EXCLUSIVE - The Jericho Report
Nixon, Watergate & the Nuclear Football Part 1

"If he [Nixon] were a Hitler or a Stalin, he'd have gone all the way,
brought the house down.
And that's what Jaworski was afraid of and that's what we were afraid of."
One of the Watergate Special Prosecutors

The President may be the Commander in Chief, but he doesn't exist outside the normal chain of command. It is claimed that in the final days of the Watergate affair the Joint Chiefs discreetly notified all commanders to obey only orders that came through the normal system. Thus, Nixon could not have called up SAC and ordered them to nuke Moscow. In a less dramatic example, the president would incur a lot of screams at the Pentagon if he ordered the promotion of a major to general, outside the normal promotional system. Both ends have powers and responsibilities.

Now, in situations where the mental stability of the commander is in question or if a command is unlawful, of course any unusual orders should be questioned. However, that applies to everyone at any rank under any circumstances.

During the final days of Watergate, when Nixon was drinking hard and wandering the White House at night talking to the pictures on the walls, there were stories that the chief of staff and the secretary of defense had taken away his football. While not exactly true, it is close.

The Watergate - Dallas Connection

Nixon indeed had been drinking heavily and was coming unglued, not just about Watergate. He was afraid for his life because some of the taped conversations had referred to "the Bay of Pigs thing", which H. R. Haldeman had said, correctly, was a code for "the Kennedy assassination."

It's true, the two were tied together, but there was hidden evidence that both Nixon and Lyndon Johnson had played personal roles in the Dallas murder. Not only could Nixon not allow that to come out, he had reason to fear that he himself might be assassinated to shut him up.

During the Watergate Scandal the CIA director, Richard Helms, and his deputy, Vernon Walters, were approached to pay hush-money to E. Howard Hunt. Although it seemed Walters was willing to do this, Helms refused.

According to one of the taped conversations, William Sullivan was providing Haldeman with information on the JFK assassination. Sullivan, along with James Angleton, had carried out a joint CIA/FBI investigation into the assassination. In his memoirs Sullivan claims he did not believe Oswald was a lone gunman.

Nixon had persuaded Sullivan to work with him in the White House after he was sacked by Hoover. This was a shrewd move as Sullivan had considerable information on the illegal activities of the Democratic Party. For example, Sullivan gave John Dean information on how Bobby Kennedy had ordered the bugging of LBJ during the Bobby Baker scandal.

On 23rd June, 1972, H. R. Haldeman suggests to Richard Helms that Richard Nixon has information on the CIA involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This included a reference to CIA actions in Mexico City. It is almost certain that this information came from Sullivan who had investigated Oswald's movements in Mexico City.

Despite these attempts at blackmail Helms refused to help Nixon in the cover-up. In February, 1973, Nixon sacked Helms. His deputy, Thomas H. Karamessines, resigned in protest.

Schlesinger now became the new director of the CIA. Schlesinger was heard to say: “The clandestine service was Helms’s Praetorian Guard. It had too much influence in the Agency and was too powerful within the government. I am going to cut it down to size.” This he did and over the next three months over 7 per cent of CIA officers lost their jobs.

Sullivan continued to pass information to Nixon. At a meeting on 13th March, 1973, Dean and Nixon discuss how they are going to survive the Watergate Scandal. Dean says: "This is why I keep coming back to this fellow Sullivan. It could change the picture." Nixon asks how? Dean replies that Sullivan could "get Kennedy into it". ...

On 9th May, 1973, Schlesinger issued a directive to all CIA employees: “I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or might have gone on in the past, which might be considered to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency. I hereby direct every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information should call my secretary and say that he wishes to talk to me about “activities outside the CIA’s charter”.

There were several employees who had been trying to complain about the illegal CIA activities for some time. As Cord Meyer pointed out, this directive “was a hunting license for the resentful subordinate to dig back into the records of the past in order to come up with evidence that might destroy the career of a superior whom he long hated.”

I believe that some of the information being reported to Schlesinger involved the assassination of JFK. I expect Nixon wanted this information to use against the CIA. Nixon hoped this would enable him to force the CIA to help with the Watergate cover-up.

