The Arrogance of Power (83 page)

On October 6, just six weeks after the president's alarming behavior in New Orleans, a red-button moment arrived. Soviet-backed Arab armies, performing militarily better than ever before, struck at Israel, and for a while it seemed they might triumph. Israel was able to contain and reverse the threat thanks to a massive American airlift, but before the guns stopped firing, a moment of nuclear peril would put the entire world in danger. At that unsafe moment, and during the three weeks the war lasted, the president of the United States gave it less than adequate attention.

He did not attend a single formal meeting on the conflict during the first week of the conflict. He was clear on the essentials, Kissinger recalled, not least on the fact that a massive airlift of arms supplies was essential to Israel's survival. Yet he remained “preoccupied with his domestic scandals . . . deflected from details.” In private, at the time, the secretary of state was more forthright.

At lunch with the columnist Max Lerner during the war Kissinger took a telephone call at the table. “I could hear some muttered words about the president and saw his face change color,” Lerner recalled. “For a moment he was silent, and then—as we rose from the table—he said, almost under his breath but quite clearly, ‘That anti-Semitic bastard!' ”

While they ate lunch, Lerner had asked the secretary about Nixon. “Kissinger was in effect carrying the burden of the presidency,” he concluded, “seeking to salvage by his prestige whatever shreds of legitimacy the executive still had. He knew how Nixon was coming apart, as a mind, and as a man.”

Nixon spent much of the conflict's fourth day preoccupied with the fate of his vice president. Spiro Agnew, accused of having received thousands of dollars in kickbacks on building contracts, had hoped the president would come to his rescue. Nixon, however, had long since wanted to be rid of Agnew, and under the strictest scrutiny as the result of his own crisis, he could not appear to be interceding on behalf of his vice president in a criminal case. Agnew pleaded no contest on a tax charge and resigned.

Nixon wrote his departing colleague a placatory letter, declaring his sadness and “great sense of personal loss.” Agnew, however, believed the president had become his “mortal enemy.” While he was still resisting resignation, he had received a final message from the White House, reminding him curtly that
“the President has a lot of power.” Agnew had interpreted it as a physical threat. He feared he would be killed, he was to write years later, should he refuse to “go quietly.”

His concern sounds exaggerated today, but it is worth recalling how deeply Watergate spread the poison of fear. “Everyone's life is in danger,” Bob Woodward was warned by his source Deep Throat. He and Bernstein briefed their editor and took a few precautions, but pressed on with their work.

A threat to kill John Dean, meanwhile, caused the Senate Committee to arrange around-the-clock protection for Nixon's former counsel. Senator Ervin's life was also threatened, as was that of Special Prosecutor Cox.

There was concern too that one or more of the Watergate burglars might be murdered to ensure their silence. A caller had phoned a bomb threat to the home of James McCord days after the arrests. “If the administration gets its back to the wall,” a White House messenger warned him later, “it will take steps to defend itself.” Like Agnew, McCord took the assertion as a threat to his life. Louis Russell, the former Nixon investigator who had been “watching” on the night of the Watergate arrests, died of an apparent heart attack during the summer, after alleging he had been poisoned. The claim may well have been baseless, but it was symptomatic of the rotten atmosphere of Watergate Washington.
¹²

Early on the morning of the day Agnew resigned, with the war in the Middle East in its fifth day, the congressional leadership went to the White House for a briefing. It proved a disconcerting experience. While Kissinger attempted to present a situation report, Nixon kept interrupting with bad jokes about the secretary of state's supposed sex life. “President,” Tip O'Neill scrawled on his notepad, “is acting very strange.”

Two days later, October 12, Nixon chose a curious way to name Agnew's successor. The televised announcement of his choice, Gerald Ford, featured red-coated marines playing violins. At a time when only understatement would have been appropriate, the occasion was raucous and celebratory. The
Times
's Anthony Lewis thought it the “most repellent American public ceremony in memory. . . . There was not the slightest sense of responsibility for what had passed, not the least reference to the grisly reason for this occasion.” Ford aide Robert Hartmann thought Nixon was “visibly wallowing in his stellar role.”

