The Arrogance of Power (86 page)

Article III, charging Nixon with obstructing the work of the House of Representatives by disobeying its subpoenas, also passed. Two other charges, related to the secret bombing of Cambodia, tax evasion, and personal corruption, failed.

As a result of the conduct described in Articles I, II, and III, the resolutions decreed that “Richard Nixon warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

_____

Nixon had always fought, always wanted his name to be synonymous with never giving up. Would he fight now and allow his case to go forward to the Senate for a prolonged trial?

On seeing the state of the man the day after the Supreme Court decision,
Kissinger and Haig quietly agreed that the end of the presidency was inevitable. Nixon should resign, but they knew it would be folly to push him.
⁵

Nixon flew back to Washington with Pat on July 28. The next day, alone in his office in the Executive Office Building, he phoned to ask John Mitchell his advice. “Dick,” said Mitchell, himself facing trial for Watergate crimes, “make the best deal you can and resign.”

The next day, Tuesday, Nixon sat listening to the June 23 tape again, still convinced—he said—that he had done no wrong. His attorneys, however, told him he was mistaken. Unable to sleep that night, Nixon rose at 4:00
A
.
M
. and sat scribbling down his options. “There were strong arguments against resigning,” he was to write, the first of them being that he was “not a quitter.” He could not face “ending my career as a weak man. . . .”

On the other hand, Nixon mused, perhaps he should resign for the sake of the country and the Republican party. In the end, though, he turned the notes over and wrote: “End career as fighter.” It seemed “the right thing to do.”

Hours later the president asked Haig in turn for his view on the June 23 recording. “Once this tape gets out,” the general told him, “it's over.” Summoned to the presence again the next day, Thursday, Haig found Nixon looking “thin, battered, like a stroke victim.” He now agreed he would resign, and soon. Haig was to “tell Ford to be ready.”

As Haig met with the vice president, Nixon went back to the tapes. That evening, during a river cruise on the
Sequoia
with Bebe Rebozo, he again said he planned to resign. “You can't do it,” Rebozo retorted now. “It's the wrong thing to do. . . . You just don't know how many people are still for you.” Nixon promised “one last try to mount a defense” and said he would consult the family.

He told Julie first, not Pat, that he expected to resign. When she sought out her mother afterward, Julie recalled, “A look of alarm spread across her face, and she asked, ‘But why?' ” Pat wept, but only for a moment. Then she canceled plans to buy new china for the White House and started packing.

That night, in conclave with Rebozo and his family in the Lincoln Room, Nixon handed out transcripts of the June 23 recording. After they had read it and sat silently around him, he asked if the experience of the presidency had been worthwhile. They assured him that it had.

Pat, however, told him after the others were gone that she—like Rebozo—favored “fighting to the finish.” “Quite late that night,” Haig recalled, “he called me at home and told me that he had changed his mind. . . . ‘Let them impeach me,' he said. ‘We'll fight it out to the end.' ”

So it went through the weekend of August 3 and 4. More advice came from the daughters, and reportedly from their husbands, to fight on. Haig and the presidential speechwriters struggled to draft Option A and Option B speeches. The incriminating June 23 transcript was publicly released on the Monday, to predictable outrage. Nixon took another cruise on the presidential
yacht, with the family this time, then called a cabinet meeting for the following morning. He had another sleepless night.

Tuesday, August 6. Nixon's account of the cabinet meeting differs from that of others who were present. In his version he opened by discussing Watergate, offered his gratitude for his colleagues' support, and asked their opinions on whether he ought to resign. In fact, others agree, he first held forth on “the most important issue confronting the nation”: inflation.

When he did turn to the topic of Watergate, he said he had rejected the notion of resigning. “What he sought,” thought Kissinger, who was seated to the president's right, “was a vote of confidence . . . a show of willingness to continue the fight. . . . All he encountered was an embarrassed silence.”

Then Vice President Ford spoke up, politely making it clear that he expected soon to be president. Nixon replied with more discussion of the economy. Attorney General Saxbe and, even more forcefully, future president George Bush, at the time Republican National Committee chairman, interrupted to say it was time to end the crisis.

After the cabinet had dispersed, Kissinger returned to tell the President directly, in the Oval Office, that he owed it to the country to resign. “Nixon had never sought my views. Nor did he do so now,” the secretary of state remembered. “He said he appreciated what I said. . . . He would be in touch. Then there was silence.”

Haig called later that day and told Kissinger that Nixon was, after all, “tilting toward resignation. But it would be a close call; in the evening his family might change his mind again.”

The only thing that was clear about the situation, at that moment of awesome historic and personal confusion on August 6, was that nothing was yet clear. It was made even less so, and more frightening, by a phone call Tricia's husband, Edward Cox, made that afternoon.

Cox, a New York attorney, had flown down to join the family conference over the weekend and then returned to his office in New York. From there he placed a call to the Republican party whip, Senator Robert Griffin. He and Julie's husband, David, he said, disagreed with their wives and thought their father-in-law should resign. On the
Sequoia
the night before, however, the president had insisted that he intended to hang on.
⁶

Cox added more disturbing information. Nixon was drinking, and his mental condition was troubling. He had been “walking the halls” in the White House, “talking to pictures of former presidents, giving speeches and talking to the pictures on the wall.” Finally, Cox confided, he was worried Nixon might commit suicide.

Nixon would insist in old age that killing himself at that juncture had never crossed his mind. Yet there had been a disquieting moment that same afternoon, Haig was to recall, when the president had said he envied the soldier's way out: “Leave a man alone in a room with a loaded pistol.” Haig thought the president was speaking figuratively, but he worried nonetheless. “I told the
White House doctors,” he revealed in 1995, “if Mr. Nixon had any pills to take them away. . . .”

