Being Nixon: A Man Divided (53 page)
Read Being Nixon: A Man Divided Online
Authors: Evan Thomas
But Pat had more or less given up speaking directly against Haldeman. She knew that her husband wanted his chief of staff to act as gatekeeper, to guard his time alone to think, to keep away complainers and hangers-on. She left her morose, distant husband alone as he agonized over whether to fire his closest aides.
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Nixon was already well aware of the hush money. On March 6, he had discreetly thanked Greek oilman Tom Pappas for helping out John Mitchell with some of the cash needs to keep the Watergate burglars silent. In return, Pappas got to keep his friend Henry Tasca as ambassador to Greece.
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The White House’s own transcription of the tape was subtly, but significantly different: “I don’t give a shit what happens. Go down and sto—, stonewall it; Tell ’em, ‘plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up’ or anything else, if it’ll save ’em—save it for them. That’s the whole point.” There is no mention of a “plan.” Even with audio enhancement technology, the quality of the recording is poor and difficult to decipher, a significant problem for researchers who sometimes must spend hours listening to a single White House tape. Inevitably, debates over interpretation have been shaded by sympathy and ideology.
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Nixon always tried to be cool with Riland whenever Kissinger was not. As Kissinger seemed to be collapsing along with the peace deal in early January, Riland described the president’s relaxed demeanor while the two men discussed Kissinger’s tendency to overreact. Of Nixon, Riland wrote: “His calm and complete detachment is something to see.” Nixon asked his doctor about Kissinger, “Why is he so emotional?” Riland, who fancied himself as more worldly than the president, whom he once described as “rather provincial,” explained to Nixon, “It’s his Jewish heritage, as that racial group, particularly the German Jew, has a great inferiority factor which oddly is not a factor with the Israelites.”
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Praying Not to Wake Up
O
n Saturday morning, April 28, Nixon walked into the living room at Aspen Lodge looking for Manolo and a cup of coffee. He found his daughter Tricia sitting by the fire. She had been up all night talking to Julie, she said, and the two girls had talked to their mother in the morning. The Nixon women were all agreed: Haldeman and Ehrlichman had to go. “I want you to know that I would never let any personal feeling about either of them to interfere with my judgment,” she began, even though she added, “You know that I never felt the way they handled people served you well….” Tears were brimming in her eyes, Nixon recalled, “but unlike Julie, Tricia would seldom allow them to overflow.” Tricia told her father she would support him whatever he decided to do. They hugged. Nixon had already decided to fire both men. He had been talking to Leonard Garment and Bill Rogers, two old friends whom Nixon had marginalized as president but whose personal advice he still valued. They had been adamant: Nixon had to sacrifice his closest aides to save himself.
1
The next day, Sunday April 29, was a beautiful spring day at Camp David. The sun burned off the morning fog and the woods shone with new growth. Haldeman had been summoned, along with Ehrlichman, to the mountaintop. Haldeman was carrying a book of writings by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of his faith, the Christian Science Church. Aspen Lodge, where the president stayed, was a couple hundred yards from Laurel, the roomy staff lodge recently remodeled
by Haldeman. “I chose a bike to pedal over to meet the president, which is, I suppose, rather an unusual way to ride to political doom,” recalled Haldeman.
2
With Brezhnev.
Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
“When I got to Aspen the P was in terrible shape,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. “Shook hands with me, which is the first time he’s ever done that.” Nixon took Haldeman out on to the back terrace overlooking the blooming valley. The president was having trouble speaking. Finally he said, “This is so beautiful. These lovely tulips down here.” Nixon told Haldeman, “I have to enjoy this, because I may not be alive much longer.”
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The president began to talk about his religion. He told Haldeman that every morning since his election, he had gotten to his knees and prayed for guidance. (“I thought he looked somewhat surprised,” Nixon recalled.) “When I went to bed last night, I hoped, and almost prayed, that I wouldn’t wake up this morning,” the president said.
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Haldeman did his best to comfort the man who was dismissing him.
After about forty minutes, Haldeman emerged and told Ehrlichman, “Your turn.” Ehrlichman asked, “How did it go?” Haldeman answered, “About as we expected.”
Ehrlichman entered the living room at Aspen without knocking. Wearing a checked sports coat, Nixon appeared from the bedroom. “His eyes were red-rimmed and he looked small and drawn,” Ehrlichman recalled. Ehrlichman himself struggled to remain composed as Nixon told him that he had hoped and prayed that he might die during the night.
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1
“He began crying uncontrollably,” Ehrlichman recalled. “It’s like cutting off my arms,” the president sobbed. “You and Bob. You’ll need money; I have some—Bebe has it—and you can have it.”
