The Arrogance of Power (82 page)

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By the early summer of 1973, Nixon's ultimate fate was no longer really in his hands. Two considerable forces were now moving inexorably forward on the Watergate investigation, and a third was stirring. The Senate committee which was hearing witnesses in the glare of constant publicity, had been joined in the field by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, appointed at the insistence of the Senate Judiciary Committee because of the perception that the White House had been interfering with the course of justice. Cox's Prosecution Force, unlike a congressional committee, could bring people to trial, though not—it was thought—the president of the United States.

The only process by which a sitting president can be forced from power is impeachment. The House of Representatives is the prosecutor, the Senate the judge and jury. The ultimate penalty is removal from office, and there is no appeal. Only one president, Andrew Johnson, had ever faced impeachment before, in the mid-nineteenth century, and he had been acquitted.
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Impeachment was a virtually unthinkable remedy, but senior men in the Congress were now thinking about it. “The time is going to come,” House Majority Leader Tip O'Neill had said months earlier at a private meeting with Speaker Carl Albert, “when impeachment is going to hit this Congress.” Peter Rodino, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, had thought at the time that O'Neill was wrong. In June 1973, however, he told his chief counsel, Jerry Zeifman, to start preparing for the process—“just in case.”

On July 12 Ervin's seven senators gathered to discuss a problem: Nixon had sent a letter refusing to produce documents relevant to the investigation, claiming “executive privilege.” The committee decided to respond both by writing to the president, explaining that his position could cause a “fundamental constitutional confrontation,” and requesting a telephone conference between him and Ervin.

Nervous jokes were made as the senators gathered in Ervin's office to await the telephone call. “Should we all stand when the telephone rings?” one joked. Another responded that they should indeed, and “all sing ‘Bail to the Chief.' ” Then the president came on the line.

“We could hear Ervin's side of the conversation,” chief counsel Sam Dash recalled in 1997. “He was talking respectfully about working out some arrangement about the documents and how perhaps he and Senator Baker could go and see Nixon. . . . And then suddenly the senator was saying: ‘But, no, Mr. President, we're not out to get you, Mr. President. We're just trying to do our duty.' Then again: ‘No, we're not out to get you, Mr. President. . . .' ”

Ervin concluded the conversation a quarter of an hour later looking flushed and troubled. Nixon had been “shrieking” and “hysterical,” the senator told his colleagues, “emotionally distraught.”

When word came that evening that the president had been taken to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, some of Ervin's staff assumed he had suffered a mental breakdown. In fact, he had pneumonia, which was to keep him in the hospital for eight days. Meanwhile, within twenty-four hours, came the revelation that doomed him. The Senate committee learned about the existence of the White House tapes.

Twice that spring, in conversations with Haldeman, Nixon had expressed concern about the taping system. “Frankly,” he had said one April morning, “I don't want to have in the record discussions we've had in this room on Watergate.” He and Haldeman agreed that the recording system would henceforth be activated only when the president switched it on. It was a sensible, if belated, precaution, but the taping of compromising conversations continued.

A week later, when Nixon asked if the system was still in place, he was informed it was. Should the tapes be preserved? On balance Nixon seemed to think they should, but he was nervous. “I don't think it should ever get out that we taped this office,” he told Haldeman in one of their last taped conversations. “Have we got people that are trustworthy on that? I guess we have.”
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It got out in July as the president lay in the hospital, aptly enough on
Friday the thirteenth. That day, three Senate staffers sat in the Dirksen Office Building interviewing Haldeman's former aide Alexander Butterfield, who had recently moved on to a new job.

Ironically it was a Republican, deputy minority counsel Donald Sanders, whose questioning brought the breakthrough that sealed Nixon's fate. Sanders had two leads to go on. Investigators had come by a White House summary of Nixon's version of his meetings with Dean, a summary that seemed almost unnaturally detailed and complete—unless it had been prepared from a recording. Dean, moreover, had told how Nixon had behaved oddly at one of their meetings, moving away to a corner and speaking in a virtual whisper. Dean had wondered at the time, he testified, whether the president was secretly taping him, hoping to set him up.

Sanders, a former FBI agent, asked Butterfield if he knew why Nixon would have behaved as Dean had described. “I was hoping you fellows wouldn't ask me that,” Butterfield slowly replied, then went on to reveal the existence of the president's recording system. The White House and Camp David, he told his questioners, were positively riddled with microphones.

The investigators knew at once what they had. Staffers of both parties rushed to notify colleagues, and the Republicans made sure the White House was warned that the secret was out. Nixon, delivered the news in the hospital, was appalled. Rose Woods called Butterfield to say: “You dirty bastard. You have contributed to the downfall of the greatest president this country has ever had.”

Unsurprisingly the taping system was shut down almost at once. Democrats hastened to claim that no president of theirs would ever have made such secret recordings, as in fact, several had, if not on the scale of the Nixon operation. Meanwhile a preemptive damage control operation got under way at the Kennedy Library. “Sensitive” tapes were hastily erased, according to Edward Kennedy's aide Richard Burke.

At the same time, Nixon's men headed to the hospital to discuss what he should do with his. Some advised destruction, but the lawyers warned that would be obstruction of justice. The president himself reportedly at first suggested having the tapes stored under his bed at the White House. So vast was the accumulated body of recordings, however, that the tapes would not have fitted in the room, let alone under the bed. Given the unfeasibility of that option, Nixon was of two minds as to what to do. “Should have destroyed the tapes after April 30,” he scribbled on the notepad at his bedside. Yet he told Alexander Haig, “I know what I did and didn't do. I don't think I knowingly committed any crime. I need those tapes to protect me.”

