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maintained—apparently because J. Edgar Hoover suggested the possibility a few weeks later—that the president had eavesdropped on him personally in the last days of the campaign, with bugs or wiretaps. “We were tapped,” he averred on his own White House tapes. “Johnson tapped us.” Though it was not so, that would have made a far more sordid story, he believed.
    All decided to keep the affair under seal in the name of national security.
    Walt Rostow wrote the last chapter of the story in 1973, shortly after Nixon was reelected and Lyndon Johnson died. Rostow had smuggled out of the White House the key documents that told the tale. He had copies of the NSA’s reports, the FBI wiretaps, and a cable from the CIA station in Saigon that directly quoted President Thieu saying “he had sent two secret emissaries to the U.S. to contact Richard Nixon” in response to Johnson’s “betrayal.”
    Rostow placed the documents in a folder and wrote, “The ‘X’ Files,” on the cover. He sent it to the LBJ Presidential Library, with a request that it remain secret for fifty years. Before he sealed it, he added some personal reflections in a postscript.
    “I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways to the Watergate affair,” he wrote. “First, the election of 1968 proved to be close and there was some reason for those involved on the Republican side to believe their enterprise with the South Vietnamese [provided] the margin of victory. Second, they got away with it.” As Rostow concluded, “There were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit—or beyond” in the pursuit of power.
    A measure of deep bitterness remained in Nixon after his hour of triumph, over his suspicion of LBJ’s spying and his unshakable belief that the bombing halt in Vietnam was a ploy to deny him the presidency. Nixon would always remember that his victory depended on deception, duplicity, and acts of dubious legality.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    “He was surrounded by enemies”
    N IXON ’ S SENSE of siege started minutes after he was sworn into office on January 20, 1969, the president of a nation as deeply divided as it had been since the end of the Civil War.
    The war at home began on Inauguration Day, said Tom Charles Huston, a young White House aide charged with intelligence gathering. When Nixon rode from the Capitol to the White House, he confronted thousands of “radical people that were throwing rocks,” hurling obscenities at the president’s black limousine, “screaming and carrying on.” No president had ever arrived in office under a hail of garbage and curses, mocked by middle-finger salutes.
    Nixon would have his vengeance; Huston would help him seek it. A former military intelligence officer, by the end of the year he had become Nixon’s in-house consultant for domestic spying. When Nixon created the special investigative unit later known as the Plumbers, the group that carried out the president’s orders for gathering intelligence on his political enemies, he looked for a leader. He said, “I really need a son-of-a-bitch like Huston who will work his butt off and do it dishonorably.” But by then, he had a multitude of White House staffers willing and able to perform those tasks.
    A generation of the American right arose with Nixon; through them, his influence resounds down the decades. A future president, George H. W. Bush, was his steadfast Republican National Committee chairman. Seven future secretaries of defense served Nixon, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who labored mightily to destroy the foundations of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, at Nixon’s command. Six future secretaries of state came up through the Nixon White House; so did six directors and deputy directors of central intelligence.
    The hard-right views of a young Justice Department attorney, William Rehnquist, caught Nixon’s eye. Rehnquist would spend