Bottled Up
Nixon’s unfortunate timing resulted from a series of events that seem, in retrospect, almost to have benefited from a guiding hand. In mid-1963, friends had persuaded him that his long-term prospects required a move from California, where he had lost the 1962 race for the governorship. Now that he was a two-time loser, Nixon’s best hope, they counseled, was to find a position in New York that would pay him handsomely, and let him politick and keep himself in the public eye. His friend Donald Kendall, the longtime head of Pepsi’s international operations, offered to make him chairman of the international division. But the consensus was that a law firm job would suit him better, so he joined the firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, and Todd. Kendall sweetened the deal by throwing the law firm Pepsi’s lucrative legal business. In September, Kendall himself was promoted to head the entire Pepsi company.
On November 1, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, a corrupt anti-Communist, was overthrown and assassinated. On November 7, Nixon wrote to GOP strategist Robert Humphreys, expressing outrage over Diem’s death and blaming the Kennedy administration. “Our heavy-handed complicity in his murder can only have the effect of striking terror in the hearts of leaders of other nations who presumably are our friends.”
Historians disagree on what exactly Kennedy knew about Diem’s death, though Kennedy registered shock at the news—just as he had when Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, was assassinated in 1961. Kennedy realized that he could be blamed. Later on, it would be established by the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA had been attempting to kill Lumumba.
Also of interest is a little-noticed comment made by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, caught by his own recording equipment, in which he declared about Diem: “We killed him. We all got together and got a god-damn bunch of thugs and assassinated him.” It is not clear whom he meant by “we.”
Kendall asked Nixon to accompany him to Dallas for the Pepsi corporate gathering coinciding with the bottlers’ convention in late November. The convention was an important annual event for Pepsi, and so would have been on Kendall’s schedule for a while, though the necessity of Nixon’s presence is less apparent. And with LBJ as keynote speaker, and appearances by Miss USA, Yogi Berra, and Joan Crawford, Nixon, the two-time loser, did not even appear at the convention.
For his part, Nixon seems to have agreed to go because it was an opportunity to share the limelight surrounding Kennedy’s visit. And since Nixon was traveling as a representative of Pepsi, and flying on its corporate plane—something noted in the news coverage—Kendall was getting double duty out of Nixon’s play for media attention. That was something Kendall understood well.
Donald Kendall was, like Nixon and Poppy Bush, a World War II Navy vet who had served in the Pacific. But instead of politics, he had gone into the business world, joining the Pepsi-Cola company and rising quickly through the ranks. Like Nixon and Bush, he was enormously ambitious. And in his oversight of Pepsi operations abroad, he also shared something else with them: a deep concern about Communist encroachment—which was just about everywhere. Plus Kendall had a passion for covert operations.
Kendall’s particular reason for being interested in Cuba was sugar, for many years a key ingredient of Pepsi-Cola. Cuba was the world’s leading supplier; and Castro’s expropriations, and the resulting U.S. embargo, had caused chaos in the soft drink industry. (It also had affected the fortunes of Wall Street firms such as Brown Brothers Harriman, which, as noted in chapter 3, had extensive sugar holdings on the island.)
Indeed, articles from the Dallas papers anticipating the bottlers’ convention talked openly about all these problems with Cuba. One of the articles, titled “Little Relief Seen for Sugar Problem,” explains the pressure felt by soft drink bottlers in light of a crisis concerning high sugar prices. The president of a major New York-based sugar company is quoted explaining why the crisis had not yet been averted: “The government probably thought the Castro regime
might be eliminated.”
It is in this context that we consider a June 1963 letter from Nixon to Kendall, then still running Pepsi’s foreign operations. A researcher working for me found it in Nixon’s presidential library archives; it appears to be previously
unpublished.
Dear Don:
In view of our discussion yesterday morning with regard to Cuba, I thought you might like to see a copy of the speech
I made before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which I directed remarks toward this problem. When I return from Europe I am looking forward to having a chance to get a further fill-in with regard to your experiences
on the Bay of Pigs incident.
Dick
The letter rings a little odd. Nixon and Kendall were close, and more than two years had passed since the Bay of Pigs; it was unlikely that this would be the first chance Nixon got to discuss the subject with his friend. Furthermore, Kendall is not known to have had any “experiences” in relation to the invasion. In a 2008 interview, Kendall, by then eighty-seven years old but still maintaining an office at Pepsi and seeming vigorous, said that he could not recall the letter nor provide an explanation for it.
