Being Nixon: A Man Divided (57 page)

In the last
weeks of 1973, Nixon had conducted a small, private experiment. He had asked Pat Buchanan to type up transcripts of some of the Watergate tapes and show them to Haig. “Even I, who had been present during many such conversations and knew what to expect, was shocked by the flavor of what I read,” recalled Haig. Haig asked Bryce Harlow, who had good political instincts, to read the transcripts. Harlow appeared at Haig’s office and “sat down in heavy silence. He seemed reluctant to express an opinion,” recalled Haig. “I did not press him. Finally he said, ‘What do
you
think?’ ”

Haig replied, “He’ll never survive this.”

“Amen, brother,” said Harlow.

Haig went to see Nixon and, without preamble, said, “Mr. President, there is no way you can release the transcripts Pat and his people have prepared. If you do, what they contain will destroy you.”

Nixon “wagged his head, thrust out his jaw, glared at me,” Haig recounted. “All right,” said the president, angrily. Then, with a wave of the hand as if to make both Haig and the transcripts vanish, he exploded,
“All right!”
⁴⁷

But the demand for the tapes was growing. In January both the special prosecutor and the House Judiciary Committee, now cranking up for full impeachment hearings, demanded more tapes. Nixon was threatened with contempt of Congress if he didn’t turn them over.

Once more, the Nixon staff began putting together transcripts, only this time they were carefully edited by Nixon to excise some of
the more embarrassing moments, including dozens of instances of what became known as “expletive deleted.” Nixon explained to his lawyers that his mother would have disapproved of his salty language and certainly any blasphemy.
⁴⁸

A certain amount of wishful thinking was creeping in as the White House prepared to release the tapes. Nixon hoped that his recorded conversations would show that John Dean had misled the Senate Watergate Committee, that the president had
not
been an active participant in the cover-up.
⁴⁹
Nixon failed to see that, while he might not sound like a crook, he would certainly not appear presidential.

Perhaps, he did understand, at some level, the mortal danger in the tapes, even if he didn’t let on. During that bleak winter, Tricia, no fool, wrote in her diary:

Something Daddy said makes me feel absolutely hopeless about the outcome. He has since the [Alex] Butterfield revelation [of the tapes existence] repeatedly stated that the tapes can be taken either way. He has cautioned us that there is nothing damaging on the tapes; he has cautioned us that he might be impeached because of their content. Because he has said the latter, knowing Daddy, the latter is the way he really feels.

“Sometimes,” Nixon wrote in his memoir, “People around you understand things better than you understand them yourself.”
⁵⁰

A
t 9:01
P.M
. on April 29, 1974, Nixon appeared on national television from the Oval Office, looking haggard but sounding confident. On his desk was a stack of thirty-eight slender binders, comprising 1,300 pages of transcripts from forty-six White House tapes. “Once and for all,” he said, the tapes would show what he knew and what he had done about Watergate. “The President has nothing to hide,” he said. He said he trusted in the “basic fairness of the American people.”

The “Blue Book,” as the collection was dubbed by the White House, went on sale for $12.25. It immediately sold more than three million copies. The reaction was delayed, but violent. Reading the transcripts, Billy Graham said he felt like throwing up.
¹
Senator Hugh Scott, the Republican minority leader, denounced the contents as “deplorable, shabby, disgusting, and immoral.” Newspapers once supportive of the president turned on him. The
Chicago Tribune
called for his resignation: “He is devious. He is vacillating. He is profane. He is willing to be led….”
²
Jokes about “expletives deleted” abounded. “Somebody told me, ‘He talks even worse than you do, Bradlee,’ ”
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee recalled.
³

A little disingenuously, old Nixon hands like Kissinger and George Shultz expressed surprise: They had
never
heard the president talk like that, they insisted; he must have saved his profanity for his political cronies like Chuck Colson.
⁴
The tapes that have been released
over the decades tell a story that is less cut-and-dried. It is true that Nixon’s tough-guy crudeness was more likely to emerge when he was discussing political “nut-cutting” than global strategy or economic policy, but there was some overlap. Nixon could be vulgar and anti-Semitic with Kissinger as well as Colson. It is also true that Nixon was more blasphemous than obscene and that he probably swore no more, and possibly less, than his two immediate predecessors.

