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THE FINAL WATERGATE meeting with O’Brien, on Saturday, October 26, was a lot shorter than the first. Apologizing for being the bearer of bad news, O’Brien said he had approached the President, but that Johnson said he would not ask Helms about the Greek money transfer. Furthermore, O’Brien had concluded that, although the story was “compelling,” every solution proposed by Elias “had a lot of pluses and a lot of minuses, with more minuses.” He said that sending any of his staff to Greece to interview sources was far too risky. They could get arrested or entrapped in some embarrassing exposé that would reflect badly on the Humphrey campaign and turn off Greek-American voters.
He then returned to the proposal to bring one or more of the sources and their families to the US to corroborate the story publicly. O’Brien told him, “Elias, if we win the election we’ll not have any problems, but if we lose the election I cannot guarantee that we could cover their living expenses.” Laughing, he continued, “If we lose, I don’t know how I’ll cover my own living expenses.”
Reflecting on those words more than four decades later, Elias bristled at the apparent disingenuousness of the comment. “If I knew then what I know now about O’Brien’s dealings with Howard Hughes before, during, and after his chairmanship, that he would be fine financially regardless of the outcome, the meetings with O’Brien would have been far different. I still would have tried to get Johnson to question Helms, but I wouldn’t have agreed to keep quiet.”
He definitely would not have violated his longstanding principle of not over-relying on one source or outlet. Instead, he would have turned elsewhere to get the story out, particularly to his highly respected friends in Congress. Although Congress was in recess and members had scattered to their districts to campaign, more than a few, he thought, would have been willing to issue statements decrying the illegal money transfer. Once Johnson declined to help, Demetracopoulos also would have given the story to syndicated columnists Evans, Novak, Pearson, and Anderson, and to the main wire services. He himself would have held a major press conference, disclosing everything he knew. Not doing so was a fatal miscalculation.
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PUBLICATION OF THE Greek money story could have had a major impact on the 1968 election. Public opinion on the rapidly narrowing race was volatile. Pollsters said pre-election measurements could be further from accurate than at any time since 1948, when they had predicted the wrong winner. The three-person race made screening non-voters and “undecideds” more difficult. In mid-October, a Gallup poll reported that 29 percent of voters were not certain they’d vote for their preferred choice on election day.35
As Eileen Shanahan reported in the New York Times on October 16, three days before the first Demetracopoulos-O’Brien meeting, predicting an outcome is made more difficult because of “what appears to be a widespread lack of enthusiasm for any of this year’s candidates [which] may mean a higher-than-usual possibility of last minute switches if there is a last minute campaign issue or disclosure.”
Nixon’s team, relying on their internal tracking polls, saw the same developments. Campaign aides Herb Klein and Len Garment worried they were one bad story away from blowing the race. Harry Dent, architect of the Southern Strategy, told Elias years later he believed the Pappas story could have changed the outcome of the race.36
It’s not as if such a thing had not happened before. Drew Pearson’s late-October 1960 exposure of a mysterious $205,000 (almost $1.5 million in current dollars) non-recourse loan made in 1956 from tycoon Howard Hughes to Richard Nixon’s mother, allegedly to save the vice president’s brother Donald’s “Nixonburger” enterprise, was decisive in providing JFK’s razor-thin margin of victory that year—perhaps more so than voting-machine irregularities in Chicago or paper-ballot problems in Texas, or the first-ever televised presidential debates. It was rationalized by Hughes as the “chance to cement a relationship” with the Nixons.37 Shortly after the loan was processed, Hughes’s various businesses overcame multiple roadblocks involving US regulations and won a major defense contract.
The 1960 Hughes loan story was first exposed thirteen days before election day in Drew Pearson’s column. As expected, it evoked “semi-sleeping perceptions of Nixon…the huckster whose personal ethics were less than presidential.”38 By providing the public enough but not all of the story two weeks before the election, Pearson meant to tempt a Nixon denial and then rebut the denial with follow-up articles disclosing the most damning specifics. The stratagem worked.39 In the face of six syndicated stories, the Nixon camp lied, tried to cover up, challenged the critics’ motives, played the victim, stonewalled, and at last grudgingly conceded the truth. The Kennedy campaign amplified the stories, encouraging doubts of Nixon’s trustworthiness. Voters drew their own conclusions. It was the October Surprise of the 1960 presidential campaign.
