Being Nixon: A Man Divided (55 page)

After thirty-seven days and 325 hours of network broadcast time, the Senate Watergate hearings were at last winding down. One of the last witnesses, Pat Buchanan, gave a feisty defense of political spying and pranks and finally got across the point that Democrats, too, indulged in them.
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But the weight of testimony, in all its tawdry detail, left a strong impression of a White House that had lost its moral bearings. The president’s credibility was badly wounded, and Nixon knew it. On the July 23 White House “News Summary” he underlined an item that showed how low his standing had sunk even among the midwestern faithful. The item began, “ ‘Facts Batter Sense of Trust’ is Trib head on first of 4-part series.” The “Trib” was the
Chicago Tribune
, historically a pro-Republican organ. The “4-part series” promised to lay out Nixon’s lies about Watergate. Nixon jotted a note to Haig and Ziegler, “Al and Z—this is the basic problem.” The heartland’s trust in Nixon, battered by the facts emerging from the Watergate hearings, was fading.

For his first four and a half years in office, Nixon had underlined his Daily News Summary and festooned the margins with reactions (“Good!”) and instructions (“Order the jerk to pipe down!”).
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But
by the Watergate summer, Nixon’s commentary on the Daily News Summary had dwindled to almost nothing.

Perhaps he thought there was no longer any point. Nixon had tried to manipulate and control a press corps that had grown increasingly skeptical of authority through the gyrations of the late 1960s and the “credibility gap” left by LBJ’s deception over the Vietnam War. The facts of Watergate, as they dribbled out, were bad enough, but an inflamed press corps did not stop at the facts. Gossip became headlines. “At some point in the hot, muggy summer of 1973, some of the more influential members of the Washington press corps concluded that I was starting to go off my rocker,” Nixon recalled.
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Nixon fed the rumor mill with his own erratic behavior. On August 20, he flew to New Orleans to address the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The trip was intended to show off Nixon’s popularity outside the Beltway, with cheering crowds lining the roads. But an assassination threat forced a change in the motorcade route, and when Haig handed the president a bulletproof vest, Nixon exploded: “Al, get that damn thing away from me!”
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Moments later, as he entered a special VIP holding room trailed by press secretary Ron Ziegler and the usual gaggle of reporters, Nixon abruptly spun Ziegler around and shoved him, snarling, “I don’t want any press with me, and you take care of it!” CBS News played the video twice, in slow motion.
⁴⁷

In the
New Republic
, John Osborne, perhaps the most respected Nixon-watcher in the press, wrote that reporters detected “something indefinably but unmistakably odd” about the president’s gait. There was a frisson of excitement, Osborne later wrote, at the thought that “he might go bats in front of them at any time.”
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A story spread that Nixon had slapped an airman at a military base. Actually, in a bout of clumsiness, he had hit him in the face while trying to shake his hand.
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Nixon could see morale sinking in the White House staff, but he did not know quite how low.
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An entry by a staffer who was keeping a running diary for Leonard Garment suggests the level of cynicism even among Nixon’s lawyers:

Wednesday, August 15

at 9:00 pm that evening President gave speech on TV—more or less the same thing, i.e. “had no prior knowledge of break-in; never took part in or knew about any of the subsequent cover-up activities; neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign activities…that was and is the simple truth.” (simple, all right, as in if you are simple enough to believe this, you’ll believe anything!) They (Zeigler [
sic
], possibly Haig and certainly the President himself) seem to think if he keeps saying it over and over again, it will become the truth or be accepted as such, but still won’t give up the tapes which presumably would at least give some clarification of what the truth is.
⁵¹

Nixon had defied a subpoena from special prosecutor Archibald Cox to turn over tapes on certain dates, and the matter was in the courts. Nixon was not just trying to keep Cox at bay. He refused to let his own lawyers listen to the tapes. Doug Parker, the young White House attorney who was working with Garment on Nixon’s defense, recalled going with Garment to see William Rogers to try to enlist the secretary of state’s support in persuading Nixon to level with the men hired to defend him. Rogers was Nixon’s old friend, and Nixon himself had turned to Rogers for advice in April when he was pondering the fates of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Garment and Parker made their pitch: “We told Rogers, ‘We think the President knows more than he’s saying,’ ” Parker recalled. “ ‘We need to get it out, and you could be just the person to persuade him.’ Rogers made it very clear to us: He was not going to sign up for that committee!”
^52
,
*
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Back in the second week of June, Attorney General Richardson had come to Haig with some disturbing news: Federal prosecutors were investigating Vice President Agnew for kickbacks on public construction
projects during his time as governor of Maryland. As vice president, he had allegedly continued to take bags of cash at the office. “In my own mind, two words formed:
double impeachment
,” recalled Haig. “I called Fred Buzhardt and told him what Richardson had just told me and what I feared. ‘Oh, shit,’ said Fred.”
⁵⁴