Given this, the use of the phrase in the letter appears to be some form of euphemism between friends, a sort of discreet wink. Nixon, the former coordinator of covert operations under Ike, clearly knew that Kendall was more than a soda pop man. Nixon’s experiences representing Pepsi instilled in him a lasting—and not altogether favorable—impression of what he acidly termed “the sugar lobby.” Haldeman got the message that treading carefully was wise. Some of his notes are intriguing in this respect. He urges special counsel Charles Colson:
0900 Cols[on]—re idea of getting pol. Commitments— Sugar people are richest & most ruthless before we commit—shld put screws on & get quid pro quo ie Fl[anigan]—always go to Sugar lobby or oil etc. before we give them anything The CIA also knew the soft drink industry well. The agency used bottling plants, including those run by Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and other companies, for both cover and intelligence. Moreover, the local bottling franchises tended to be given to crucial figures in each country, with ties to the military and the ruling elites. It was not just bottlers that played such a role; there were marketing monopolies for all kinds of products, from cars to sewing machines, given out on recommendations of the CIA.
Kendall was a close friend of the Bush family and a fellow resident of Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1988, he would serve in the crucial position of finance chairman for Poppy Bush’s successful run for the presidency. His support for the Bushes included donating to George W. Bush’s 1978 Midland congressional campaign.
And as noted by the New York Times, Kendall was identified with the successful effort to overthrow the elected democratic socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende.
As the Times would report in July 1976:
One of Mr. Kendall’s great passions is international trade, and his interest in foreign affairs won him a footnote in a 1975 interim report of a Senate Select Committee. The report was called “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” and discussed in part the assassination of Salvador Allende Gossens, the Marxist Chilean president who was killed in 1973. The report stated that Mr. Kendall had requested in 1970 that Augustin Edwards, who was publisher of the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, as well as a Pepsi bottler in Chile, meet with high Nixon Administration officials to report on the political situation in Chile. (Pepsi bottling operations were later expropriated by the regime.) That meeting, which included Mr. Kendall, Mr. Edwards, Henry Kissinger and John N. Mitchell, was indeed held, and later the same day, Mr. Nixon met with Dr. Kissinger and Richard Helms, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Helms later testified that President Nixon had ordered at the follow-up meeting that Chile was to be saved from Allende “and he didn’t care much how.” Mr. Kendall says he sees nothing sinister, or for that matter even controversial, in his action.
Like many on the right, quite a few bottlers regarded the Kennedy administration’s policy toward Castro’s Cuba as dangerously soft. Declassified FBI files show that, after Kennedy’s death, one man contacted the FBI regarding threatening remarks that his brother, a bottler, had made in reference to the president. Another convention attendee was identified in FBI reports as having had a drink with Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald, on the night of November 21.
Though unhappy with Kennedy, these independent businessmen clearly wanted to hear what Johnson had to say, which is why the Texas-born vice president was the convention’s keynote speaker.
By some estimates, the convention included close to eight thousand bottlers—so many, in fact, that it had taken over Dallas’s largest venue, the new Market Hall. This meant that when Kennedy’s trip planners determined where he would speak on November 22, one of the very few sufficiently large and central venues had long since been taken. The Dallas Trade Mart thereby became the most likely location for Kennedy’s speech, with the route through downtown to the Trade Mart, past the Texas School Book Depository, as the most likely for the presidential motorcade.
In fact, the Trade Mart was secured by that most unlikely group of “friends” of JFK, the Dallas Citizens Council, whose members’ views were described by the New York Times as “very conservative and range rightward.” The council had cosponsored the luncheon as a putative peace offering to JFK. Indeed, it seems that JFK’s itinerary in Dallas was circumscribed by the bottlers and the Citizens Council.
The mere fact that eight thousand strangers had poured into Dallas in the days before JFK’s arrival should presumably have been of interest, yet the Warren Commission ignored the event altogether.
Another interesting thing about the bottlers’ convention is that the Army Reserves volunteered to help facilitate an unusual extracurricular activity. As noted in chapters 6 and 7, Poppy Bush’s friend Jack Crichton was head of a local Army Intelligence unit. Associates of Crichton’s who were involved with the Army Reserves had managed to get into the pilot car of Kennedy’s procession, with one as the driver. Crichton would also provide the interpreter for Marina Oswald after her husband’s arrest as the prime suspect in Kennedy’s murder.