However, this Schlesinger directive backfired. The CIA realised this was a fight to the death. This encouraged senior CIA operatives to leak information to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about Nixon's attempt to cover-up the Watergate Scandal. This information probably came from Richard Ober, a senior CIA official based in the White House. I suspect that William Sullivan also helped to get this information to the CIA. Sullivan, as Deputy Director of the FBI had always been close to the CIA, especially Richard Helms. Sullivan was also a secret supporter (revealed in his memoirs) of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. A Roman Catholic Irish-American, Sullivan had a lot in common with JFK. Like JFK, Sullivan moved left while in power. The row with Hoover had been about the large amount of resources being used against the left in the America. Sullivan had told Hoover that there were more FBI informants in the American Communist Party than genuine members.

On 16th May, 1973, Deep Throat has an important meeting with Woodward where he provides information that was to destroy Nixon. This includes the comment that the Senate Watergate Committee should consider interviewing Alexander P. Butterfield. Soon afterwards told a staff member of the committee (undoubtedly his friend, Scott Armstrong) that Butterfield should be asked to testify before Sam Ervin. When he did testify, Butterfield gave details of the tape system which monitored Nixon's conversations. It has been claimed by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin that Butterfield was working undercover for the CIA. This is based on several factors including Butterfield lying about he got the job with Nixon. He initially claimed that he had been approached by Haldeman. Later it was discovered that Butterfield asked Haldeman for a job in the White House (Butterfield admitted to Colodny that he had lied about this).

I suspect that by the end of May, 1973, Nixon realised he had made a terrible mistake in appointing Schlesinger. He now changed his tactics and promoted William Colby from within the organization to become Director of the CIA. Colby did not cancel Schlesinger's directive. Instead, he continued to take information on CIA illegal activities. This information was later passed onto the Frank Church Senate Committee.

The CIA continued to leak information via Deep Throat. Mark Riebling (Wedge) argues that Colby could have been Deep Throat. He quotes Colby as saying Deep Throat was a "good guy". However, Riebling eventually reaches the conclusion that it was another CIA official, Cord Meyer, who was Deep Throat.

[NOTE: After his death, Bob Woodward revealed that Mark Felts, second in command at the FBI, had been the real "Deep Throat" - but this would not have prevented a CIA source from feeding Felt the information, providing a second layer of protection. - Jim Moore] 

In the first week of November, 1973, Deep Throat told Woodward that their were "gaps" in Nixon's tapes. He hinted that these gaps were the result of deliberate erasures. On 8th November, Woodward and Bernstein published an article in the Washington Post that said that according to their source the "conservation on some of the tapes appears to have been erased". From this date on Nixon was on his way out.

The careers of the three men took different paths. William Sullivan was shot dead near his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on 9th November, 1977. An inquest decided that he had been shot accidentally by fellow hunter, Robert Daniels, who was fined $500 and lost his hunting license for 10 years.

Sullivan had been scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Sullivan was one of six top FBI officials who died in a six month period in 1977. Others who were due to appear before the committee who died included Louis Nicholas, special assistant to J. Edgar Hoover and Hoover's liaison with the Warren Commission; Alan H. Belmont, special assistant to Hoover; James Cadigan, document expert with access to documents that related to death of John F. Kennedy; J. M. English, former head of FBI Forensic Sciences Laboratory where Oswald's rifle and pistol were tested; Donald Kaylor, FBI fingerprint chemist who examined prints found at the assassination scene.

"The James Schlesinger Directive" by John Simkin, The Education Forum, June 21, 2005

Three aides - Henry Kissinger, Gen. Alexander Haig and James Schlesinger - were hearing rumors to the effect that Nixon was going to mobilize the 82nd Airborne Brigade and seal off the White House to stave off impeachment. It was actually Haig himself who had suggested the idea to Nixon.

Up to this point, the "revolt" had come from the CIA, not the military. It was the CIA that had been manipulated to try to cover up Watergate and destroy the evidence. The military "had no dog in this fight" until Haig drew it in, not to rebel against the Commander in Chief, but to support him, in what would could have been seen as either a coup d'etat or a counter-coup, depending on one's point of view.

