Being Nixon: A Man Divided (56 page)

Feeling low, fearful that he had failed the president, Haig went to find Nixon, who was alone in the darkened Oval Office. The president, too, seemed dispirited. Haig dutifully briefed Nixon on the spiraling events at home and abroad. Haig noticed that Nixon seemed to be reviving. “Well, Al,” he said, his voice regaining its timber, “it’s going to be tough, but we’ll handle it. It will work out.”

Haig recalled, “I realized that he was reassuring me, letting me know that he still had confidence in me. Deeply touched by his simple kindness in what must have been one of the most difficult hours of his life, I felt a surge of admiration and sympathy for this complex, unpredictable, and indomitable man.” But Haig also wondered if Nixon could survive the firestorm.
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“I was taken by surprise by the ferocious intensity of the reaction,” Nixon recalled. “For the first time I recognized the impact Watergate was having on America. I suddenly realized how deeply its acid had eaten into the nation’s grain.”
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Nixon expected a revolt by the likes of Bill Paley’s dinner party. But when he saw that, almost overnight, his approval rating had sunk to an unprecedentedly low 17 percent, he again fell into a deep depression.

Nixon’s aides could
feel the gloom. Charles Wardell, Haig’s young assistant who delivered briefing books to the president, could see Nixon becoming morose. Nixon rarely spoke to Wardell, but one day during this low time, as Nixon took a Department of State briefing book he had no intention of reading, the president said to Wardell, “I’m the bridge between two generations and neither likes me. They like the president [meaning the office itself], but they don’t like me.”
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Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger’s deputy, often dealt with the president, especially as Kissinger traveled to Moscow and the Middle East and Scowcroft ran the national security staff. By the third week of October, Kissinger had succeeded in arranging a cease-fire between
Israel and the Arabs, but the Russians threatened to create a far greater crisis. At 9:35
P.M
. on October 24, Soviet leader Brezhnev signaled that the Soviets were considering sending troops to the region. Intelligence showed that seven Soviet airborne divisions, representing some fifty thousand men, had been put on alert.

It was obvious that the Kremlin was testing American resolve. Scowcroft assembled a White House meeting of the president’s top advisers in the Situation Room. They agreed that America needed to put its nuclear forces on alert—a powerful return signal to the Soviets that they needed to back off. The decision was reached with Nixon’s concurrence—but without his presence. Haig twice left to consult with Nixon, but Nixon himself stayed away from the meeting.
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When stories about Nixon’s absence leaked into the press, there was a stir of rumor, fed by Kissinger’s aides, that the president was somehow incapacitated. In a phone call to Kissinger earlier that day, the president had said, “I may physically die.” Nixon had just learned that the House would begin impeachment proceedings against him. His enemies, Nixon told Kissinger, “want to kill the president. And they may succeed.”
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Scowcroft later recalled to the author that he was not surprised by the president’s absence that night in the Situation Room, as the nation went to DEFCON 3 (two grades higher, DEFCON 1, means imminent war). “He wasn’t well,” said Scowcroft. “By then he had taken to not showing up at meetings.” Nobody at the time said anything about the president’s drinking, recalled Scowcroft, but it was becoming more noticeable, in part because of the president’s limited capacity for alcohol. In the winter of 1973–74, as Kissinger began his “shuttle diplomacy” to try to reach a more permanent peace in the Middle East, it fell to Scowcroft to brief the president every day on Kissinger’s cables. Usually counseling restraint, the messages were often written in Kissinger’s opaque diplo-speak. “Nixon would call me mid-afternoon and ask, ‘What do you think he meant by that?’ ” Scowcroft recalled. “At six he’d call after a martini and he’d slur a
little and again ask what Kissinger meant. Then at 8:30 after several drinks with his friend Bebe he would tell me to put the troops on alert. If I’d done what he said we would have been at war three times over. But the next morning nobody would say anything.” Scowcroft did not find the president’s behavior alarming; by watching Kissinger and Haldeman before him, he had learned that Nixon was just “blowing off steam.” By then, Scowcroft said, “I knew enough not to think it was dangerous.”
^29
,
*
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Nixon gained nothing
by firing Cox. He was compelled by popular and political pressure to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a prominent Texas lawyer who turned out to be almost as persistent as his predecessor. Nixon still had to hand over the tapes. His woes only deepened when Judge Sirica announced that there was an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on one of the tapes, a recording of a conversation between the president and Haldeman on June 20, just as the Watergate scandal was breaking. Rose Woods claimed that she might have accidentally caused the gap, or at least five minutes of it. Posing for photographers, she awkwardly, and implausibly, contorted herself to show how she might have pressed the wrong buttons while taking a phone call. “Rose Mary’s Boo Boo” was the headline over the photograph on the cover of
Newsweek
.
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The bad dream had become black comedy.

