Being Nixon: A Man Divided (54 page)

At 12:30
A.M.
, with the party still going strong, Nixon kissed Pat good night and went upstairs to the Lincoln Sitting Room. Sitting before the fire, listening to the sounds of laughter and music coming from below, he felt, he recalled, “that this was one of the greatest nights of my life.” Then he thought of Watergate and was struck “by an almost physical force.” Picking up the phone, he called Julie and Tricia in their rooms and asked them to join him.

“My father seemed drained, as if the emotion of the evening had been too much for him,” Julie recalled. With the girls there, Nixon telephoned his friend, the TV producer Paul Keyes, who had organized the evening’s performances (Bob Hope and Sammy Davis Jr.; “no girlie show,” as per the First Lady’s instruction). With Keyes, the creator of
Laugh-In
, Nixon tried a few jokes, “but it was almost painful for us to see how sad Daddy’s face looked despite the laughter in his voice,” Tricia recorded in her diary.

Nixon hung up. There was silence. Then the president asked his daughters, “Do you think I should resign?” They burst out with “a wave of exclamations,” according to Tricia: “Don’t you dare! Don’t even think of it!” Tricia, who knew her father, wrote in her diary, “He really wanted us to give him reasons for not resigning.”
²¹

One reason was
to preserve his foreign policy achievements, particularly détente with the Soviet Union. The policy was under attack from the right and the left—by conservatives who accused Nixon of going soft on Communism and by liberals who wanted to pressure the Kremlin to free Soviet Jewry. Nixon was determined to keep détente alive with the personal diplomacy he did best.

On June 16, Brezhnev arrived in Washington for a long-scheduled summit meeting. The Senate Watergate Committee agreed to postpone John Dean’s much-anticipated testimony in order not to embarrass Nixon. Baffled by Watergate—what superpower would indulge the luxury of destroying its leader over petty nonsense like bugging the opposition?—the Soviets made clear that they were prepared to ignore it.

Nixon greeted Brezhnev in the Oval Office. The Soviet leader embraced him as an old friend. It occurred to Nixon that “the last time such tactile diplomacy had been used in that room was when Lyndon Johnson wanted to make a point.” At Camp David, Nixon gave the Soviet leader a personalized Camp David windbreaker, which Brezhnev wore most of the time he was there, and a customized Lincoln Continental. Brezhnev immediately insisted on a test drive. As the head of Nixon’s Secret Service detail turned pale, the Kremlin boss motioned Nixon to get into the front seat beside him. Brezhnev was going 50 miles an hour on a one-lane road approaching a turn marked “Slow, Dangerous Curve” when Nixon finally leaned over and said, “Slow down, slow down.” Brezhnev ignored him and, with a squeal of rubber, the four-wheel drifted around the turn. “This is a very fine automobile. It holds the road very well,” Brezhnev remarked. “You are an excellent driver,” Nixon managed to reply. “I
would never have been able to make that turn at the speed at which we were driving.”
²²

On the trip from Washington to California on Air Force One, Nixon pointed out the Grand Canyon and mentioned John Wayne. Brezhnev jumped back and pretended to draw a pair of six-shooters. Flying by helicopter from California’s El Toro Air Base to San Clemente, Nixon made sure that the Soviet leader saw all the highways, cars, and middle-class homes. At Casa Pacifica, where Brezhnev insisted on staying overnight, he was assigned to Tricia’s room, decorated in white wicker furniture with pink-flowered wallpaper. The secretary general had not brought Mrs. Brezhnev but was accompanied by a bosomy masseuse; Nixon noted that she wore Arpège, Mrs. Nixon’s perfume. Brezhnev shared a narrow hallway with Pat’s bedroom, so, as Julie put it, “Mother was aware of the secretary general’s activities throughout this visit.”
²³
“He was always kind of bragging” about being “a ladies’ man,” Nixon recalled. “Mrs. Nixon did not particularly appreciate that aspect of him.”
²⁴

On the first night, Brezhnev retired early, complaining of jet lag, then roused Nixon out of his bed at 10:15
P.M
. to try to bully him on the Middle East. Crammed into Nixon’s tiny study with their translators and top advisers, the two superpower leaders went at it. (Nixon was “as always calm under pressure,” recalled Kissinger.)
²⁵
Brezhnev insisted that the United States and Soviets work out a Middle East peace deal right there. Nixon, who was sure that the Russians were fronting for their Egyptian clients and trying to marginalize Israel, said no—a peace deal imposed on the Middle East, he believed, was sure to fail.
²⁶