Perhaps Haig thought it would be a stepping stone for himself if successful ... or perhaps he thought the military might follow those orders sooner than it would follow orders to launch a nuclear attack on North Vietnam. While there were plenty who would have been happy to push the button, there were plenty more generals and admirals who were sick and tired of the deception and manipulation of the military, starting with the Gulf of Tonkin lie, and how it was affecting the military's support within the United States. Also, the Vietnam War had driven Lyndon Johnson from office.

The Nuclear Football

What it is - The football is a cryptological communication mechanism carried everywhere with the President by aides from the White House Military Office. It enables the President to positively identify himself to nuclear commanders working for the NSA in the Pentagon and alternate sites around the country in order to authorize a nuclear strike - basically, the "signal to unleash hell."

Who carries it - The Football is carried by a rotation of military aides representing the 5 branches of the armed forces. Each aide must go through the fiercest possible American background check called "Yankee White." Any aide with any sort of foreign influence whatsoever is immediately disqualified. The football is chained to his wrist. Each football carrier is armed with an M9 Beretta 9 mm pistol and is licensed to eliminate anyone stupid enough to make a grab for the football. Talk about an offsides penalty!

What it's made of - outside it's black leather, 18 X 15 X 10, and brandishes a sizable combination lock. Inside it's impenetrable titanium. Wolverine's claws got nothing on this. Further inside is the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) Decision Handbook, a list of nearby emergency bunkers, a communications booklet on strategies in the event of nuclear war, and an Authorizing Tablet. When the president cracks it open, he can see the authorizing codes written out in letters and numbers and give the orders to launch. I gather this is much like the nuclear warhead launching sequences in "The Hunt for Red October." But the President doesn't have to "concur" with nobody. When under attack, the President is authorized to declare war without the permission of Congress.

Miscellaneous - Dwight Eisenhower created the entire concept...It's called the Nuclear Football because the first code name for it was "Dropkick."......The president is briefed for 15-30 minutes on the Football shortly before his inauguration...Officially, the carrier is required to be "nearby" the President; unofficially, he travels in any vehicle the President travels in except for his limo...Ronald Reagan kept the codes in his wallet instead of the briefcase; Jimmy Carter carried it in his jacket pocket...Reagan loved horseback riding, so the military office had special saddlebags made so that an aide could follow along on his own horse...President Kennedy never reached for the Football during the Cuban Missile Crisis...The carrier is advised to always stand between the President and his transportation...

"Secrets of the Nuclear Football" by Martin Bodek, (Published January 21, 2002 in The Scoogie Spin)

The contents of the case are classified, but a 1980 book called "Breaking Cover" by Bill Gulley, a former White House Military Office director, offered the following:

"There are four things in the Football. The Black Book containing the retaliatory options, a book listing Classified Site locations, a manila folder with eight or ten pages stapled together giving a description of procedures for the Emergency Broadcast System, and a three-by-five inch card with authentication codes."

Gulley added that the Black Book was about 9 by 12 inches and contained 75 loose-leaf pages. Retaliatory options were printed in red ink.

The book containing Classified Site locations, Gully wrote, contained information on places around the country the president could be taken in an emergency.

The contents have most likely been updated since Gulley wrote his book: Computers and telecommunications are more advanced, the Soviet Union is gone and the threat of a sudden, all-out nuclear war is more remote than in the Cold War days. Nevertheless, the football still shadows the president wherever he travels.

• MYTH: The football is handcuffed to a military aide.

• FACT: It has a leather cinch strap that can be looped around the wrist.

• MYTH: The football contains nuclear launch codes.

• FACT: It contains codes the president would need to order the Pentagon to launch nuclear weapons.

• MYTH: The football is always at the president's side.

• FACT: It must always be accessible but sometimes is stowed nearby, in another room or vehicle.

• MYTH: There is only one football.

• FACT: There are three: one stays with the president, one stays with the vice president, and a backup resides at the White House.

Since the President himself does not actually "carry" the football, it can't be "taken away" from him. Because the football contains only the nuclear launch codes, the President must authorize the football to be opened (as it was on Sept. 11, 2001), retrieve the codes, decide what targets to hit, and then communicate those codes to the appropriate launch centers.