At the time, Al Haig made a joke about “sinister forces” erasing the tape. Much later, in an oral history for the Nixon Library, he claimed, “I think Rose did it” at the request of Bebe Rebozo. “God,
she loved Nixon and she would do anything for him,” said Haig.
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The eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap remains an enduring Watergate mystery. Nixon denied any responsibility, but very few people had access to the tapes, and someone made five to nine erasures. It’s unclear what Nixon and Haldeman were talking about on the June 20 tape—Haldeman’s notes of the meeting are benign but inconclusive (“PR offensive to top this”)—but Nixon plainly did not want to be heard discussing what to do about Watergate with his chief of staff within three days of the break-in. At the time, he was insisting that he had been ignorant of the cover-up until the infamous cancer-on-the-presidency conversation with John Dean of March 21, 1973.
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“I know that most people think that my inability to explain the 18½ minute gap is the most unbelievable and insulting part of the whole of Watergate,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. Nixon kept adding to his own caricature. Rattled by the headlines about investigations into his personal finances, he told a press conference on November 18—in the same defiant but brittle tone he had once told reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”—“I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

Nixon’s statement was “not spur-of-the-moment,” he recalled. “The attacks on my personal integrity were more disturbing for me and my family than all the other attacks put together.” But, he conceded, saying “I am not a crook” was “a mistake.” The remark became “an almost constant source of criticism and ridicule.”
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“
HONK FOR IMPEACHMENT
”
read signs in Lafayette Park across from the White House, and motorists on Pennsylvania Avenue did. The Nixon girls, long accustomed to the vulgar chants of antiwar protesters, tried to ignore the cacophony. But they could see the toll on their father as his press aides fended off questions like: Is the president seeing a psychiatrist? Is he using drugs? Does he still believe in prayer? “The drinking rumors were the most persistent,” Julie recalled, “perhaps
because it seemed he
was
drinking a little more than ever before, but at dinnertime, when he was trying to unwind.”
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For months, Julie had been on the road making speeches in her father’s defense, sometimes as many as six times a week, but it was hard for her, too. After a night of caustic jokes at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner, when the Nicaraguan ambassador tried to show some sympathy, she burst into tears and fled the room. When her father suggested she become less involved, she responded, “But Daddy, we have to fight.” Tricia, quieter but no less fierce in her resolve, took to staying with her father at night in the Lincoln Sitting Room, saying little if anything, but just trying to show her loyalty and affection.
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The holidays brought no respite. On December 23, 1973, at Camp David, Nixon wrote across a page of notes, “Last Christmas here?”
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At Christmas dinner, Nixon was subdued, Pat quieter than usual. An Arab oil embargo—punishment for Nixon saving Israel—had plunged the nation into an energy crisis. Long lines of automobiles snaked around fuel-starved gas stations. Around the country, thermostats and speed limits were lowered. At the White House, once brightly lit at Nixon’s command, there were 80 percent fewer Christmas lights than the year before. For appearances’ sake, Nixon decided to park Air Force One and fly commercial to San Clemente over New Year’s. Tricia remembered the family’s intense discomfort: The other passengers in first class kept their eyes “glued” on the Nixons, even during the movie.
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The sun did not shine at Casa Pacifica. The California weather was unusually wet and cold, and electric heaters were moved from the living room to the bedrooms at night. A small earthquake and the highest tides in three hundred years added an eerie feel to the refuge. Nixon sat for hours, staring out at the slate gray ocean; at night, unable to sleep, he played the piano in the darkness.
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At 1:15
A.M
. on January 1, 1974, the president made a note: “The basic question is: Do I fight all out or do I now begin the long process to prepare for a change, meaning, in effect, resignation?” His note continued:

The
answer
—
fight
.

