The Arrogance of Power (87 page)

General Brown later confirmed that the conversation with the defense secretary had taken place. Schlesinger had asked “if the House voted impeachment and the Senate trial process was long and drawn out and going unfavorably for the president, could the president get an order down to the end of the military establishment without our knowing it?” Brown thought that the “normal process would prevent any such happening because troop orders must go to a high Pentagon command center. . . . I would have it in two minutes, and I'd be in the secretary's office in thirty seconds.”

After the conference with Schlesinger, the general briefed the Joint Chiefs. Admiral James Holloway, who had recently succeeded Zumwalt as chief of naval operations, recalled the scene. “Brown's hands were shaking. He told us, ‘I've just come from the office of the secretary of defense. I made some notes. I want to read them to you.' What the secretary wanted was an agreement from the Joint Chiefs, all of them, that nobody would take any action or execute any orders, without all of them agreeing to it.”

“General Brown said they were afraid of some sort of coup involving the military,” a former member of the Joint Chiefs told the author on condition of anonymity. “We almost fell off our chairs. If anyone was thinking of a coup, it was not anyone in uniform. None of us wanted to conjecture on ‘What if we get a screwy order from the president?' We knew it would take care of itself. We had in the JCS five people with an average of forty years' experience, and they are picked for their good judgment. . . . They would have found a way to make sure the right thing happened.”

The “right thing” under the circumstances was to abide by the provisions of the National Security Act, which required that the president transmit all military orders through the defense secretary, who in turn would relay them to the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “I did assure myself,” Schlesinger has said of the episode, “that there would be no question about the proper constitutional and legislative chain of command. And there never was any question.”

The secretary was also concerned to ensure that the system not be circuited, that “no idiot commander somewhere was misled.” He wondered in particular about the air force, in part because of admiration for Nixon among its ranks for his role in effecting the release of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam. Most had been downed pilots.

As he considered how steady or otherwise senior officers of the various services might be, Schlesinger wondered in particular about General Robert Cushman. As a brigadier general during Nixon's vice presidency Cushman had been his national security adviser. During the presidency, as deputy CIA director, he had been involved in providing agency facilities to Watergate burglar Howard Hunt.
⁹
By the summer of 1974 he was commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, an appointment that, unusual for the corps, was seen as a political appointment. In that capacity he now served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“General Cushman was a pleasant but weak man,” Schlesinger is said to have commented privately. “He might have acquiesced to a request from the White House for action. The last thing I wanted was to have the marines ordered to the White House and then have to bring in the army to confront the marines. It would have been a bloody mess.”

Schlesinger also found himself calling for answers to the questions his friend Laitin had asked in the spring. The nearest significant troop concentrations to the White House, he learned, were marine units under Cushman's command, one at a barracks on the outskirts of Washington—at Eighth and I streets SE—another at a facility in Quantico, Virginia.

The secretary was also interested in the mobility of the army's 82
^nd
Airborne Division, which had been secretly brought in to protect the White House during antiwar demonstrations early in the presidency. How swiftly could the 82
^nd
move troops to Washington from its base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina? A significant force, Schlesinger learned, could be in the capital in about five hours.

When Pentagon correspondents first reported the gist of these precautions, soon after Nixon's fall, President Ford would move quickly to squelch them. “No measures were actually taken,” a spokesman claimed. During research for this book, however, the author was told otherwise by a former army operations intelligence specialist named Barry Toll.

A much-decorated veteran, Toll was in 1974 serving on one of the battle staff units, known in the military as doomsday teams, on permanent standby to brief the president and top commanders in the event a military crisis should “go nuclear.” In August 1974 he was based at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, with the Worldwide Military Command and Control System.

“The last week or so of the Nixon administration,” Toll said in 2000, “we
received a top secret, ‘eyes only,' limited distribution order effectively instructing us not to obey the president—on anything, not just nuclear, until further notice. The order came in as topmost priority, Flash Override. It was signed, at the Joint Chiefs' insistence, as I understood it, by not one but two cabinet officers. The names I recall as having signed were Secretary Schlesinger and Secretary Kissinger. There had been similar orders in the past, up to five that I saw over the months, at times when, as I understood it, the president had been drunk.”

While Toll testified on elements of these events to a Senate committee, his account remains uncorroborated.
¹⁰
Information from Henry Kissinger, meanwhile, indicates that consideration was given to using the 82
^nd
Airborne in the last tense week of the presidency.

“Haig was in touch with me every day,” the former secretary of state has written. “Usually I started my day at the White House in a brief meeting with him. On Thursday, August 1, he said matters were heading towards resignation, though the Nixon family was violently opposed. On Friday, August 2, he told me Nixon was digging in his heels; it might be necessary to put the 82
^nd
Airborne Division around the White House to protect the President. This I said was nonsense; a presidency could not be conducted from a White House ringed by bayonets. Haig said he agreed completely . . . he simply wanted me to have a feel for the kinds of ideas being canvassed.”

“The end of the Nixon presidency was an extraordinary episode in American history,” former Secretary Schlesinger said in 2000. “I am proud of my role in protecting the integrity of the chain of command. You could say it was synonymous with protecting the Constitution.”

In his dry way the chairman of the Joint Chiefs agreed that Schlesinger had acted correctly. “I think,” General Brown later commented, “the secretary had a responsibility to raise these sort of matters.”
¹¹

Mercifully, nothing untoward happened.