Julie with Martha Mitchell.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

The one place Nixon did not swear was at the family dinner table. The release of the tapes made Nixon’s family very uncomfortable. “The Richard Nixon on the tapes was not the Richard Nixon the family saw every day,” Julie recalled.
⁵
Mrs. Nixon told her chief of staff, Connie Stuart, that she was “shocked” by the tapes; she had never heard her husband use such words.
⁶

The furor surprised Nixon, who had once again miscalculated the reaction of the public, a majority of whom now favored impeachment. The tapes did not serve to rebut Dean’s testimony, as he had once hoped. Instead, Nixon’s meandering, back-and-forth style of speech, his equivocation and uncertainty, as well as his occasional vulgarity, came across as erratic and weak—certainly not what Americans, however unrealistically, imagined or hoped for in a president. Nixon had wanted to be de Gaulle, remote, mysterious, grand. Instead, he lamented, the tapes showed the American people “things they did not want to know.”
⁷

On May 12,
Julie jotted in her calendar book a quotation from Rose Woods. “If there is hell on earth, we are living through it now,” Nixon’s faithful secretary had told her. “The feeling of helplessness,” Julie wrote, “was almost unbearable.”
⁸

Still, Nixon did not give up. Deeply distracted by Watergate, he nonetheless tried fitfully to govern. On May 13, the president made a national radio address proposing comprehensive national health insurance. His proposal, with its federal mandates, was not significantly different from the one that Barack Obama finally pushed through Congress nearly four decades later.
⁹
But in May 1974, such a massive
piece of social welfare legislation had no chance of passage. Nixon had been surprisingly effective on Capitol Hill, given that the Democrats controlled both chambers, but the game was over. Bill Timmons, his congressional liaison, had long since lost hope of creating bonds between the president and congressmen; now, with the release of the tapes, Nixon lost any chance to use the power of the office. “He was an activist president who wanted to do a lot of things nobody had ever tried, and by a floating coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats, we got some of it passed,” Timmons recalled. “We were able to cut deals, to compromise, and we built a lot of courthouses and bridges [trading pork barrel projects for votes]. But the tapes killed him. He was not the Nixon they knew or they thought they knew.”
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By the summer of 1974, the U.S. government was essentially running without an effective president. Indeed, it had been running on autopilot for at least a year. “After Haldeman and Ehrlichman left in April 1973, everything I sent to the White House was approved—everything,” said Paul O’Neill, the associate director of the Office of Management and Budget who oversaw all domestic policy. As an OMB official from the beginning of Nixon’s first term, O’Neill, who would go on to serve as George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary, had been impressed by the “Brandeis Briefs” demanded by Nixon from all his advisers—fact-based arguments the president sent back covered with incisive comments. By 1974, “I’m not sure Nixon even read my recommendations,” O’Neill recalled. “I guess he was huddled down in a bunker, wishing he were dead.”
¹¹

Foreign leaders had not abandoned Nixon, not quite. Anwar Sadat of Egypt gave the American president something he craved and missed: public adulation. In June 1974, Nixon made a triumphant trip to the Middle East, allowing him to escape, however briefly, the jeering at home.

Israel, Egypt, and Syria had fought to a draw, more or less, in the October War—which amounted to a victory for Sadat. (Nixon had urged the revived and rearmed Israeli army not to destroy Egyptian
forces.) An able and up-and-coming leader, Sadat was eager to salve Egypt’s bruised pride and to sidle away from Egypt’s overbearing Soviet sponsors. Nixon wanted to play the role of “honest broker” between Arabs and Jews and indeed succeeded at laying the foundation for a rare period of relative peace in the Middle East.
¹²
He also wanted to catch up to Kissinger, who, rightfully, had been lauded for his tireless “shuttle diplomacy.”
Newsweek
, the Washington Post Company–owned magazine that had published dozens of gleeful Watergate covers, fronted its June 10 issue with a drawing of Kissinger in a Superman costume.
¹³

Arriving in Cairo on June 12, Nixon received “perhaps the most tumultuous welcome any American president has ever received anywhere in the world,” Nixon boasted in his memoirs.
¹⁴
Nixon had shown the Egyptian people the respect they craved. A lover of crowds and spectacle, Nixon was often heard proclaiming “the greatest day of my life,” but he had reason to exult. “When we moved to the highway, it was like hitting a tidal wave,” Nixon recounted a decade later. “It was just a sea of humanity surging around us.”
¹⁵
More than a million people chanted “Nik-son! Nik-son!” as the motorcade inched into the city. (Somewhat uncharitably, Kissinger noted that trucks were picking up people as soon as Nixon passed and moving them farther down the parade route.)
¹⁶
Later, on a three-hour train ride in an ornate, open-sided, Victorian-era carriage, Nixon bathed in the adulation of an estimated six to seven million people.

Nixon stood for hours in the nearly hundred-degree heat even though his right leg was swollen to nearly twice its normal size. He was suffering from phlebitis, a potentially fatal swelling of the veins. Nixon was visibly limping, though he later recalled that he felt no pain on either the motorcade or the train ride. He did permit himself a morbid thought when he noticed that a hearse was driving along on the highway that paralleled the track. He wondered for a moment if Haig had leaked the president’s potentially mortal condition but later learned that the hearse had been ordered up in case of an assassination.
¹⁷