With the Russians, Nixon could still stand firm. Congress was a different matter. In the spring of 1973, the North Vietnamese began moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to resupply their troops inside South Vietnam. It was a clear violation of the peace accords signed just a few months earlier. Nixon wanted to bomb the North Vietnamese, but he knew that he could not, that a majority of senators would openly revolt. He was too weakened by Watergate to act.
²⁷

At 5:30
A.M
.
on July 12, Nixon awakened with a stabbing pain in his chest. The pain was “nearly unbearable,” he recalled.
²⁸
Nixon had pretended not to watch John Dean’s testimony before the Watergate Committee at the end of June, but he understood television well enough to measure the impact. With his beautiful wife sitting demurely behind him and Senator Howard Baker asking, repeatedly, “What did he know, and when did he know it?” the handsome, bespectacled young lawyer had seemed humble and credible. The former White House counsel delivered, in detail that was at once numbing and sensational, a scathing indictment of his former boss. Most of Dean’s revelations had already been leaked, but he managed to hold millions of TV viewers spellbound with a vision of life inside the White House that was dark and conspiratorial, paranoid, and vengeful against its enemies.

In the bright early light of a June morning, Nixon lay coughing and burning in his bed at the White House, unable to arise. At about 9
A.M
., Nixon summoned Al Haig, his new chief of staff, to his bedroom. Haig was surprised to find Nixon still in bed; he had never seen the president lying down before. Haig had filled in for Haldeman with take-charge brio. (An aide to Haig once described him as “pathologically ambitious.”)
²⁹
The only dissenter to Haig’s appointment had been Kissinger, who did not like the idea of reporting to his former assistant and who resented Haig for undercutting him with the president. Kissinger had threatened to resign (again), spurring Rose Woods to tell him, “Henry, for once in your life, act like a man.”
³⁰

Huddled under the bed covers in his pajamas, Nixon began coughing violently. Seeing blood on the president’s pillow, Haig urged Nixon to go to the hospital. But Nixon resisted. His fever (102 degrees) rose when he took a call from Senator Sam Ervin at 11
A.M
. The chairman of the Watergate Committee wanted Nixon to turn over presidential papers relating to Watergate. In a letter citing “executive privilege”—the well-established doctrine that the executive
can’t function without some degree of confidentiality—Nixon had refused. Ervin wrote Nixon what he called a “little note” beseeching him to reconsider. The senator’s note was promptly leaked to the press, enraging Nixon.

“I read about your letter,” Nixon began. “Your committee leaks, you know.” The conversation deteriorated. “Your attitude in the hearings was clear,” Nixon told Ervin. “There’s no question who you’re out to get.”
³¹

“We are not out to get anything, Mr. President, except the truth,” replied Ervin.

When Ervin hung up, “his face was flushed,” recalled his chief counsel, Sam Dash. “The president is screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘You are out to get me; you are out to get me!’ ” Ervin told his staff.
³²
The next day the entire exchange was in
The New York Times
.

“The joust with Ervin seemed to rejuvenate Nixon,” Haig recalled in his memoirs. But he was obviously very sick, and by late afternoon the president was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Breathing with difficulty, Nixon was unable to sleep.

On the morning of Monday, July 16, Haig received some shocking news: Haldeman’s former aide, Alex Butterfield, had testified to the Watergate Committee about the secret taping system in Nixon’s offices and residences.
*
²
Haig immediately ordered, “Tear it out,” and headed to Bethesda to talk to the president. Nixon was “not in a talkative mood,” Haig recalled. The president’s first reaction was that Butterfield’s revelation would make him a laughingstock. Indeed, one headline read, “Nixon Bugs Himself.”
³⁴
Haig was worried where the tapes would lead. He recalled telling the president, “Mr. President, I’ve been in a good many meetings with you, and we both know how the conversation goes. You set up straw men; you play devil’s advocate;
you say things you don’t mean. Others do the same. There is gossip and profanity. Imagine publishing every word Lyndon Johnson ever said in the Oval Office. No president could survive it.”