Like Nixon’s 1968 campaign managers, Humphrey’s had similar internal polling data indicating the same softness in Nixon’s support. Napolitan, sensing an opportunity, shared this information with O’Brien. “If the story had come out publicly about Greek CIA money going to Mitchell, you bet your ass it could have been woven effectively into ads,” Napolitan recalled years later. “Just having that accusation and being able to determine its veracity would have given us a good weapon.”40 He urged O’Brien to go on the attack, but the campaign manager told Napolitan “not to say anything to anyone.” Napolitan added, “I wasn’t calling the shots then; Larry was.” Even after the second Demetracopoulos meeting, Napolitan felt “we still had time” to turn the election by making statements and creating powerful ads. But “Larry was running the show…and asked that we not do it.”41
Respected Washington Post columnist David Broder, dean of the Washington press corps, observed that if the payoff story had been released in mid-October 1968, it would have been “explosive.”42 The “New Nixon” myth would have quickly evaporated, he surmised, inviting “others to come forward with similar reports, which cumulatively could have changed the outcome of such a close election.” It could also have created an atmosphere in which Humphrey or LBJ released intelligence reports about the even more sensational Nixon Paris Peace talks sabotage.43
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CRESTFALLEN, ELIAS LEFT the Watergate Hotel that beautiful autumn afternoon and slowly walked back to his apartment at the Fairfax Hotel. In the privacy of his room, emotionally exhausted, he briefly shed tears. He cried for the wounded cause of Greek democracy and the lost chance to prevent the pernicious effects of an ascendant Agnew. He cried in frustration at his failure to achieve the anti-junta objectives he’d sought, after months of sleepless effort. He cried in fear for himself. Then he coldly assessed his situation and wondered what he, with an uncertain immigration status, under wiretap and other government surveillance, should do next.
He knew that if he were denied legal permanent resident status, he would have to leave the country, and briefly considered carrying his self-exile to Copenhagen, London, or Rome and picking up the fight there. But those capitals paled as a base from which to mount a serious, sustained campaign against the junta. To be effective, he needed to stay in Washington and fight harder.
He decided to file the Pappas-KYP money story away and not discuss it further. If, in such a close campaign, O’Brien and the Democrats didn’t think his “scoop” was of great value, worth confirming and promoting, then maybe someday a serious congressional committee would investigate what happened and expose the truth. History would provide answers. But the Pappas payoff could not remain his priority issue. Johnson-Humphrey had not been great for Greek democracy either; Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy had been much more forceful in criticizing American support of the military dictatorship. How much worse could Nixon-Agnew be, especially if the Democrats held control of Congress? The fight would go on, he rationalized.
He dried his eyes and called his lawyer to discuss the deportation risks he faced and plan the next steps. And then, in classic Elias Demetracopoulos compartmentalizing fashion, he walled off the week’s events and went to a square dance to which he’d been invited. But rather than wearing cowboy boots, Stetson hat, and a colorful bandanna as did others, he wore wingtips, navy suit, white shirt, and carefully knotted tie.
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AT THE LAST meeting with O’Brien, Ira Kapenstein held out the promise of a critical story on Tom Pappas. Robert Healy, Boston Globe reporter, columnist, Washington bureau chief, and later executive editor, had Pappas on his radar for years. Covering the Eisenhower Administration, Healy had watched as Pappas came and left the White House as he pleased, often securing decisions favorable to his business interests.
Healy was also a regular at Washington Sunday-evening pot-luck suppers where reporters dined informally with sources, including CIA officers. The rules were that all conversation was “off the record,” definitely not for attribution, but the information exchanged could be developed. And the information, Healy said, was usually reliable. It was there that he picked up fragments of stories of Pappas and Agnew leaning hard on Greek-Americans, Greek nationals, and members of the Greek government for serious cash to help the Nixon campaign.44 So Healy was primed when, about the time of Brown’s call to O’Brien, Kenny O’Donnell, former appointments secretary in the Kennedy White House, raised the issue of Pappas and channeling possibly illegal Greek money to the Nixon campaign.
Healy passed the tip on to the Globe’s editor Tom Winship, a stalwart liberal who had long been interested in profiling the Pappas brothers’ roles in Boston and Washington politics.45 Winship disliked Tom Pappas, and relished an opportunity to knock him down, or, better yet, nail him in a breakthrough article that could influence the campaign. He assigned a large feature story to Christopher Lydon, a young, well-regarded, Boston-based political reporter and ardent admirer of Hubert Humphrey. Sensing a big story, Winship pushed Lydon to “dig deep.”46
The day before Demetracopoulos’s first meeting with O’Brien, Lydon met Tom Pappas for breakfast at the Boston Ritz Carlton Hotel. Pappas turned on the charm, denying the negative allegations as baseless rumors. That Friday, October 18, was a memorable day for Lydon. His wife was about to give birth to their first child, and he was conducting the early-morning interview before going to the hospital. When he got there, he found in his wife’s room an enormous basket of fruit, a gift from Tom Pappas, with a note of congratulations and best wishes.