Nixon had known about the charges against Agnew since April 10, but he had wanted to believe his veep’s protestations of innocence. “Damn lies,” Agnew had told Nixon. But by the end of September, Richardson was informing Nixon that the government had “an open-and-shut case” against the vice president.
⁵⁵
Garment’s diarist recorded:

Some people in WH think this might take some heat off the President’s problems—does it help to have a VP charged with taking “bribes”?? If so, things are really bad.
⁵⁶

Archibald Cox.

Library of Congress

O
ctober 1973 was the most dramatic month of Nixon’s presidency. The president was caught in a dizzying swirl of crises, some forced on him, some self-inflicted. He was at once bold, foolish, defiant, and blind to the precariousness of his position. He was brave and decisive at moments, withdrawn and absent at other times. His sense of reality seemed blurred by stresses that were becoming ever more personal.

On October 6, the Nixon administration was caught completely off guard by an Arab attack—Syrians from the north, Egyptians from the south—against Israel. Just the day before, the CIA had reported to the president that war was unlikely. Nixon was unsurprised by the incompetence of the CIA, his old hobbyhorse, but he was “stunned” by the failure of Israeli intelligence.
¹
Attacking on the Day of Atonement—the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, when most Israelis were home with their families—the Arab invaders inflicted heavy losses on Israeli forces. For the sake of a peace deal that would bring a balance of power to the region, the Nixon administration was willing to see Israel bloodied, but only up to a point, and that point was quickly passed.
²

At 1:30
A.M
. on October 9, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Simcha Dinitz, awakened Secretary of State Kissinger to warn that Israel was losing the war and badly needed supplies.
³
The U.S. response
was sluggish, partly because President Nixon was distracted by events closer to home. At 6
P.M
. earlier the same night, Vice President Agnew had appeared at the Oval Office to resign. For weeks, the corrupt former governor of Maryland had been forcefully proclaiming his innocence: “Small and fearful men have been frightened into furnishing evidence against me….I will not resign if indicted!
I will not resign if indicted!
” he had recently bellowed at a cheering rally of Republican women in Los Angeles, who were chanting “Spiro is our hero!” Under pressure from Justice Department lawyers, who wanted to send Agnew to prison for bribery, Al Haig had been trying to persuade Agnew to accept a face-saving plea bargain. Agnew had resisted, angrily. (Haig told his wife, “only half in jest,” that in case he disappeared they might “want to look inside any recently poured bridge pilings in Maryland”; Agnew later wrote that he in turn feared that Haig would arrange for him to have a convenient “accident.”)
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To avoid a jail sentence, Agnew finally took a deal—three years probation and a $10,000 fine for tax evasion—and stepped down. His visit to the Oval Office was unannounced, though not unexpected. The scene would play out with ritual insincerity.

Nixon looked “gaunt and sorrowful,” Agnew recalled, as he shook Agnew’s hand. Agnew asked if the president could help him find some corporation to put him on retainer as a consultant. Nixon told Agnew he’d always be his friend. Agnew’s eyes welled up, and Nixon put his arm around Agnew’s shoulders. Agnew began to realize that Nixon couldn’t wait to get him out of there. They never spoke again.
⁵

The president was immediately consumed with trying to find a successor to his defrocked number two. His first choice was John Connally, but a few phone calls to Capitol Hill revealed the hopelessness of that cause. Connally could never be confirmed by the Senate: Many Democrats saw him as a traitor to the party and a potential presidential opponent on the GOP ticket in 1976. High-profile candidates like Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller would split the Republicans. The safe choice—practically speaking, the only choice—was
House Republican Minority Leader Gerald Ford. The genial Ford was popular on the Hill, on both sides of the aisle.