Ehrlichman responded, “That would just make things worse. You can do one thing though, sometime.” Ehrlichman recalled that it was
“hard for me to talk.” (In Nixon’s account of the conversation, Ehrlichman’s “mouth tightened.”) “Just explain all this to my kids, will you?” he told the president. “Tell them why you had to do this.” Ehrlichman turned and left, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief.
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As darkness fell that night, Nixon turned to his spokesman Ron Ziegler, who was becoming a kind of all-purpose sounding board, the role so dutifully played by Haldeman. “It’s all over, Ron. Do you know that?” said the president, searching for reassurance and sympathy.
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The next night, Monday, April 30, 1973, Nixon went on national television to give his first-ever speech on Watergate. He made it sound as if he had discovered and exposed the cover-up. He announced that he had accepted the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman and had fired John Dean. “The easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I delegated the responsibility to run the campaign,” he said, and gravely shook his head. “But that would be the
cowardly
thing to do.” His Checkers-style sanctimony was wearing thin. He hoped, he later wrote in his memoirs, that he had “put Watergate behind me as a nagging national issue. I could not have made a more disastrous miscalculation.”
In his memoir, Nixon wrote with unusual directness and candor:
In the April 30 speech I gave the impression that I had known nothing at all about the cover-up until my March 21 meeting with Dean. I indicated that once I had learned about it I had acted with dispatch and dispassion to end it. In fact, I had known some of the details of the cover-up before March 21, and when I did become aware of their implications, instead of exerting presidential leadership aimed at uncovering the cover-up, I embarked in an increasingly desperate search for ways to limit the damage to my friends, my administration, and myself.
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On his way to the Oval Office to deliver his speech that night, he passed an FBI agent standing in front of Haldeman’s office, which
had been sealed off to keep anyone from entering and destroying documents. Suddenly, the president turned around. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, and shoved the shocked FBI man against the wall.
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After the speech, Nixon went to the Lincoln Sitting Room and may have had a drink. He waited for calls of ritualistic reassurance from cabinet officials. The calls, save one from Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Caspar Weinberger, never came, partly because Haldeman was no longer around to arrange them. At 10:16
P.M.
, Nixon took a call from Haldeman.
“I hope I didn’t let you down,” the president said, his voice slurring.
HALDEMAN:
No, sir. You got your points over, and now you’ve got it set right and move on. You’re right where you ought to be.
NIXON:
Well, it’s a tough thing, Bob, for you and for John and the rest, but, goddamn it, I’m never going to discuss this son-of-a-bitching Watergate thing again—
never, never, never, never
. Don’t you agree?
HALDEMAN:
Yes, sir. You’ve done it now, and you’ve laid out your position….
Nixon began to complain that no cabinet officers, except for Weinberger, had called. After some more presidential bucking up—“by God, keep the faith”—Nixon ventured to ask his old chief of staff for a favor:
NIXON:
I don’t know whether you can call and get any reactions and call me back—like the old style. Would you mind?
HALDEMAN:
I don’t think I can. I don’t—
NIXON
(hearing himself): No, I agree.
HALDEMAN:
I’m kind of in an odd spot to try and do that.
NIXON:
Don’t call a goddamn soul. To hell with it….
Nixon complained some more about cabinet members who needed to check the polls before calling. Haldeman tried to explain that the switchboard had been instructed not to put calls through. Finally, Nixon signed off with an exceedingly rare declaration:
NIXON:
God bless you, boy. God bless you.
HALDEMAN:
Okay.
NIXON:
I love you, as you know.
HALDEMAN:
Okay.
NIXON:
Like my brother.
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At 10:34
P.M.
, Elliot Richardson called. Nixon had named Richardson attorney general to replace Kleindienst, who had resigned that day, tainted by his association to Mitchell.
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Nixon had told Kissinger that he picked Richardson—whom he described to speechwriter Ray Price as “sort of Mr. Integrity, Mr. Clean”—because he would be “trusted by the so-called damned establishment.”
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In his televised speech, Nixon had announced that he was giving his new attorney general “complete authority to make all decisions bearing on the prosecution of the Watergate case and related matters”—including the potential appointment of a special prosecutor. Over the phone that night, a grateful Richardson knew how to flatter:
RICHARDSON:
Well, I was very—I thought that was really great.
NIXON:
Well, you’re very kind to say that.
RICHARDSON:
In a real sense, your finest hour.
Then, after some more mutual stroking, Nixon got down to business:
NIXON:
Elliot, the one thing they’re going to be hitting you on is about the special prosecutor.
RICHARDSON:
Yeah.
NIXON:
The point is, I’m not sure you should have one.