In the course of his research, Lydon talked with Larry O’Brien, who gave him the gist of what Demetracopoulos had told him, without disclosing his source, but indicating that the story couldn’t be corroborated. O’Brien’s assistant Kapenstein, focusing on feeding the press allegations of Agnew’s corruption, also failed to push the Demetracopoulos disclosures.47 Although he continually monitored the development of the Globe story, Kapenstein said nothing to Lydon about Demetracopoulos or to indicate that the Pappas charges were anything but “unsubstantiable [sic] rumors.” It might not have mattered. With a new baby, Lydon was not going to fly to Athens to check out the details, and the Globe wasn’t going to pick up the unlimited tab for any sources moving to the States.
Some who knew Winship well, however, believe that the Globe editor, given the opportunity to help, would have sought out benefactors who could have provided living expenses for the corroborators.48 As it was, Winship was disappointed that no smoking gun had been uncovered, but nevertheless gave Lydon’s profile big play. The article came out on Thursday morning, October 31, and highlighted Pappas’s “near-legendary reputation as a Midas among party money men,” who always made sure he got full credit for his fundraising prowess. It quoted an economist who called Pappas a modern-day “robber baron” and “monopolist,” and described the Greek-American fundraiser as a salesman for the junta who was planning to lead a series of meetings after the American election on “Greece: Business Opportunities in a Developing Economy.” Asked about being a power broker on both sides of the Atlantic, Pappas “dismissed the question” with a “tsk, tsk,” responding “I am an American citizen” and denying “any more than a civic interest in the American election.”
About the dramatic headlines in the New York Daily News and London Sunday Times instigated by Elias’s tips and late-September news conference, headlines “which inspired new legends about Pappas the wonder worker,” Lydon wrote: “Few of those original suggestions about Pappas and Agnew seem credible now.”49 The section dealing with the KYP money was buried in the piece. It said only: “In the rumor mills of Boston and Washington it is being whispered that Pappas is the conduit of campaign funds from the Greek junta to the Nixon-Agnew treasury—an unsubstantiable charge. Yet the government in Athens was sufficiently concerned about it to issue an official statement branding the rumor a ‘ludicrous fabrication of enemies of Greece.’ ”50
The article was enough of a news hook for the Democratic National Committee to issue a press release later the same day, blandly headlined: “O’BRIEN ASKS EXPLANATION OF NIXON-AGNEW RELATIONSHIPS WITH PAPPAS,” and including a call on Nixon and Agnew to “explain their relationships.” It had no impact on the race. The Nixon campaign was silent. No reporter picked up the story. And, even if one had, there was little that could have been done to penetrate the noise of the final days of the campaign.
October 31 was the day that President Johnson announced the halt to bombing in Vietnam. That story, the so-called “breakthrough to peace,” led the news. Even the normally voluble Elias Demetracopoulos thought the Globe piece was too little, too late. That evening he issued a simple anticlimactic press release of his own, criticizing Agnew’s “surprising ignorance of the Greek situation” and stating that he preferred “to make no comment whatsoever, under the present circumstances” about “the relationship between the Greek military junta,…Mr. Thomas A. Pappas and the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Governor Spiro Agnew.”51
On November 1, the day after O’Brien issued his Pappas release and Johnson announced the bombing halt, a Pearson-Anderson column appeared under the headline: “Agnew’s Junta Ties Disturb NATO.”52 Trying to do a takedown article on Nixon with the impact of his 1960 Howard Hughes exposé, Pearson focused on Agnew and his alleged Geppetto, Tom Pappas. Like their earlier 1968 Nixon exposés, this one also failed to draw blood, only nibbling at parts of the big story.53 Kapenstein was one of Pearson’s anonymous sources for this article, but never told him about the Demetracopoulos disclosure. When Pearson, who had extensive contacts in Greece dating back to his covering the Greek Civil War, found out that Elias had withheld information that could have helped him write a blockbuster CIA/Pappas/Nixon/Agnew exposé, he was furious and, until his death the following year, refused to talk to him.54
Jack Anderson’s biographer, Mark Feldstein, said that, while it is impossible to say with certainty, he believed that had Pearson and Anderson been able to confirm Elias’s allegations with other “tangible evidence,” they would have run with it hard, in their nationally syndicated column and daily radio program, probably using the same approach they successfully used with the Hughes loan in 1960.55 Les Whitten, then a junior member of the same muckraking team, also felt that Pearson and Anderson, each for different reasons, would have gone with the information, even before they’d pinned everything down, because of Elias’s reliability as a source and the importance of stopping Nixon.56 Awareness of the Boston Globe’s contemporaneous investigation of Pappas would also have fueled their competitive juices.