Still feverish, Nixon appeared unsure what to do, though he seemed—in Haig’s view—to be leaning toward destroying the tapes. He told Haig to go back to the White House and talk to the two lawyers who had been deputized to handle Watergate.
³⁵

Nixon’s lawyers were opposites: Fred Buzhardt was a slow-speaking, cagey South Carolinian and, like Haig, a West Pointer. Leonard Garment, Nixon’s old friend and colleague from his New York law days, was known as voluble and excitable—“the Nuclear Non-reactor” was his nickname. Buzhardt agreed with Haig about the risk of letting the world hear the unfiltered Nixon. “You know how he talks in the Oval Office; you would think he was Beelzebub reincarnated,” Buzhardt said. He argued that the tapes were Nixon’s property and that, at least until a subpoena arrived, he was free to destroy them. Garment responded that Nixon would be impeached if he did such a thing and threatened to resign.
³⁶

Haig, Buzhardt, and Garment piled into a car and drove out to Bethesda to confer with the president. The debate was typically wandering and inchoate. Spiro Agnew dropped by and ventured his opinion. “Boss,” he told the bedridden Nixon, “you’ve got to have a bonfire.” According to Haig, Nixon “gazed at a picture on the wall and feigned temporary deafness.”
³⁷
At one point, there was discussion of who would light the match. Bebe Rebozo? Nixon’s dog King Timahoe? Haig later recalled that Nixon asked him if he would be willing to destroy the tapes. “I can’t do that, I can’t put my family in that position,” Haig replied—but suggested that maybe Manolo could do the deed.
³⁸

In the morning—Tuesday, July 17—after his fever broke, Nixon told Haig, “Al, those tapes are going to defend me. They’re going to protect me from what I’m being charged with.” He would come to rue his decision not to destroy the tapes. Indeed, he had second
thoughts almost right away. In the early hours of Thursday, July 19, he made a note on his bedside pad: “Should have destroyed the tapes after April 30, 1973.” In early April, Nixon and Haldeman had discussed getting rid of all the tapes save the ones recording his major foreign policy decisions.
³⁹
Distracted and caught up in Watergate, Nixon and Haldeman had not acted on this instinct. By July 19, it was too late: The subpoenas from investigators had begun to arrive.

Nixon and Haldeman believed, wrongly, that the tapes might be exculpatory, that they would contradict Dean’s damning testimony. Nixon’s recorded statements are not as incriminating as Dean’s testimony promised. But veering back and forth on subjects like hush money—condoning it one moment, rejecting it the next—Nixon’s utterances were, tonally at least, unsavory and demeaning to the office. Surely Nixon must have known, at some level, how the tapes would sound if made public. But he believed that his conversations were protected by executive privilege and that he would be shielded by the courts. He was wrong in this judgment, but not irrational. Less reasonably, he seems to have clung to the tapes as a kind of insurance policy against betrayal by others, including his closest aides. At one point, he said to Haig, “Al, I don’t know what Haldeman and Ehrlichman are going to accuse me of.”
⁴⁰

Nixon could not let go of his deep desire to shape the historical record. In 1971, Elliot Richardson had discussed Nixon’s favorite biography, Blake’s
Disraeli
. Richardson, who could play the courtier, was quick to grasp the comparison between Nixon and the great nineteenth-century British statesman. “The similarities are great, Mr. President,” said Richardson, “but what a pity that Blake could not quote Disraeli’s conversation.” For years, Richardson would wonder if he had helped bring on Watergate by thus encouraging Nixon to record
his
conversations.
⁴¹

There was one Nixon intimate who recognized right away the risk in hanging on to the tapes. “My mother saw immediately that unlimited access to the President’s private, candid conversations spelled disaster,”
Julie recalled. “She told me later that she felt the tapes should have been destroyed.” But at the time, “at the hospital she said nothing about the tapes, relying on an even stronger instinct: her implicit faith in her husband. She would not worry him by probing, especially when he was ill—and vulnerable.” When Pat picked up her daughter to go to the hospital, Julie noticed that her mother was “uncharacteristically wearing sunglasses. She was very quiet in the car, and I remember how she protectively put her hand on top of mine.”
⁴²

Nixon returned to
the White House “on a beautiful summer day,” he recalled, and tried to buck up the staff, which had turned out to greet him in the Rose Garden. Rumors that he might resign, he told them, were, “in one of my father’s favorite words, pure poppycock.” The president vowed: “Let others wallow in Watergate, we are going to do our job.”