Behind the scenes the president denigrated his own appointee. “Can you imagine Jerry Ford sitting in this chair?” he reportedly sneered to Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon sent one of his attorneys a pen he had used to certify the Ford nomination, with a note reading: “Here is the damn pen I signed Jerry Ford's nomination with.” For Kissinger, the naming of Ford stilled, if only briefly, “the worry about the future of a country with a visibly disintegrating executive authority.”

Nixon was about to take a disastrous step, the removal of the man he called “the viper in our bosom,” Watergate Special Prosecutor Cox. The stated reason for firing him was to be that Cox had rejected the president's proposed
compromise on the tapes—an offer of White House “summaries” rather than the tapes themselves. To Nixon, though, the prosecutor was more than an obstinate public servant insisting on full compliance. For Cox's background combined two elements sure to raise the president's ire: He was a Harvard professor, and he was favored by the Kennedy clan.
¹³
“Now that we've taken care of Agnew,” Nixon had said in the hearing of his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, “we can get rid of Cox.”

On the night of October 20, around nine o'clock, Judiciary Committee chief counsel Zeifman received an anguished call from a special prosecution force attorney, Philip Lacovara. “The FBI has just entered our office, and they are armed,” Lacovara shouted. “This may be the end of the Republic. You've gotta do something.”

The Saturday Night Massacre was under way. Rather than obey Nixon's order to fire Cox, Richardson resigned. When his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused the same command, he in turn was fired. Solicitor General Robert Bork, however, temporarily promoted to acting attorney general, obediently sent the letter of dismissal. It had been composed by Nixon's lawyer and typed on Justice Department stationery that had been transported from Richardson's office to the White House by chauffeured limousine.

As Cox awaited the letter at home, his staff hurried to the office to secure records as best they could. Three reels of tape were spirited away, stuffed down the pants of an attorney's wife, just as the FBI arrived to seal the building. Provided secretly to the prosecutors just days earlier, they contained the covertly recorded conversations of Rebozo bank vice president Franklin DeBoer, saying he managed Nixon's “buried” financial portfolio.
¹⁴
On the money front, the investigation was getting dangerously close to the president. Ten days earlier Rebozo had admitted receiving one hundred thousand dollars in cash from Howard Hughes on Nixon's behalf.

“Constitutional crisis,” “dictatorship,” “Brownshirt operation,” “act of desperation”: The media's condemnation of the Saturday Night Massacre was immediate and universal. Nixon was “acting like a madman, a tyrant,” “crazy.” A Gallup poll showed that the president's approval rating had sunk to a nadir of 17 percent. He would admit, years later, that dismissing Cox had been a “serious miscalculation.”

The situation in the Middle East remained grave, with the successful Israeli counterattack bringing new risks and uncertainties. Kissinger, on a trip to Moscow to negotiate a cease-fire agreement, phoned the White House on an urgent matter—only to have Alexander Haig tell him, “Get off my back . . . I have troubles of my own.”

Back in Washington, on the evening of October 24, the secretary of state found himself faced with the possibility that the Soviets might send forces to the war zone. At 7:05
P
.
M
. he interrupted a phone confrontation with Ambassador Dobrynin to take a call from the president. Nixon was “agitated and emotional,” and his principal concern was himself. Congressional leaders, he
insisted, must be told how indispensable he was to the management of the Middle East crisis. The politicians, Nixon told Kissinger, were attacking him “because of their desire to kill the President . . . they may succeed. I may physically die. . . . It brings me sometimes to feel like saying the hell with it.” Kissinger thought his boss “in the paralysis of an approaching nightmare.”

It was on that night that the red-button moment occurred. Kissinger's conversation with Dobrynin, resumed after he had spoken with Nixon, convinced him that Moscow was intent on sending in Soviet troops. He worked the phone for two hours, then called Haig at 9:30
P
.
M
. only to be told that Nixon had already “retired for the night.” At a moment that he and Haig agreed might herald the presidency's “most explosive crisis,” the leader of the free world was unavailable.