If the military decides the President is mentally unstable, those links of communication can be cut, making it impossible for the President to actually transmit the codes and authorize the launch.

During the end of Nixon's presidency, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, Gen. Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger met in secret to decide what actions to take - or ignore - if Nixon carried out his threat to order troops around the White House and to possibly arrest members of the House and Senate and prevent his impeachment. ...

A new urgency was added early in August: scare talk about the need to bring out the Army's 82nd Airborne Division to protect the White House. There is evidence that Haig was behind much of this talk, which worked its way quickly to the Pentagon and—more important—to the Special Prosecutor's office.

One aide to Alexander Haig said it was Haig himself who suggested calling in the troops.

In the second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, Henry Kissinger wrote of a meeting with Haig on August 2: "He told me that Nixon was digging in his heels [in terms of immediate resignation]; it might be necessary to put the 82nd Airborne Division around the White House to protect the President.

"This I said was nonsense; a Presidency could not be conducted from a White House ringed with bayonets. Haig said he agreed completely; as a military man it made him heartsick to think of the Army in that role; he simply wanted me to have a feel for the kinds of ideas being canvassed."

One of Haig's close aides describes the atmosphere: "There was a vehemence against us. We had people circling the White House. Only Abe Lincoln had faced such ugliness, such absolute vehemence, while in the presidency. The White House is not a fort. It's a tough place to get into, but not a tough place to take [by force]." There was real "concern" on the part of Nixon and Haig about the crowds outside the White House.

"Haig was saying, 'Hey, maybe we need the 82nd Airborne.'" The aide insists that neither Nixon nor Haig was entertaining any thought of what he called "extra-legal stuff." Not everyone at the top of the government was so sure.

He had also reportedly threaten to launch a nuclear attack on North Vietnam, partially as a way to divert attention from the impeachment, according to other sources and documents released much, much later.

Schlesinger served both as CIA Director (in 1973, after Richard Helms, the previous director, had been fired for his refusal to block the Watergate investigation) and Secretary of Defense under both Nixon and President Ford.

During President Nixon's last days in the White House during the Watergate crisis, when the President's mental stability was doubted by some, Schlesinger is thought to have instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to check with him before carrying out any of Nixon's orders regarding nuclear weapons. He also drew up contingency plans for an emergency deployment of the 82nd Airborne to Washington D.C. in the event of Nixon refusing to step down in the event of impeachment and usurping of the marines. [1]

Secretary of Defense Disobeys President's Order for an Attack

Schlesinger's insistence on higher defense budgets, his disagreements within the administration and with Congress on this issue, and his differences with Secretary of State Kissinger all contributed to his dismissal from office by President Ford in November 1975.

Kissinger strongly supported the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks process, while Schlesinger wanted assurances that arms control agreements would not put the United States in a strategic position inferior to the Soviet Union. The secretary's harsh criticism of some congressional leaders dismayed President Ford, who was more willing than Schlesinger to compromise on the Defense budget.

On 2 November 1975, the president dismissed Schlesinger and made other important personnel changes. Kissinger lost his position as special assistant to the President for national security affairs but remained as secretary of state. Schlesinger left office on 19 November 1975, explaining his departure in terms of his budgetary differences with the White House.

The unreported, but important, main reason behind Schlesinger's dismissal, though, was his insubordination toward President Ford.

During the Mayaguez incident, Ford ordered several retaliatory strikes against the Cambodians. Schlesinger told Ford the strikes were carried out, but Ford later learned that Schlesinger, who disagreed with the order, had none of them carried out. Ford let the incident go, but when Schlesinger committed further insubordination on other matters, Ford finally fired him. This is all reported in Bob Woodward's 1999 book, Shadow.

"The Pardon" by Seymour Hersch, The Atlantic, August 1983

So we have here a Secretary of Defense who, with others, arranged to defy the orders of not one, but two presidents - Nixon and Ford.