What would have happened had they published the exposé? “Think about it,” Feldstein asked. “[I]f this story had cost Nixon the election, there would have been no Watergate…Instead of Woodward and Bernstein, Pearson and Anderson might have become journalistic icons for a generation of budding investigative reporters. And Elias Demetracopoulos, not Daniel Ellsberg, would have become the international poster boy for whistleblowers…”57
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YEARS LATER, IT is still not entirely clear why O’Brien did virtually nothing with the information, or why he appears to have lied to, or at least misled, Demetracopoulos on several key issues. Historian Robert Dallek developed plausible reasons why Johnson might have said no.58 But information in the archives of the LBJ and JFK libraries, not previously available, now points to the president never having been asked to intervene by either O’Brien or Humphrey.59 Indeed, Johnson may not have known anything about the Pappas money transfer.
According to Demetracopoulos, when he inquired if Johnson personally refused him, O’Brien said he never went directly to LBJ, but sent the request through Humphrey, who had received the refusal from Johnson. O’Brien did have a few conversations with his candidate during this period, but there is no evidence that he ever mentioned Elias’s revelations to Humphrey, let alone indicate they should be treated seriously. Johnson’s autobiography and other leading biographies are silent on the issue, as are those of Humphrey. Surviving members of Humphrey’s top campaign staff have no recollection that LBJ and Humphrey ever discussed the matter during the single exchange between the two in this period, an “off-the-record” meeting at the White House the day after Elias met O’Brien. Likewise, there is no record of O’Brien’s talking to Humphrey before he met with the President. Humphrey’s press secretary, Norman Sherman, who helped prepare the vice president’s memoirs and was thus privy to his detailed recollections, has stated that he would have known about any Humphrey conversation with O’Brien or the President about the Demetracopoulos charges, had such a conversation happened.60
In later years, when challenged by reporters to explain why he never used the Demetracopoulos information, O’Brien said the story was “impressive…but not subject to absolute proof.”61 This was clearly not true. Elias had names, dollar amounts, and witnesses. Any of his three options could have led at least to clear and convincing evidence. Obviously, asking Helms directly could have been dispositive, but most likely Helms would have resorted to plausible deniability. To a question posed by historian Stanley Kutler on a CIA-KYP-Pappas-Nixon-Agnew connection, Helms responded:
There are certain things, Dr. Kutler, that we learned through hard experience and one of them was that you don’t get yourself involved at any time in any way in allowing foreign money to come into American elections…Even if somebody suggests they would like to do it, I would insist that they don’t tell me about it because that is dynamite.”62
Given Helms’s long history monitoring Elias and contributing to his negative dossier, it seems unlikely he would have told the President that Demetracopoulos was a credible source for anything. But even without Helms, Robert Healy’s usually reliable CIA dinner companions had given him the story of Pappas’s transferring the Greek money to Nixon.63 The Globe and New York Times need not have stopped their coverage with the junta’s perfunctory denial. Kapenstein could have spent as much time following up on this as he did gathering dirt on Agnew’s unlawful fundraising practices while he was governor.64 Congressman Don Fraser, co-chair of the Democracy in Greece Committee, said that, if he had known, he would have talked to colleagues who knew about CIA funding of Greece and urged the Justice Department to conduct an immediate inquiry.65
It is interesting that O’Brien used the qualified language “absolute proof” as his standard. O’Brien and the Humphrey campaign could have readily obtained contemporaneous corroborative proof, if they had cared enough to do so. No one ever questioned Phillips Talbot, then US ambassador to Greece, or others connected with the embassy or the Athens CIA station. Former Ambassador Thomas Boyatt, who was then a political officer in Cyprus, said he heard about the KYP money transfer and believed that the facts could have been nailed down at the time. A former American ambassador told Sy Hersh he learned about Pappas’s conduit role in 1968 at the State Department, asserting: “We were carrying out a policy to support ‘a Greek bearing gifts.’ ”66
There are several possible reasons why O’Brien never used the information. The first is an overabundance of caution. To say, as O’Brien did, that he was concerned about the possible embarrassment of having DNC staffers arrested in Athens is disingenuous. An arrest of DNC staffers at the hands of the Greek dictatorship would have increased news coverage of the issue. Furthermore, he knew that, with Agnew on the ticket, many traditionally Democratic Greek-Americans were already planning to desert their party.
O’Brien may have thought there was nothing of substance in the Demetracopoulos information and that, even if what was done by Pappas and his Nixon confederates was reprehensible, nothing involved was illegal or worth pursuing. But this sounds like a strange reaction from someone known to exploit all types of opposition research. Joe Napolitan waited in vain for the signal to prepare ads on this issue. Had O’Brien instructed him, Kapenstein would likely have been more aggressive urging his high-level press contacts to follow the CIA-Greek money trail.
