Egypt and Syria attacked Israel during the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday on October 6, and achieved complete surprise. The Syrians pushed the Israelis off the Golan Heights in south Syria, and the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal and pierced the Bar-Lev Line, which Israel had represented as almost impenetrable, and came a short distance into the Sinai. Both Brezhnev’s warnings and Sadat’s threats had proved well-founded. The Israelis had always assumed that they would not have to face more than a brief war with the Arabs, and went through aircraft, tanks, and ordnance with disconcerting speed. Nixon resupplied the Israeli air force with combat planes and Kissinger made it clear that any Arab attempt to intercept them as they were flown to Israel would be regarded as an act of war. Nixon presciently foresaw that Arab success could produce a reentry of the Soviet Union, as the Arabs’ armourer, into the region, but he sought to help ensure a good showing by Israel without the humiliation of the Egyptians or the Russians, as had occurred in 1967, but with a sufficiently respectable Arab showing to encourage all parties onto the path of a durable peace. He said to Kissinger that Israel could not “get away with just having this thing hang over for another four years and have us at odds with the Arab world. We’re not going to do it anymore.”
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There followed a contest of airlifts with the Soviet Union, which the United States easily won with its superior air transport capacity, and Nixon told his entourage that he would take complete responsibility for the anticipated Arab oil embargo. By October 20, the Israelis had cleared the Syrians back off the Golan Heights, had recrossed the Suez Canal in two places, and had surrounded the Egyptian army in Sinai. This was enough for Brezhnev, seeing his hopes of reentry to the Middle East on the wings of Arab military victory disappear, to propose a cease-fire in place and invite Kissinger to Moscow to work out a durable regional agreement. There was a lack of agreement between Nixon and Kissinger as the secretary of state left for Moscow on October 20. Kissinger didn’t believe a broad settlement could be reached, and thought it better to complete the expulsion of the Russians from the region, and feared that Nixon underestimated the difficulties of reaching and imposing such a settlement. The Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, had reduced oil production starting on October 17.
Kissinger went to Israel for one day and told the Israelis they had to agree to a cease-fire and could not force the surrender of the Egyptian army in Sinai. On October 22, a joint U.S.-Soviet resolution in the UN Security Council passed, mandating a cease-fire in place. Israel continued to squeeze, and on the 24th, Sadat became so desperate he asked for joint Russo-American military intervention. (All parties agreed that UN peacekeepers were a nuisance and an irrelevancy and should be avoided.) Nixon would have nothing to do with such a request and on October 24, Brezhnev sent a message to Nixon that if the U.S. didn’t agree to joint action, the USSR would inject forces unilaterally to impose the cease-fire. Nixon and Kissinger and the National Security Council responded with a heightened state of military alert, the dispatch of two aircraft carrier combat groups (
Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy
) to or toward the Eastern Mediterranean, preparation for the dispatch of an airborne division to the region, and the return to the U.S. for integration into the Strategic Air Command (i.e., for possible attack on the USSR) of 60 B-52s from Guam.
This level of saber-rattling was effective. Brezhnev said no more of his threat to intervene unilaterally, a third UN resolution, cosponsored by the Soviet Union and the U.S., was adopted, and Kissinger muscled Israel into acceptance without closing the ring completely on the Egyptian army in Sinai. It was another strategic success for the United States, the more remarkable for occurring in the midst of an explosion in the Watergate crisis. Nixon had come up with a compromise whereby Senator John Stennis of Mississippi would check the tapes against the White House transcripts. Nixon claimed that his attorney general, Elliott Richardson, and Senators Ervin and Baker had agreed to this (but, unfortunately, for once a White House conversation was not taped), and Richardson and Ervin reneged. Richardson resigned after he refused to fire the special prosecutor, Cox, although Nixon asked him to remain while there was an international crisis; the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, resigned, but in the manner of early film comedies, Nixon declined his resignation and fired him instead. The acting attorney general, Robert Bork, fired Cox, without taking a position on the matter but because he accepted that the president had the constitutional right to fire anyone in the executive branch of the federal government. There were a great many calls in the Congress for impeachment and hearings on that subject began, in the usual spirit of incandescent partisanship, in the House. If Nixon had just lamented the impasse, he might have got something close to a reasonable compromise, but by pulling the trigger on Cox and the senior officials of the Justice Department, he ignited the issue far beyond his ability to manage. All this unfolded while the Yom Kippur War was in progress and the cease-fire was being negotiated in a time of great international tension.