Roger Morris, a former Kissinger aide, has quoted the secretary of state's senior assistant, Lawrence Eagleburger, and other colleagues as saying Nixon was “upstairs drunk . . . slurring his words and barely roused when Haig and Kissinger tried to deal with him in the first moment of the crisis.” Haig, the principal relevant witness, has said the president was merely “tired.”

Minutes after his call to Haig, Kissinger heard from Dobrynin again, this time to read a peremptory warning from Brezhnev to the president. “I will say it straight,” the crucial sentence read, “if you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter, we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally.” The letter demanded an immediate response.

Intelligence reports confirmed suspicious Soviet air and naval movements that seemed to suggest that insertion of an airborne force was imminent. The appropriate response, Kissinger reasoned, was to shock the Soviets into abandoning such plans. At 9:50
P
.
M
. he called Haig again. “I asked whether I should wake up the President,” Kissinger recalled. “He replied curtly: ‘No.' I knew what that meant. Haig thought the President too distraught to participate. . . .”

After more phone calls and a warning to Dobrynin, the Washington Special Actions Group, made up of top Defense Department, intelligence, and military chiefs, was summoned to the White House Situation Room. Kissinger again discussed with Haig whether to wake up the president. There was no vice president to summon because Ford had yet to be confirmed by the Senate.

Most U.S. forces at that time were normally at an alert status known as DEFCON (defense condition) IV. DEFCON I is war. That night the military went to DEFCON III, or Flash III.

At U.S. air bases, B-52s loaded with nuclear weapons lined up nose to tail. In missile silos, launch commanders buckled themselves into their chairs. Nuclear-armed submarines sped to secret positions off the Soviet coast, prepared to launch. In case those steps were not sufficient to put the Soviets on notice, two aircraft carriers were ordered to move closer to the conflict, amphibious ships were ordered to leave port in Crete, B-52s in the Pacific
headed for the United States, and the 82
^nd
Airborne was placed on alert. A stern reply to Brezhnev's letter, telling him that unilateral Soviet action would among other things be contrary to the Agreement on Prevention of Nuclear War, went out at dawn. It was sent in Nixon's name.

Nixon seemed “clearheaded and crisp” when Kissinger briefed him at 8:00
A
.
M
. Forty minutes later, however, when congressional leaders arrived to be brought up-to-date, they were once again confronted with bizarre behavior.

As Tip O'Neill recalled, “Kissinger had barely opened his mouth when the President interrupted him and started talking to us about the history of communism in the Soviet Union. He rambled on for almost half an hour about the czars and the revolution, about Marx and Lenin, and even the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico. Nobody could understand what, if anything, all this had to do with the Middle East war.”

When Kissinger managed to resume speaking, he was interrupted by Nixon with another twenty-five-minute history lecture. With the House due to convene at ten o'clock, the members of Congress eventually excused themselves and left. On the way back to the Hill, O'Neill discussed Nixon's demeanor with George Mahon, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Thomas Morgan, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Morgan, the only practicing doctor in the Congress, said the president seemed to him “paranoid . . . in real trouble.”

A new letter from Brezhnev came in within hours, written as though the threat of the previous night had never been made. The crisis evaporated, and Nixon—“elated,” according to Kissinger—went off to Camp David. From there he called again to ask that the press be informed how indispensable he had been.

Whether or not the president had been drunk, the fact remains that the world had been on the brink of a nuclear crisis while he was asleep. Haig, who would remain at Nixon's side until the resignation, has said he took the threatening Brezhnev message to the president, that Nixon called it “the most serious thing since the Cuban Missile Crisis” and called for action. Later, told of the decision to hold an emergency meeting, Nixon “expressed no enthusiasm for attending. . . . As usual he preferred to let others set the options. . . . With a wave of the hand, he said, ‘You know what I want, Al, you handle the meeting.' ”