According to a short item in the Dallas Morning News the day before Kennedy was shot, members of the Dallas unit of the 90th Artillery Division of the Army Reserve would be providing trucks and drivers to transport two hundred orphans to a livestock arena for a rodeo sponsored by the bottlers’ group. This was to take place at nine P.M. on the night before Kennedy’s arrival. The arena was at Fair Park, near the site under which Crichton’s Dallas Civil Defense maintained its underground emergency bunker and communications facility. Putting aside the Dickensian aspect of moving orphans in Army trucks within an affluent American city, this raises some questions about the reason for this odd maneuver. Whatever the true purpose of a small platoon of Army vehicles being permitted to move about Dallas on purportedly unrelated civilian business as the president’s arrival was imminent, it appears investigators never considered this incident worthy of a closer look.
Cumulatively, the bottlers’ convention was responsible for a number of curious circumstances that may be said to have some relevance to the events surrounding Kennedy’s death:
- The convention brought Nixon to Dallas.
- It brought eight thousand strangers to Dallas.
- It sent army vehicles into action on city streets the night before the assassination.
- Its early reservation of one large venue helped determine Kennedy’s legtimate destination and thus the motorcade route.
In any event, as Nixon’s adviser Stephen Hess has recounted, the former vice president emerged deeply shaken about the timing of his Dallas visit. It served to remind him that if he ever occupied the Oval Office, he too could be vulnerable and targeted—by the very same players. And his presence in this incriminating spot was suggestive of wheels within wheels, to which he of all people would have been alert. Were these intrigues what fueled President Nixon’s obsession with the CIA and its cloak-and-dagger activities in the Kennedy era? This little-noted tug-of-war, a struggle over both current policy and past history, would become an ongoing theme throughout Nixon’s term in office.
The Loyalist in Chief
At one time, Poppy Bush had worked hard to position himself as Richard Nixon’s most loyal servant. An example appeared in a 1971 profile of Poppy in his role as Nixon’s United Nations ambassador. Under the banner headline “Bush Working Overtime,” the Dallas Morning News of September 19, 1971, portrayed the ambassador as poised at the center of world affairs. Leaning forward at his desk, a large globe next to him, his lean face bearing a look of calm intensity, George H. W. Bush looked almost presidential.
The reporter for the Texas paper picked up on that. But he was equally struck by Poppy’s devotion to the sitting president. Ambassador Bush, he noted, “is loyal—some say to a fault—to President Nixon, and frequently quotes him in conversation.”
It was the image Poppy wanted to convey. Even when the reporter asked for his own views, he quickly deferred. “I like to think of myself as a pragmatist, but I have learned to defy being labeled,” Bush said. “What I can say is that I am a strong supporter of the President.”
Of course, when someone defies being labeled, it gives him extraordinary flexibility to move in different circles, to collect information, to spin on a dime—in short, to behave a lot like a covert intelligence officer.
The image of Poppy as the ultimate loyalist was one he would project for three more years—right up to the final days of the Nixon presidency. Not even Nixon, who was famously distrustful, seemed to doubt it. After winning the 1972 election in the midst of the Watergate scandal, Nixon decided to hedge his bets and clean house.
Planning to fire all but his most trusted aides, Nixon instructed Ehrlichman to “eliminate everyone except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause.” This trust endured to the end of Nixon’s presidency.
If indeed Bush was ever a Nixon loyalist, he certainly flipped the moment the tide turned. This new stance emerged with the 1974 public release of the transcript of Nixon’s smoking gun conversation with Haldeman. As Bush would record in his diary after Nixon’s final cabinet meeting, the taped conversation was irrefutable proof that “Nixon lied about his knowledge of the cover-up of the Watergate scandal . . . I felt betrayed by his lie . . . I want to make damn clear the lie is something we can’t support.”
Added Poppy: “This era of tawdry, shabby lack of morality has got to end.”
This purported diary entry was most likely part of Poppy’s perennial alibi trail. It could have been Bush family tradecraft, something like Barbara’s Tyler, Texas, hair salon letter from November 22, 1963—always intended for public view. Perhaps the most revealing part is the point at which Bush summarizes the content of the smoking gun conversation. Poppy selectively paraphrases a tiny part of that session, making it look as if Nixon had ordered Haldeman (as Bush put it) to “block the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in.” This, Poppy asserted, “was proof [that] the President had been involved, at least in the cover-up.”
What Poppy omitted were two key things: that it was actually John Dean’s suggestion, not Nixon’s, to block the investigation—and that the CIA was at the center of the intrigue to begin with.