Nixon was the second (after Eisenhower) of many U.S. presidents to call for a restoration of energy independence, but nothing came of it, then or under the next seven presidents, as the strategic vulnerability of the United States steadily increased. The price of oil rose 400 percent in a few months, taking gasoline prices and the rate of inflation up with it. The Democrats wanted gas rationing, but Nixon, who had worked in the wartime Office of Price Administration before joining the navy in World War II, resisted this as a catastrophic idea.
On January 17, 1974, in a prodigious feat of personal diplomacy, Henry Kissinger negotiated a mutual withdrawal of the Israeli and Egyptian armies and won the confidence of both sides. He was emerging as a very widely admired and dazzlingly talented foreign minister and not just an extremely capable executant of a brilliant foreign policy president.
On March 18, the oil embargo ended, but the oil-exporting countries were already addicted to high-priced oil. Egypt and the United States reopened diplomatic relations after a lapse of seven years and more than a decade of frosty relations before that, after the Eisenhower-Dulles pullout on financing the Aswan Dam project and Nasser’s flight into the arms of Khrushchev. And on May 29, Kissinger completed the brokering of the Israeli-Syrian forces disengagement, which has stood, unviolated, at time of writing, for 38 years.
On April 5, 1974, French president Georges Pompidou died in office. Nixon attended his funeral and, as he had been at the memorial service for de Gaulle in the same place (Notre Dame Cathedral) five years before, was by far the most prominent figure among the very large number of heads of state and government present. He remained three days in Paris and met with many foreign leaders in the opulent U.S. embassy, on the Faubourg St. Honore between the British embassy that had been “bought” by the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, and the Elysée Palace, residence of the president of the Republic. De Gaulle’s former finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected the third president of the Fifth Republic a few months later.
Nixon started a Middle East tour in Cairo on June 12, and he and Sadat stood in an open car (despite Nixon’s phlebitis, heat of over 100 degrees, and the avoidance of open cars by U.S. presidents since the assassination of Kennedy in 1963) and were cheered by dense crowds numbering well over a million on the way from the airport to the presidential palace. It was quite a turn in U.S.-Egyptian relations. There was a series of accords on secondary matters with Egypt, and Nixon went on to meet with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Nixon was unsuccessful in urging Saudi support for the reestablishment of King Hussein as representative of the Palestinians rather than Arafat, but he parried the king’s championship of the 1967 borders. Faisal promised a quick reduction in the price of oil. Nixon continued on to a very cordial meeting with the Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, and restored diplomatic relations with that country, then proceeded to Israel, where he told Premier Yitzhak Rabin that the United States would no longer give Israel an open-ended guarantee. There was an emotional exchange at the state dinner with the recently retired Golda Meir, whom Nixon praised and who replied in an impromptu toast that “Richard Nixon is a very great American president.” The tour concluded with a very satisfactory visit with Jordan’s King Hussein and Nixon returned to the United States on June 19.
3. WATERGATE, THE LAST ACT
Former junior and middle-level White House officials were now being routinely given prison sentences, usually for perjury in denying their knowledge of the Watergate break-in before it occurred, or in muddying the waters about it when it had first been exposed. It was all coming down to the tapes. Nixon, having failed to destroy them, underestimated their explosive content, and botched many opportunities to compromise regarding their use, was almost certainly going to be ordered by the Supreme Court to surrender them.
In accord with his 1972 agreement with Brezhnev, Nixon made the annual visit to the Soviet leaders starting on June 27. The president was received with immense ceremony and cheered by large crowds all along the route in from the airport to the Kremlin. Two days later they removed to Yalta, only a few miles from where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had met 29 years before. Brezhnev wanted a Russo-American nonaggression pact, but Nixon was wary, because he thought it was really an effort to isolate the Chinese. It was a very convivial occasion, but again, little tangible progress was achieved. Nixon’s now almost rabid domestic enemies, deranged with blood lust whatever the facts and consequences to world affairs and the domestic constitutional balance and the institution of the presidency, having vocally feared that Nixon would give the national security store away in the Kremlin for domestic political advantage, now professed to be disappointed that he returned almost empty-handed on July 3.