In April of 1974, Joseph Laitin, a public-affairs official who had served in the Johnson White House, telephoned Schlesinger. Although Laitin was a liberal Democrat, the two had become friends early in the Nixon Administration, after Laitin was reassigned as a press official in the Bureau of the Budget, where Schlesinger was in charge of analyzing defense and intelligence programs. They had remained close as Schlesinger moved up in the government—to chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971, director of the Central Intelligence Agency in February of 1973, and to the Pentagon in May. Laitin broached some of his fears:

• Was it possible for the President of the United States to authorize the use of nuclear weapons without his secretary of defense knowing it?
• What if Nixon, ordered by the Supreme Court to leave office, refused to leave and called for the military to surround the Washington area?
• Who was in charge then?
• Whose orders would be obeyed in a crisis?

"If I were in your job," Laitin recalls telling Schlesinger, "I would want to know the location of the combat troops nearest to downtown Washington and the chain of command." Schlesinger said only, "Nice talking to you," and hung up.

Schlesinger did not need Laitin to provoke his suspicions of the President and the men immediately around him. He had watched, while serving in the Bureau of the Budget, as Nixon and Kissinger, invariably using Haig as their executive agent, repeatedly bypassed Melvin Laird, then secretary of defense. Laird would simply be eliminated from the chain of command, as combat orders for the war in Vietnam would go directly from the White House to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At one point early in the Administra­tion, Schlesinger had expressed his concern about such practices to Haig, who shrugged it off. Schlesinger's doubts about the White House's integrity deepened soon after he was named to replace Richard Helms as CIA director. Within weeks, the Agency was embroiled in Watergate, as it became known that the White House, working in 1971 through General Robert D. Cushman, Jr., deputy CIA director, had authorized Agency support for a series of illegal escapades involving E. Howard Hunt, Jr., and G. Gordon Liddy, members of the White House "Plumbers" team. Cushman, who had grown close to Nixon while serving as his military aide during the Eisenhower years, had been promoted by Nixon to commandant of the Marine Corps after leaving the CIA—he was thus one of the five members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the one feared by Schlesinger in 1974.

Since moving to the Pentagon, Schlesinger had had occasion to learn firsthand of the desperation in the White House, he told an acquaintance recently. Late in 1973, a few weeks after the White House had been criticized for what seemed to be an eighteen-and-a-half minute erasure in a crucial tape recording, Haig had telephoned Schlesinger with a disturbing order. Acting on behalf of the President, he told Schlesinger to arrange for the National Security Agency, the nation's communications intelligence agency, which is under Pentagon control, to produce a duplicate set of White House recordings. Schlesinger worried that any attempt by Nixon and Haig to involve the nation's most sensitive intelligence service in Watergate could only hurt national security. The NSA, of all agencies, had to be above suspicion. After consulting his closest associates in the Pentagon, among them Martin R. Hoffman, the secretary of the Army, Schlesinger telephoned Haig with a counter-offer: it was, of course, perfectly proper for the NSA to duplicate tapes at Nixon's request, he said; but the Defense Department felt that it would have to inform the Watergate Special Prosecution Force of the request and allow it, if it so chose, to have a representative witness the procedure. Haig was, as Schlesinger anticipated, enraged at the suggestion, and became only more so when Schlesinger persisted by telling him that if the White House's purpose was solely to reproduce the recordings so that more persons could listen to them, there could be no objections to permitting the Special Prosecutor's office to participate. Haig abruptly hung up; there would be no more Watergate-related calls to Schlesinger from Haig's office.

Laitin's warning, Schlesinger's experiences in the Bureau of the Budget, the dispute with Haig, and Schlesinger's suspicion of General Cushman were the driving forces behind Schlesinger's next move. As he told the acquaintance, "I had seen enough so that I was not going to run risks with the future of the United States. There are a lot of parliamentary governments that have been overthrown with much less at stake." Sometime in late July of 1974, Schlesinger called in Air Force General George S. Brown, the newly appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Brown was known as an officer who was far more comfortable behind the stick of an airplane than in an office; he never seemed to master high-level politics, with its subtle language and indirection. Bearing that in mind, and aware that Brown had taken an oath of office that made him responsible to Nixon as Commander-in-Chief, Schlesinger trod delicately during their talk. His goal was to express his concerns about the White House and somehow to get Brown to reach the same conclusion that he himself had already reached.

