others, began to call publicly for measures to end the war. Invasion of Cambodia without Congressional authority galvanized efforts in the Senate to reassert the prerogatives