On July 24, the Supreme Court voted 8–0 (future chief justice William Rehnquist abstaining as a former employee of the Justice Department) that Nixon had to surrender all the tapes. The key was the June 23, 1972, tape that his enemies were about to represent as “a smoking gun.” In fact, he had authorized Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean to suggest to the director and deputy director of the CIA, Richard Helms and General Vernon Walters, that they ask the FBI to desist from investigating the Watergate affair because it might, through the Cubans who made the break-in, back into the CIA operations against Cuba. Helms and Walters said that they would obey a direct order from the president but would not act otherwise. Nixon declined to take it further (and it was a fatuous idea of Haldeman’s, a former advertising executive, anyway, since the local prosecutors were investigating, not the FBI). This was nothing to impeach a president for, but the crisis had to end, and the fact that it was not (and is not) clear that Nixon violated the law, or that he committed an impeach able offense, was now beside the point. He had been crucified by his opponents and the tension in Washington was intolerable. The distinguished British author Muriel Spark wrote a novel,
The Abbess of Crewe,
that was a parody of Watergate, about the theft of a thimble in a convent. She was correct; it was nonsense, but it was inexorable.
At 9 p.m. Eastern Time, on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon delivered, despite unimaginable pressure, from memory and with complete composure, an entirely dignified and eloquent address, admitting no crimes but acknowledging serious errors and the impossibility of continuing in these circumstances, and said that he would resign as president the following day at noon. It was a formula that would be durable and successful: errors but not crimes, and his status in historical regard would rise steadily, after the initial explosion of recriminations. He could have fought through a Senate trial; there was no longer anything negative to emerge, and the House Judiciary charges against him were partisan bunk, except possibly for the authorization of money paid to defendants in exchange for altered testimony. But he might have been removed by the required two-thirds majority of the Senate, and if he had squeaked through, would have had no moral authority to fill the next two years and five months of his term. All conceded that Nixon had spoken with dignity; he departed after an emotional and affecting address to the White House staff the next day, and a brief serenity settled on the capital and the country.
Thus passed from the scene, though not for long from public life, one of the most talented and unusual figures in American history. Richard Nixon seemed a rather ordinary man, and attracted and retained a following of tens of millions of ordinary people to whom, as to him, little came easily, and who never ceased to persevere, often against more glamorous, facile, advantaged, and wealthier people (the Kennedys, Rockefellers, Stevensons, etc.). This bond with ordinary people, many of whom would be routinely described as strivers or even losers, was the constituency he never lost. He built this invisible bloc of the struggling middle and working class into an immense following that never deserted him, to and after his death, and was one of his three great accomplishments. The second was that he was one of America’s most effective presidents, who calmed a terribly divided and riot-torn country at war when he took the headship of it in 1969. He was rivaled only by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan, and, in a sense, Woodrow Wilson, as the most strategically astute and imaginative president in the country’s history. And third, in being the subject of the arousal of the puritanical conscience of America by his opponents, which destroyed his career, and by maintaining that he had committed errors but broken no laws, Nixon took back the control of that puritanical conscience and turned it against his oppressors. He remains one of the presidents Americans are most interested in, and though dead more than 15 years, he gnaws now at that conscience that so assaulted him. In the last and greatest of his many comebacks, he had largely regained public esteem by the time of his death in April 1994, aged 81. All his successors as president attended his funeral, by the Nixon Library and birthplace in Yorba Linda (suburban Los Angeles), and Henry Kissinger, the last and most intimate of the eulogists, unforgettably captured the deceased as one who had come from an improbable place. “He achieved greatly, and he suffered deeply. But he never gave up.... he advanced the vision of peace of his Quaker youth.... He was devoted to his family. He loved his country. And he considered service his honor.” Richard Nixon did not always seem to be of this world; both very ordinary and even awkward, sometimes banal, and yet an imperishable demiurge. He will linger in the American consciousness for a very long time.