Free One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner Page A

the same way.”
    “The price you pay,” Rodman said, “is a demoralization of the rest of the government.”
    *   *   *
    Nixon had another reason for wanting complete control over the State Department. It had nothing to do with diplomacy. It was about dollars. The wealthiest Nixon campaign contributors were well aware that “ambassadorships were being sold to the highest bidders,” said Samuel F. Hart, a Foreign Service officer for twenty-seven years who himself served as an ambassador under President Ronald Reagan.
    This practice did not start with Nixon, but it was during his presidency that it became blatant and dangerous—another step down the road to Watergate.
    Vincent de Roulet arrived as the newly appointed ambassador to Jamaica in 1969, sailing in on his ninety-foot yacht, Patrina , soon to be joined by seventeen of his racehorses. He was a ne’er-do-well who’d married rich; his mother-in-law, an immensely wealthy heiress, was a major Nixon fund-raiser. He had contributed $75,000 to the 1968 Nixon campaign (a sum equal to $513,000 today).
    The chief political officer at the American embassy in Jamaica, Kenneth Rogers, remembered Ambassador de Roulet’s tenure as a series of political disasters and racist jibes, ending only when the government expelled him and the president of Jamaica told the U.S. Department of State that “Vincent De Roulet was no longer ‘persona grata.’ He was not permitted to return.”
    Nixon appointed Turner B. Shelton, a crony and contributor of long standing, as ambassador to Nicaragua. Shelton had been the American consul general in Nassau, the Bahamas, where Nixon was a frequent visitor during the 1960s. His appointment shocked the career Foreign Service officers who served with him.
    “I think he had something on them, on the White House and on Nixon,” said James R. Cheek, a senior American envoy who became President Clinton’s ambassador to Argentina. Strong evidence suggests that Shelton was a go-between for secret cash contributions to Nixon from donors, including the deeply eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who sojourned in the Bahamas and moved to the Nicaraguan capital during Shelton’s tenures.
    Shelton had “contributed heavily to the Richard Nixon political trajectory over many years,” said Charles Anthony Gillespie Jr., later the American ambassador to Chile under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “Turner B. Shelton was called a Hollywood producer. Now, I’m not an expert on Turner B. Shelton, but my understanding is that what Turner really produced best were what were called ‘blue’ movies. Whatever else he did … he contributed chunks of this money to Richard Nixon’s campaigns over the years. He obviously merited an appointment and he got the Embassy in Nicaragua.”
    Shelton’s shady reputation was exceeded by his devotion to the crooked dictator who ran Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. “Shelton didn’t want any of our cables or reports to go in to Washington,” said Ambassador Cheek, then Shelton’s underling at the embassy. “Somoza’s corruption and suppression and disappearing people … was supposed to be all censored out.”
    “He was very close to Somoza,” Cheek said—so close that the dictator put the American ambassador’s image on newly issued Nicaraguan currency, the twenty-c ó rdoba bill—but “Shelton’s toadying to Somoza and almost worshiping him didn’t bother the White House at all.”
    At the start of the Nixon administration, Sam Hart was based at the American embassy in Costa Rica. “We had a career Foreign Service officer as ambassador there,” he recalled. “He was told that he was not going to be kept on, and was moved out, anticipating the arrival of Mrs. Ruth Farkas. She and her husband owned Alexander’s Department Store in New York and pledged a quarter of a million dollars to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in ’68”—equal to almost two million dollars today.
    But “word