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Richardson replied that he would think about it. The new attorney general proceeded to appoint as Watergate special prosecutor a man Nixon would come to fear and loathe. Archibald Cox, a Harvard Law professor, was, like Richardson, a true believer in the rule of law and a high Wasp whose tribal loyalties did not lie with Richard Nixon. Cox proceeded to recruit a staff heavily laced with Harvard grads and former aides to Senator Edward Kennedy. Appointed solicitor general by President Kennedy, Cox himself was so close to the Kennedys that he had watched the 1960 election returns with JFK. At Cox’s swearing-in ceremony in late May, Senator Kennedy and members of his family were guests, a fact duly reported to Nixon, who had been warned by Kissinger that Cox, a former fellow Harvard professor “has been fanatically anti-Nixon all the years I have known him.” (At first, Nixon professed to be unconcerned, telling Haig that Cox was an ineffectual Harvard professor who would take five years and still not get to the bottom of the case.)
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Nixon’s April 30
speech was unpersuasive, even to his allies. Bud Krogh told Ehrlichman that the president was on “darn thin ice,” and conservative strategist Kevin Phillips wrote in his newsletter that the “wheels of government” had “ground to a halt.” He predicted that more and more people would ask “is
Richard Nixon
going to be involved” in the scandal and the answer would be “yes.” The polls suggested as much: Nixon’s approval rating, which had been running about two to one positive as late as early April, showed him in negative territory by early May. Six Republican senators had said they would not run for reelection unless the president spoke out on Watergate, but now that he had, no one was satisfied.
The national press, which had been initially slow to react to Watergate, was now overcompensating. In the White House press room, reporters were openly jeering Ziegler, who found himself trying to explain that some of the president’s earlier statements on Watergate had become “inoperative.” Night after night the broadcast news led with Watergate; every week,
Time
and
Newsweek
featured the scandal
on their covers. A torrent of stories—many of them true, but some hyped, garbled, or wrong—flooded the news. Newspapers and magazines reported erroneously that the Plumbers had wiretapped U.S. senators and the friends of Mary Joe Kopechne, the woman who died in Teddy Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick.
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In the new world of “investigative” journalism, “sources say” was sufficient authority. When Dean left the White House, he took with him boxes of documents that he would use to try to barter for immunity from prosecution. His lawyers were soon parceling out the juicier tidbits to reporters.
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The most sensational revelation was the botched break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, but there were many other leaks, duly fed by staffers on the Senate Watergate Committee. The headlines soon blared about “enemies lists” and Nixon administration plots to bug and wiretap, including spying on reporters.
Nixon correctly, but futilely, complained to his family and his aides about a double standard. Pat Nixon began collecting examples from earlier administrations, including a quotation from Franklin Roosevelt’s son John, who told a newspaper columnist, “Hell, my father just about invented bugging. He had them spread all over, and thought nothing about it.”
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William Sullivan, a former high-level FBI official close to Nixon, provided the Senate Watergate Committee with a memo detailing widespread political bugging and wiretapping by the FBI under earlier Democratic administrations. But the report was buried by the Democratic staff as unproven, too personal, or irrelevant.
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Nixon “felt discouraged, drained, and pressured,” he recalled in his memoirs.
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He was no longer pretending to be jaunty with his family or dictating upbeat passages to his diary—or anything at all, for that matter. His last entry was April 30.
Nixon’s one bright
light was the return of the 591 prisoners of war from Vietnam. At a ceremony at the State Department in May, he greeted them, one by one. When Everett Alvarez, the first pilot to be shot down and captured, reached him in the line, Nixon grabbed
Alvarez’s arms and shoulders and began feeling them. “You look good,” he said to the naval aviator who had spent over eight years in captivity. Looking down, avoiding Alvarez’s eyes, Nixon said in a somber tone, “I tried. I really tried.”
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The president and First Lady wanted to give these men, some of whom had been in brutal captivity for years, the biggest party in the history of the White House. On the rainy night of May 24, some twelve hundred guests dined on the South Lawn in a great white tent that was larger than the executive mansion itself. Beforehand, a POW chorus of thirty-five men sang a hymn that one of them had written in prison, and the former prisoners of war and their families were invited to wander through the Nixons’ private quarters on the second floor. The men presented Nixon with a plaque inscribed, “Our leader—our comrade, Richard the Lion-Hearted.” Among the invited celebrities, John Wayne rose and toasted the POWs by saying, “I’ll ride into the sunset with you anytime.” Nixon introduced Irving Berlin, the aged songwriter who, in a gravelly voice, led them all in his famous song “God Bless America.” The men shouted and cried the last words, “God bless America, my home sweet home.”