Today, with the release in recent years of several hundred hours of tape, including many categorized by the archivist of the United States under the heading “Abuse of Power,” it is astonishing that Nixon imagined they might exonerate him.

The Senate committee quickly subpoenaed recordings likely to have evidentiary relevance, as did the special prosecutor. Nixon refused to submit any at all, again claiming executive privilege. A long, long struggle had begun, during which the president's lawyers were to argue that he had “absolute power to decide what may be disclosed.” “Unlike a monarch,” the special prosecutor was to counter, “the president is not the sovereign.” The Supreme Court would eventually rule that the only thing that was absolute was Nixon's obligation to obey the law—but that decision was still a year away.

Even before the legal battle began, Special Prosecutor Cox had shared another concern with James Doyle, his aide and spokesman. “Do you think,” he asked, “the president is mentally ill?”

Nixon's behavior in public on occasion fueled such concerns. At an appearance on a Florida college campus,
Newsweek
's Washington bureau chief Mel Elfin reported, the president did a walkabout that “seemed spontaneous but was guided by staff and Secret Service men with radioed stage directions. ‘Turn him right there and have him go to the faculty,' and Mr. Nixon turned and went to the faculty. ‘Have him wave.' Nixon waved.”

This was not just the normal management of a chief executive. The president had seemed “zombie-like,” Elfin was to recall. So oddly, indeed, had he acted that the reporter consulted doctors to ask if the symptoms were consistent with the taking of any particular drug.

In August, arriving at New Orleans' Rivergate Center to address the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the president at first appeared “relaxed and confident.” Then, suddenly, he objected loudly to the presence of newsmen, grabbed Ron Ziegler by the shoulders, spun him around, and propelled his own aide with a hard push toward the photographers.

When Nixon launched into his speech, something was evidently wrong with him. “What was remarkable,” the
New York Times
correspondent thought, “was his manner on the stage. He paced about, smiling and gesturing in an exaggerated way. He stumbled over his words. . . . His voice fluctuated in volume and speed.”

Some in the audience thought the president was drunk, others that he was on “uppers,” which made him look like “Ed Sullivan on speed.” A spokesman told reporters he was not using any medication. Today, armed with the knowledge that Nixon used Dilantin, it seems more than likely that drug was the culprit. The symptoms are consistent with having taken too high a Dilantin dosage.

The word at the
New York Times
was that Nixon was seeing a psychiatrist. The therapist they had in mind was Dr. Hutschnecker, with whom Nixon had been in contact since the fifties, and reporters armed with his photograph for identification began looking for him wherever Nixon went. The doctor had in fact written to the president just weeks earlier, expressing deep concern and offering to see him. It is not clear whether Nixon accepted Hutschnecker's
suggestion, but his letter was found in Nixon's desk after the resignation—a year later.
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The same week that he wrote to Nixon, an op-ed article by Hutschnecker had appeared in the
New York Times.
Its headline was direct:
A SUGGESTION
:
PSYCHIATRY AT HIGH LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT
. The article cited the sins of Watergate in light of the doctor's long-held theory that potential leaders should be given clean bills of health in advance by psychiatrists as well as physicians. Hutschnecker wrote sorrowfully of how men charged with protecting the people's rights had betrayed their trust and done something Americans usually associated with foreign dictatorships, “spying on one another.”

Suitably trained doctors, he urged, should be available in government at all times, to “raise their voice when human ambition and greed or drives for an uninhibited use of power seem to be getting out of control.” It was time, the psychotherapist wrote, to “explore possibilities other than purely political to secure that our best and brightest leaders are also our mentally and morally healthiest and soundest.”

Few informed people can have missed the article's message or failed to note its timing. Week by week the Nixon presidency was irretrievably losing something at its core, the dignity that is intrinsic to the office. After the New Orleans episode, Nixon was referred to with a disrespect hitherto unimaginable.

“Millions of us,” wrote Nicholas von Hoffman, “saw El Flippo on TV grab Ziegler by the arms, whirl him around and, with an expression on his face both frightening and frightful, shove him. . . . Who can forget the picture of a President so out of control of himself that he expresses it by laying angry hands on a member of his staff in public? . . . [T]he impression is gaining that Nixon is becoming dysfunctional, and the fear is growing that he may do something we'll be sorry for.”

The
Washington Star-News,
meanwhile, published an extraordinary piece about what would happen should a U.S. president become mentally ill. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, it pointed out, provided a mechanism for the transfer of power in the event of incapacitating illness. The procedure was straightforward enough if the president was capable of recognizing and acknowledging his condition. “But,” writer Smith Hempstone asked, “what happens if the President becomes physically or emotionally incapacitated and is unable or unwilling to recognize that incapacity, as might well happen in the case of a mental breakdown? . . . that prospect is too horrible to contemplate.”

According to his biographer, Senator Ervin had discussed just such a possibility with Majority Leader Mansfield before they decided on the Watergate probe. It had been, even then, “that thing which was the main fear and therefore the prime issue. Which wasn't whether or not Nixon was a crook. Millions had been talking on both sides of that issue for more than a quarter century now. Everyone knew what the prime issue was. A certain thumb
moving awkwardly towards a certain red button, a certain question of sanity. . . . Query: if the man who holds the thumb over the button is mad. . . .”

Such fears, harbored by men not known for paranoia, were now very real.

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“Al Haig is keeping the country together, and I am keeping the world together,” Kissinger had been heard to say as summer ended. He had recently become secretary of state and, retaining his post as security adviser, now had more independence of action than ever. Nixon did not bother to attend National Security Council meetings and reportedly often initialed documents without reading them.