David Eisenhower had similar worries. He too reportedly feared his father-in-law might take his life, and for months he had been “waiting for Mr. Nixon to go bananas.”

Anthony Lukas, one of the most reliable of Watergate chroniclers, quoted a White House aide who compared Nixon in the last days to Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk's
The Caine Mutiny:
“given to sudden rages, to wild speculations, terrible doubts. . . .”

Suspicion and doubt sow suspicion and doubt. The uncertain days of August 1974 sparked unprecedented precautions, the logical outcome of months of anxiety about the president's mental stability.

_____

The concern had been mounting since the firing the previous year of Special Prosecutor Cox, followed within days by the nuclear alert over the Middle East War.

“A new element crept into our calculations about the effect our actions might have on the president,” Assistant Prosecutor Ben-Veniste remembered. “If there was a streak of instability there, then it meant we would have to be extra careful to keep from pushing Mr. Nixon over some invisible line into disaster—maybe disaster for all of us.”

Leon Jaworski, Cox's successor, had a variant of the same worry when he warned grand jurors against indicting the president. “He gave us some very strange arguments,” deputy foreman Harold Evans recalled. “He gave us the trauma of the country, and he's the commander in chief of the armed forces, and what happens if he surrounded the White House with his armed forces?”

By the summer of 1974 the apprehension had spread to Congress, focusing on two issues in particular. Was the president so disturbed that he might start a war? Also, might he attempt to use the military to keep himself in office? A group of legislators, headed by Jacob Javits, the Republican senator from New York, even consulted the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Bertram Brown.

“I had breakfast with a half dozen senators,” Brown recalled. “It was to talk about these issues, whether he would lose his cool. . . . Whether he was going crazy, becoming psychotic, whether he would start a war. I gave them some clues on what to watch out for. The clues were irrational statements, disappearing—not knowing where he was—and not eating.”

Alan Cranston, senator from California, had become alarmed when, as the impeachment process got under way, Nixon began courting members of the House, inviting them on his yacht. The president had spoken, Cranston heard, of how he could press a button and in twenty minutes fifty million Russians would be dead, and—after that—how many Americans?

Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, who was on the Armed Services Committee, worried that Nixon might use the army to seal off the Capitol. “He made sure there was somebody in the office twenty-four hours a day,” Hughes's legislative aide Margaret Shannon recalled. “It was sort of like before World War Two. You knew something was coming down the pike. You just had no idea what Nixon would do. . . .”

As early as June, when Nixon was en route to the Middle East, Gerald Ford's aides had begun considering how a transfer of power might work—or not work. Close Ford associate Philip Buchen and Clay Whitehead, director of the White House Office of Telecommunications, held one such conversation in a car to ensure privacy. What if Nixon was impeached and convicted in the Senate but refused to give up power? What if he lost his mind and tried to use the military to stay in office? The two men wondered if they should raise these dire possibilities with the secretary of defense, James Schlesinger.

In fact, the secretary was already alert to such fears. His attention had been drawn to the president's state of mind by a phone call a few months earlier from Joseph Laitin, the public affairs spokesman of the Office of Management and Budget, based in the Executive Office Building, just across from the White House.

In an interview with the author Laitin vividly recalled the encounter with Nixon in the spring of 1974 that prompted him to phone Schlesinger. “I was on my way over to the West Wing of the White House to see Treasury Secretary George Shultz,” Laitin said. “I'd reached the basement, near the Situation Room. And just as I was about to ascend the stairway, a guy came running down the stairs two steps at a time. He had a frantic look on his face, wild-eyed, like a madman. And he bowled me over, so I kind of lost my balance. And before I could pick myself up, six athletic-looking young men leapt over me, pursuing him. I suddenly realized that they were Secret Service agents, that I'd been knocked over by the president of the United States.”

Laitin was so shocked at Nixon's appearance that he postponed the meeting with Shultz and returned to his office. “I sat there stunned,” he said, “and I thought, you know, ‘That madman I have just seen has his finger on the red button.' I had a number for Schlesinger, a phone that only he would answer. I called him, and I asked him if the president could order the use of atomic weapons without going through the secretary of defense. I said, ‘If I were in your position, I would want to know who the nearest combat-ready troops were who would respond to the president's wishes to surround the White House. I would want to know what the next nearest combat-ready division was, which would not only be able to overcome them but also respond only to the chain of command. That's what I have to say.' Then there was just a click at the other end, as the secretary of defense hung up.”
⁷

A single call from a friend, describing a president apparently gone momentarily berserk, would not on its own have prompted Schlesinger to take
any precautions. Yet his position placed him in line of a constant flow of information from all manner of sources. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Zumwalt, had told him of Nixon's bizarre diatribe to the Joint Chiefs the previous Christmas, when he had seemed to be feeling them out, to determine “whether in a crunch there was support to keep him in power.”
⁸

Given his own access to the president, Schlesinger also had firsthand experience of his behavior. More than once, according to Zumwalt, Schlesinger himself said privately that Nixon was behaving in a “paranoid” way.

Around the time of the Laitin phone call the secretary had begun to make certain he stayed more than usually informed of the goings-on in the Oval Office. Then, in late July, he asked for a meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force General George Brown.

“I told him,” the former secretary recalled in an interview with the author, “that every order that would come from the White House had to come to me directly, immediately upon receipt. . . . The message had to be gotten through that there were not to be any extraordinary measures taken. The message did get through.”