In essence, Schlesinger asked Brown for a commitment that neither he nor any of the other chiefs would respond to an order from the White House calling for the use of military force without immediately informing Schlesinger.

Brown dutifully relayed Schlesinger's message to the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a meeting a few hours later. He began the session, one of the joint chiefs recalls, by announcing, "I've just had the strangest conversation with the Secretary of Defense."

Schlesinger had urged him not to "do anything to disturb the equilibrium of the Republic, and to make sure we're in accord." He had said, "Don't take any emergency-type action without consulting me."

Brown was troubled by Schlesinger's remarks, and so was everyone else at the meeting. "We were confused, and George had to be confused," the chief says. 'We sat around looking at our fingernails; we didn't want to look at each other. It was a complete shock to us. I don't think any of us ever considered taking any action. We didn't know whether to be affronted or flattered at the thought."

The chief recalls that one of his colleagues commented that Schlesinger must have been "thinking of something out of Seven Days in May." If there was any consensus, the chief says, it was that "Schlesinger was coming unglued."

Schlesinger was clear, however, about his concerns. He continued to believe that Cushman, with his personal loyalty to Nixon, was a weak link in the new chain of command.

He carried his own deliberations further and quietly investigated just which forces would be available to Nixon. He found out how quickly the 82nd Airborne Division could be brought to Washington from its home base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Marines, he learned—Cushman's troops—were by far the strongest presence in the Washington area, with an honor-guard barracks in southeast Washington and a large officer-training facility at Quantico, Virginia, some thirty miles to the south. Schlesinger began to investigate what forces could be assembled at his order as a counterweight to the Marines, if Nixon—in a crisis—chose to subvert the Constitution.

Schlesinger's overriding concern, in case a crisis did arise, was the possibility that the armed forces would follow their inherent loyalty to the Commander-in-Chief. One comfort was his firm belief, based on what he had seen in the previous five and a half years, that any such order, if given, would come not directly from Nixon but from Haig. The Joint Chiefs would respond to an order from the secretary of defense, Schlesinger believed, before they would respond to one from Haig. As he explained to the acquaintance, "If an order came from below the Commander-in-Chief level, I could handle it."

Schlesinger knew that many might view his precautionary steps as the actions of an alarmist, but years later he remained proud of his decision: "First protect the country and then the Department of Defense."

The notion that Nixon could at any time resort to extraordinary steps to preserve his presidency was far more widespread in the government than the public perceived in the early days of Watergate or perceives today. One of the original Watergate prosecutors recalled in a recent interview the immediate fear, once the full implication of John Dean's allegations in the spring of 1973 became known, that "the government could topple."

When the case against Richard Nixon was initially outlined that April to Henry E. Petersen, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, the prosecutor says, Petersen responded by exclaiming, "The government's going to fall. And then what's going to happen?"

The concern was that Nixon would not comply with the judicial process: instead of accepting subpoenas for his internal records, he would defy the courts and any contempt summons. "Who ever heard of a President subjecting himself to a court?" the prosecutor recalls asking himself. "What if Nixon goes on TV—and openly defies the court? Who is the public going to support? Thousands of telegrams come in his support, and Nixon calls in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then what is Congress going to do?"

"I'll tell you what," the prosecutor says. "They'll run for cover. One third of the country still supports him, and we're on the verge of civil insurrection. If he told the Joint Chiefs, 'I want the troops out and I want to dissolve Congress,' they would have done it."

It was to Nixon's credit, the prosecutor insists, that Nixon chose to accept service of a judicial subpoena and not to jail the marshal delivering it. "You've got to say this for him—he had respect for the government, because he stepped out. If he were a Hitler or a Stalin, he'd have gone all the way, brought the house down. And that's what Jaworski was afraid of and that's what we were afraid of."

"The Pardon" by Seymour Hersch, The Atlantic, August 1983
(Hersh's book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House was published in 1983).

NOTE: Some paragraphs have been split up to improve readability.

Part 2: Why Nixon's Call for 'A New World Order' Disturbed the Military