At 5
A.M.
, he made another note:

Above all else: Dignity, command, faith, head high, no fear, build a new spirit, drive, act like a President, act like a winner. Opponents are savage destroyers, haters. Time to use full power of the President to fight overwhelming forces arrayed against us.
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“The White House
staff Christmas party that year was a wake,” recalled Chuck Colson. Steve Bull, Nixon’s personal assistant, took Colson aside to say, “No one here is trying to save the President; everyone is knifing him, protecting themselves.” Haig was threatening to quit unless Ziegler was demoted; Ziegler refused to attend the party because Haig was scheduled to be there. Neither showed up. “Never have I seen liquor flow more freely or produce fewer smiles,” Colson recalled. His former assistant, Dick Howard, compared the White House to Hitler’s bunker in its backbiting and hedonism.
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Bryce Harlow, brought back to the White House for his political skills in reaching out to congressmen, quit. So did Mel Laird, who had been trying, and failing, to arrange meetings between the president and Laird’s many friends on the Hill. “By January [1974], as far as we were concerned, Nixon was almost incommunicado,” Harlow recalled. “If he wouldn’t let us help, it was time to go.”
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Fred Malek was trying to mentor a promising thirty-three-year-old White House Fellow and army officer named Colin Powell. Powell wanted to go back to uniformed duty as a battalion commander. “You know,” said Malek, “you could get them to extend it [the fellowship]. I really want you to stay with us here. We’ve got a great team.” Powell replied, “You don’t understand. Nobody’s going to be here a year from now.”
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On January 24, Dr. Riland arrived to treat the president and staff and recorded in his diary, “the entire place is like Campbell’s Funeral Home.” Rose Mary Woods collapsed in the doctor’s arms. She “looks terrible, thin, bloated—obviously drinking too much,” wrote Riland. “She is very close to the breaking point. If she were not Catholic, I’m certain she would take her life—she is that desperate.” Dr. Tkach showed Riland the president’s schedule—to make the point that it was virtually empty.

Riland was having his own problems—he had been indicted for tax evasion (Riland blamed Haldeman for tipping off the IRS)—and Nixon had dropped him for a time. But the president had resumed his treatments that winter, and was gossiping again with his gregarious osteopath, asking about his tax case. He wanted to know if Riland’s prosecutor was Jewish, and asked, “They won’t send you to jail, will they?” Riland wrote, “Jail has been the furthest thing from my mind but obviously isn’t the furthest thing in the President’s mind.” Still, Riland recorded, the president “looks great except a little tired, a little older and when he’s sitting down, he’s noticeably stooped, more than before.”
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In February, Jaworski,
the new special prosecutor, attended an off-the-record dinner with the editors of
Time
magazine. “Let’s suppose, hypothetically, just hypothetically, that we come across evidence that the president of the United States had committed an impeachable offense. What do you think the president would do?” Jaworski asked the editors. He continued to speculate, “Suppose the president knows we have this tape which is so damaging….” One of the editors, Jason McManus, wrote a note and passed it to one of the writers, Ed Magnuson. The note read: “We’ve got him.”
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On March 1,
1974, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Colson were indicted on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice (they all served prison terms ranging from seven to nineteen months). On March 16, Pat’s sixty-second birthday, she appeared on stage at
the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, where her husband played “My Wild Irish Rose,” “God Bless America,” and “Happy Birthday” on the piano. As he finished, Pat rose and approached her husband, arms outstretched. But he had already turned toward the master of ceremonies. Helen Smith, Pat’s press secretary, “winced,” and the press piled on about the president’s apparent cold indifference. Pat was bothered more by the press reaction than by her husband, whose awkwardness she well understood.
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