Sick or not, Nixon took another “Journey for Peace” two weeks later to the Soviet Union. Stopping first at a NATO meeting in Brussels, he was treated “with the solicitude shown to terminally ill patients,” wrote Kissinger. Deeply gloomy on the limousine ride from the airport, Nixon told the U.S. Ambassador Donald Rumsfeld that the State Department staffers handling the trip were “a bunch of fairies.” Rumsfeld tried to protest that they were actually Defense Department staffers and highly competent, but Kissinger took him aside and whispered, “Rummy, we don’t argue with him anymore.”
¹⁸
On the plane to Moscow, there were dark jokes among the newsmen that Nixon would ask for political asylum.
¹⁹
As Nixon and Kissinger joined on their last crusade to get an arms control treaty with the Soviets, each sensed a coolness in the other. Meeting in the presidential limousine outside the Kremlin to avoid electronic eavesdropping, they spoke guardedly. Nixon thought Kissinger was “depressed,” and Kissinger thought Nixon was “preoccupied and withdrawn.”
²⁰
No more diplomatic surprises or triumphs were in the offing. Brezhnev was signaling that he had overextended himself for détente and now had to worry about the hardliners on the Politburo. On a trip to the general secretary’s palatial villa in Yalta, Nixon and Brezhnev tried to recapture some of their chumminess and made gauzy declarations of peace. But the realpolitik side of Nixon did not want to alienate the conservatives in his own party: he would need their votes to avoid conviction in the Senate if, as many now thought likely, he was impeached in the House.
²¹

On July 12,
Nixon retreated to San Clemente to prepare for his last stand. Tricia and her husband Ed Cox decided to take an evening walk and were upset to see that the three-hole golf course, built by some “Friends of Nixon” on Bob Abplanalp’s adjoining property, had been allowed to die. “Wasted, neglected, ugly, dead,” Tricia bitterly wrote in her diary. Nixon was not surprised. He understood the fickleness of politics, which was why he often wrote sympathetic letters to losers.
²²

Nixon was a shrewd vote counter, and he spent hours with Bill Timmons on the potential ayes and nays for impeachment in the House. Most congressmen declared themselves undecided, but Nixon knew from experience that “undecided” usually meant the congressman was getting ready to vote against the White House. Still, he was shaken to hear, on the afternoon of July 23, that the three Southern conservative Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee had turned on him.

Nixon instructed Haig to call the governor of Alabama, George Wallace. Ever since Wallace had won ten million votes in the 1968 presidential election, Nixon had tried to keep the wily demagogue on his good side or, alternatively, to ruin him. A Justice Department corruption case against Wallace’s brother Gerald had fizzled, and an attempt to secretly fund Wallace’s primary opponent in 1970 also proved fruitless. When a would-be assassin’s bullet knocked Wallace out of the 1972 race, “Nixon’s agents gave Wallace $750,000 to keep his staff together as a sort of bribe, offered to fly him to the Republican Convention in a C-147 hospital plane, and had Billy Graham and John Connally try to convince him to endorse Nixon,” wrote Nixon scholar Melvin Small. Wallace had refused—but he did not endorse McGovern, either.
²³

Now, with critical support among Southern conservatives collapsing, Nixon turned to Wallace for help. When he first came on the line, Wallace pretended that he couldn’t hear Nixon very well, then said he hadn’t expected the call, then that he hadn’t examined the evidence, then that he had prayed for Nixon.
²⁴
Finally, as Haig recollected the conversation, Nixon asked, “George, I’m just calling to ask if you’re still with me.”

Wallace replied, “No, Mr. President, I’m afraid I’m not.”

Nixon beseeched: “George, isn’t there some way we can work this out?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. President,” Wallace replied.

Nixon did not try to argue. He hung up the phone and said in an even voice to Haig, “Well, Al, there goes the presidency.”
²⁵

That night, Nixon sat up late in his study working on a speech about inflation, which had already soared to more than 11 percent after the removal of the ill-conceived wage-and-price controls. What became known as “stagflation” had plunged the economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression. It is likely that the president’s approval ratings would have bottomed out even without Watergate; without doubt, voter anger over the economy further drained Nixon’s nearly empty reserves of goodwill in Congress. Wallace’s rebuff was wounding, but only one of many signs that Nixon’s grasp on the presidency was slipping away.
²⁶

“My mind kept wandering back to the afternoon, and a sense of hopeless loss and despair kept welling up in me,” he recalled. He knew that if he resigned, he “could expect an onslaught of lawsuits that would cost millions of dollars and take years to fight in the courts.” On the margin of his speech, he wrote, “12:01
A.M
. Lowest point in the presidency, and Supreme Court still to come.”
²⁷

He overslept, a rarity, and awakened to learn that the Supreme Court had unanimously ruled that he had to turn sixty-four more tapes over to the special prosecutor. One of them, he knew, was the June 23, 1972, tape, on which he and Haldeman had discussed importuning the CIA to block FBI investigators from following the money trail in the early days of Watergate.

Nixon had listened to the tape in May and knew it was troublesome, though he tried to convince himself it was not fatal. Incredibly, he had not permitted his lawyer, Fred Buzhardt, to listen to the tape, but now he did. Buzhardt came back and told one of his young lawyers, Geoff Shepard, that Nixon was doomed. Shepard put together a transcript and gave it to Buzhardt. “Smoking gun,” said Shepard.
²⁸