Nixon regarded Ford, his fellow charter member of the Chowder and Marching Club, as decent but not exceptionally bright.
⁶
With the poor political judgment that increasingly afflicted him, Nixon believed that Ford provided him with a layer of protection against impeachment—the affable but limited congressman from Michigan was a “good insurance policy,” the president told Chuck Colson. Congress, Nixon predicted, would not want to remove the incumbent and bequeath the presidency to a rank amateur who knew so little about foreign policy.
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At a White House ceremony on Friday evening, October 12, to announce Ford as his choice, Nixon mistook the loud applause from members of Congress in the audience; the president thought they were cheering for him. Nixon was “exuberant” when Kissinger encountered him the next morning at the White House. “As always after a successful public performance, Nixon was exhilarated,” Kissinger recalled. “He still reveled in the applause that had greeted his brief, graceful speech the night before. He failed to recognize that it was a tribute above all to Ford.”
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Secretary of State Kissinger had been up most of the night. At 11:20 on Friday night, Ambassador Dinitz had appeared at his White House office to plead for help. Israel had lost a third of its air force and a fifth of its tanks in intense fighting. Israeli forces were running out of fuel and ammunition while the Egyptians and Syrians were being resupplied by the Soviets. Nixon had ordered the Pentagon to restock the Israelis, but the supply chain was bottlenecked, partly for bureaucratic reasons and possibly because of pro-Arab sentiment at the Pentagon.
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As so often in the past, Nixon felt isolated, unable to trust his closest advisers. He was getting foot-dragging excuses from the Pentagon, and he continued to wonder about Kissinger’s divided or ambivalent loyalties—to him, to his liberal friends, to the Jewish state.
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Nixon himself was constantly weighing competing interests—access to cheap Arab oil, the Jewish vote at election time, worries about
provoking a conflict with the Soviet Union over primacy in the Middle East. Along with Kissinger, he had a tendency to delude himself with the presumption that America could cold-bloodedly calibrate the fate of other peoples as part of some grand global “geostrategy.”
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And yet, in a critical moment in the history of Israel, Nixon—who could so casually utter ethnic slurs—decisively and forcefully came to the rescue of the people of Israel. When Kissinger told him that the Pentagon had authorized three C-5A transports to fly to Israel—any more would “cause problems” with the Arabs and Soviets—Nixon was exasperated. “We’re going to get blamed just as much for three planes as for 300,” he told Kissinger.
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The president called Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and told him that he was aware of the gravity of his decision and that he would accept the responsibility if the Arabs cut off oil to America. If the Pentagon could not arrange private charter flights, it should use military aircraft. “Do it,
now
,” the president ordered.

Informed by Kissinger that Pentagon officials were arguing over the type of aircraft to be used, Nixon exploded: “Goddamn it, use every one we have. Tell them to send everything that can fly.”
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The next morning, anxious residents in Tel Aviv were awakened to a loud droning in the sky. One after another, giant American air force transports rumbled overhead as they descended to nearby airports and airfields. Cars stopped in the streets and people began to shout “God bless America!” Relieved and grateful, Golda Meir, Israel’s hard-bitten prime minister, wept.
¹⁴

On the same
day that Israel asked to be saved by the United States, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled 5 to 2 that President Nixon had to turn over the tapes of nine White House conversations subpoenaed by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. Nixon had been dreading the court’s decision, in part because of the prospect that the judges would shred his constitutional defense of executive privilege and in part because he feared the unleashed zeal of Archibald Cox. “Firing
him,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “seemed the only way to rid the administration of the partisan viper we had planted in our bosom.”
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For months, the special prosecutor, with his graying crew cut and jaunty bow ties, had been engaged in what Nixon regarded as a witch-hunt.
*
¹
Cox had used his wide mandate, empowering him to investigate the presidential abuse of powers, to look into Nixon’s personal finances as well as those of his friend, Bebe Rebozo. The aggressive young lawyers in Cox’s office were examining the hefty expenditure of taxpayer dollars to improve Nixon properties in Key Biscayne and San Clemente, as well as a sizable tax break Nixon had claimed when donating his private papers to the National Archives. Nixon prided himself in believing that he was above the sort of venality that had brought down Agnew and so many politicians. “Never let a dollar touch your hand” was Nixon’s maxim for avoiding any stain on his personal probity. But, following the precedent set by Lyndon Johnson and his Texas ranch, the Nixon White House spared no expense while making presidential retreats more comfortable and secure. While Pat remained frugal, Nixon had paid little attention as Haldeman had spent freely to please his boss.
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With investigators poking around in Nixon’s finances and a distraught Bebe Rebozo complaining that he was a target in a money-laundering investigation, Nixon felt like he was reliving the Fund Crisis. Pat was “heartsick,” Julie recalled.
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The president’s anger at Cox and his team, known as the “Coxsuckers” around the White House, was beginning to cloud his judgment. “If it costs me the presidency, Cox is going to go,” Nixon fumed to Haig.
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Nixon’s chief of staff, working with Nixon’s lawyer, Fred Buzhardt, tried to head off a confrontation with Cox over the tapes. Haig proposed a compromise: The White House would make “summaries” of the subpoenaed recordings, and Senator John Stennis would vouch for their accuracy. Stennis was old and hard of hearing, but he
was respected in the Senate. (He was also someone Buzhardt thought he could trust to cover up inconvenient truths; Stennis’s nickname as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee was “the Undertaker” because he could bury controversial spending items so deep in the federal budget that nobody could dig them up.) Haig thought that he had persuaded Attorney General Richardson to sell the compromise to Cox, but he was mistaken.
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The president’s chief of staff underestimated the deep bonds between the two Yankee lawyers. They valued their loyalty to the rule of law, and to each other, far above any allegiance to Nixon. As Harvard Law School grads, both men had been law clerks to Judge Learned Hand, who was known for his flinty honor. As he defied President Nixon on the night that became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson read to Cox from Homer’s
Iliad
. The passage (slightly improved by Richardson) had been inscribed, in Greek, in a signed photo given to Richardson by Judge Hand:

Now, though numberless fates of death beset us, which no mortal can escape or avoid, let us go forward together, and happily we shall give honor to one another, or another to us
.
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Matched against such self-conscious pillars of rectitude, Nixon was bound to look like a small and mean tyrant. Saturday, October 20, 1973, unfolded with Shakespearean—that is to say, convincingly contrived—drama. At a press conference early that afternoon, Cox rejected the “Stennis Compromise” and said that he would go to the Supreme Court to force the president to turn over the tapes.

In
Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon
, presidential chronicler Theodore White (Harvard ’38) rendered the scene in the ballroom at the National Press Club: “Gangling, gentle and firm, combining the qualities of old Mr. Chips and Joan of Arc, the Special Prosecutor opened at his best—and then proceeded to get better.” Sheepishly, perhaps a bit disingenuously, Cox apologized for disturbing reporters on a beautiful fall day. “I am certainly not out to get the
President of the United States,” said Cox, as the cameras zoomed in. “I am even worried, to put it in colloquial terms, that I am getting too big for my britches.” But he felt honor-bound, he explained, “to stick by what I thought was right.” Cox went on to state that under the law only the attorney general—not the president—could fire him.

Nixon was prepared to fire Richardson if he declined to fire Cox. “If Elliot feels that he has to go with his Harvard boy, then that’s it,” Nixon told Haig.
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Shortly after 4:30
P.M.
, Richardson was ushered into the Oval Office. The attorney general, refusing to axe Cox, resigned instead. “Let it be on your head,” responded Nixon, grimly. He said that he was sorry Richardson had put his own concern above the nation’s interest at a time when the Russians were watching for signs of irresolution in the Middle East. Richardson usually spoke in a slurred New England drawl (often mimicked by the departed Agnew, to Nixon’s entertainment). But now the ex–attorney general crisply uttered: “I like to feel that what I’m doing
is
in the national interest.”
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At 8:22
P.M.
, Ron Ziegler stepped before the cameras to announce that Cox had been fired and that Richardson, as well as his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, had resigned. (Solicitor General Robert Bork, the number three official at Justice, finally fired Cox because, while he disagreed with the decision, Bork believed that Nixon was within his rights and he recognized the need for continuity of government.) The networks broke into their Saturday night programming to show images of FBI agents arriving at the Justice Department to seal off the offices of the special prosecutor. NBC anchorman John Chancellor opened his newscast by saying, “The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history.” A dinner party in New York City at the home of CBS chairman William S. Paley “erupted in a maelstrom of hysteria,” recalled Jonathan Aitken, who was a guest, along with an array of prominent Establishment types. “Excitable phrases like ‘coup d’etat’; ‘What’s next? Gas ovens?’; ‘Reichstag fire’; ‘thump of jackboots’; ‘White House madman’; and ‘Nixon’s insane’ filled the air,” recalled Aitken. Around
midnight, Paley proclaimed, “It’s the last straw. He’s bound to be impeached now.”
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