_____

Wednesday, August 7. Alexander Haig was feeling simultaneously relieved, worried, and angry: relieved because the president had been speaking as though he were really going to resign; worried, because he had received word that Barry Goldwater and other Republican leaders were about to confront Nixon in person and “demand” that he resign; and angry about what he viewed as dark machinations within Congress.

“Do you know where the coup was coming from?” Haig was still saying in outraged tones two decades later. “The legislature! The Congress! Not from the military.”
¹²
In August 1974 Nixon thought so too and might yet have balked at resignation if pressured.

“Senator, you simply cannot let this [congressional maneuver] happen,” Haig told Goldwater at a hastily arranged meeting. “This is a banana republic
solution. . . . If the President goes, he must go on his own terms, by due process of law, as the result of his own uncoerced decision.” Goldwater promised that he and his eminent associates would not so much as mention the possibility of resignation when they met with Nixon.

Consequently, when Nixon received Senator Goldwater and two colleagues, no one mentioned the real reason for the meeting. “We sat there in the Oval Room,” Goldwater remembered, “and the president acted like he just played golf and had a hole in one. You'd never think the guy's tail was in a crack.”

Nixon put his feet up on the desk and prattled on about Lyndon Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower and what fine men they had been. Then, almost casually, he asked “how things stood in the Senate.” The senators told him the numbers in an impeachment vote were likely to go decisively against him. The president stared up at the presidential seal on the ceiling and murmured that he seemed to have run out of options. The senators then left.

Nixon was now prepared to utter the word others had so scrupulously avoided—to Rose Woods. It was she who was to tell the family that he had “irrevocably” decided to resign. Only an hour had passed since Edward Cox had again called Senator Griffin. His mother-in-law Pat, he said, had told him the president was still “not talking about resignation.” The family, he added, continued to worry about Nixon's mental condition.

Now at last though, the troubled mind had fixed its course, and the oft-told denouement began. After the senators had left, the Nixons ate a final family supper in the White House. “We spoke only of light things,” Julie would recall. Her father had decreed that “we not talk about it anymore.” Nixon had, however, arranged for the house photographer to come in. Teary, fixed-smile pictures were taken over Pat's protests.

Later there was a distraught, agonized session, alone with a compassionate Kissinger. Strong drink was taken, by Nixon's account from the same bottle of brandy from which they had once toasted the breakthrough to China. The two men knelt to pray together, Nixon was to claim, though whether they actually got on their knees was a detail lost to Kissinger's memory.

Later still, more nocturnal phone calls, including one that Kissinger's aide Lawrence Eagleburger thought “drunk . . . out of control.” Yet the president's loyal speechwriter Ray Price thought the three calls he received “absolutely rational.” The last one came around 5:00
A
.
M
.

Thursday morning, the 8th. A things-to-do list for Haig, some last business with a piece of legislation—Nixon insisting on vetoing the agricultural appropriations bill. Some judges to appoint, resignations to accept. Business as usual was best, Haig thought—at a time when nothing at all was usual. The next step was a meeting with Gerald Ford, to say “I know you'll do a good job.”

In the afternoon, with possible prosecution in mind, Nixon forced jollity in a conversation with Haig. “Lenin and Gandhi did some of their best writing in jail.” The same lines, fatalistically this time, in a talk with attorney Fred
Buzhardt. And worry, one more time, on a familiar theme: “I've never quit before in my life. . . .
You don't quit!
”

“There'll be no tears from me,” the president had assured Goldwater the previous day. Yet he had cried, reportedly, with Kissinger, and now he cried with the representatives and senators who came to make their farewells. “I just hope,” he managed to say, “I haven't let you down.”

A half hour later Nixon appeared on television to tell the nation he would go at noon the following day. He was composed and fluent and closed with a benediction: “May God's grace be with you in the days ahead.” No apology, however. With his family afterward, embraces. “Suddenly I began to shake violently,” he recalled, “and Tricia reached over to hold me. ‘Daddy!' she exclaimed. ‘The perspiration is coming clear through your coat!' I told them not to worry.”

Hearing noise from the street, Pat drew her husband to a window. Her elder daughter, recognizing the chant as “Jail to the Chief,” tried to drown it out by talking loudly. From outside, the Nixon women were seen drawing curtains that had never been seen closed before, not even after the Kennedy assassination.

Nixon was back on the phone that night. He had an apology for Len Garment, the Democrat who had switched allegiance to him, who had camped with him in Elmer Bobst's pool house, listened to him say he would do anything to stay in public life—“except see a shrink.”

“Sorry, I let you down,” the president said now. What would the special prosecutor do about him? Would he be indicted? Garment said he thought not. Then: “Well, it's not the worst thing in the world. Some of the best writing's been done in jail.” For the third time that day, a reference to Gandhi. No good night. Just a click, and the line going dead.

Friday, August 9. Morning found Nixon in the Lincoln Sitting Room, memoirs of past presidents piled in front of him. Haig brought him a letter addressed to Henry Kissinger. The political death warrant, requiring signature.

Time running out. In the elevator on the way down to the East Room, an aide explained precisely where family members were to stand for the television cameras. “Oh, Dick,” Pat said in anguished tones, “you can't have it televised.”

But he did, rambling on emotionally before the assembled cabinet and staff and the watching nation. Disjointed, unconnected sequences about money (the lack of it), his father, and his mother, who “was a saint.”