Watergate’s Unknown Prelude
The series of scandals that undid Richard Nixon’s presidency are principally identified with the 1972 burglary at the Democratic party offices in the Watergate complex. But one could argue that Watergate—and Nixon’s downfall—really began in late 1969, during Nixon’s first year in office, with a phone call from a man almost no one today has heard of.
An independent oilman named John M. King dialed in to offer ideas for improving Nixon’s hold over Congress. Former White House staffer Jack Gleason remembered the episode: “[King] called one day in ‘69 and said, ‘You know, we have to start planning for 1970.’ ”
King’s call suggested he was principally concerned about helping Nixon, but in retrospect, there may have been more at stake. For one thing, King was a member of the fraternity of independent oilmen who were growing increasingly unhappy with Nixon. As we saw in the last chapter, the oil barons were up in arms over threats to the oil depletion allowance, convinced that Nixon was not solidly enough in their corner. But they had other gripes. As Haldeman noted in a diary entry in December 1969: “Big problem persists on oil import quotas. Have to make some decision, and can’t win. If we do what we should, and what the task force recommends, we’d apparently end up losing at least a couple of senate seats, including George Bush in Texas. Trying to figure out a way to duck the whole thing and shift it to Congress.”
On a more personal level, King was mired in problems. The Denver-based King had assembled a global empire with oil drilling and mining operations in a hundred countries; he was known for a high-flying lifestyle and a gift for leveraging connections. He even had two Apollo astronauts on his board. In 1968, King had donated $750,000 to Nixon, and as a big donor, his calls always got attention. But King was, according to a Time magazine article of the period, something of a huckster. By late 1969, his empire was on the verge of collapse. In the end, he would face jail and ruin.
Perhaps he was looking to secure intervention from the White House. Perhaps it was just general business insurance. Or perhaps he was speaking on behalf of his fellow in dependent oilmen.
In any event, King’s pitch sounded like a good idea. He was proposing that the Nixon White House funnel money from big GOP donors directly to Senate and House candidates of its choice, rather than following the customary method: letting the Republican Party determine the recipients. To do this without provoking the wrath of the GOP establishment, King suggested it be kept under wraps.
This idea appealed to the White House brass, and soon, a special operation was being convened.
”As it matured, we had a couple of meetings with Ehrlichman and Haldeman and went over some of the ground rules,” said Gleason. Haldeman brought the bare bones of the idea to Nixon, who thought it sounded fine. Anything that involved secrecy and centralized White House control was likely to find a receptive ear. Gleason’s recollection is confirmed by a notation in Haldeman’s diary of December 11: “I had meeting with [Maurice] Stans, Dent, and Gleason about setting up our own funding for backing the good candidates in hot races. A little tricky to handle outside the RNC but looks pretty good.”
The White House political unit assigned the job of organizing and running the new fund to its operative Gleason, an experienced GOP fundraiser. Gleason was instructed by his boss, Harry Dent, to find an office for the operation. When he suggested renting space in one of those prefurnished office suites that come with secretarial and other services, he was told that this would be too expensive.
That struck Gleason as odd, since it would not have cost much more and would have been a pittance in relation to the large sums that would be raised. But he followed his orders and rented something cheaper and more discreet. Dent directed him to a townhouse on Nineteenth Street, in a residential area near Dupont Circle. The space was not just in a townhouse but in the basement of a townhouse. And not only that, it was in the back of the basement. Reporters would later describe it as a “townhouse basement back room”—an arrangement guaranteed to raise eyebrows if ever discovered.
The way in which the funds were to be handled also struck Gleason as unnecessarily complicated, and even furtive. While donors could simply— and legally—have written a single check to each candidate’s campaign committee, they were instructed instead to break up their donations into a number of smaller checks. The checks were then routed through the townhouse, where Gleason would pick them up and deposit them in a “Jack Gleason, Agent” account at American Security and Trust Bank. Gleason then would convert the amounts into cashier’s checks and send them on to the respective campaign committees, often further breaking each donation up into smaller ones and spreading them over more than one campaign committee of each candidate.
The ostensible reason for these complex arrangements was to enable the White House to control the money. The actual effect, however, was to create the impression of something illicit, such as a money-laundering operation aimed at hiding the identities of the donors.
Somewhere along the way Gleason began to detect an odor stronger than that of quotidian campaign operations. What seemed suspect to him was not that Nixon would help Republican candidates—that was how things worked. What bothered him were the operational details. Many seemed positively harebrained, the kind of things with which no president should be associated. But Gleason just figured that Richard Nixon, or his subordinates,
had a blind spot when it came to appearances of impropriety.
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