One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (37 page)

“Everyone’s in the middle of this, John,” Nixon said.

Dean handed the president a revised letter requesting a leave of absence. On that grim note, the two men parted for the last time.

*   *   *

Tuesday, April 17: Watergate investigators commanded by Mark Felt knocked at the doors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “The FBI has just served a subpoena on our White House police,” Ehrlichman told the president. It sought the names of the people who had been cleared to enter the White House on June 18, 1972.

N
IXON
: Jesus Christ.

E
HRLICHMAN
: Now what in the hell?

N
IXON
: Where were we then?

H
ALDEMAN
: What date?

N
IXON
: Ah, June 18.

H
ALDEMAN
: June 18.

E
HRLICHMAN
: The day of the bugging.… I bet it’s the Hunt safe thing.

N
IXON
: I need somebody around here as counsel.

H
ALDEMAN
: And Attorney General.

N
IXON
: I need a Director of the FBI.

Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Nixon gave a formal statement on Watergate to the White House press corps. He said that on March 21—immediately after John Dean’s dire warning of a cancer on the presidency, a diagnosis that Nixon did not disclose—he had initiated “intensive new inquiries” into Watergate. “Last Sunday afternoon, the Attorney General, Assistant Attorney General Petersen, and I met at length in the EOB to review the facts which had come to me in my investigation.”

“Real progress has been made in finding the truth,” Nixon declared—a bit of truth, perhaps, but not the whole truth.

At 11:45 p.m., after a state dinner for the prime minister of Italy and a scintillating concert by Frank Sinatra, the president called Henry Kissinger from the White House. Their conversation went on past midnight and into the wee hours of April 18.

Nixon was slightly inebriated and deeply despondent. He spoke of “throwing myself on the sword.” The idea appalled Kissinger. “You have saved this country, Mr. President. The history books will show that, when no one will know what Watergate means.” But Nixon would not be consoled. “It’s a human tragedy,” Kissinger conceded.

Thursday, April 19: Nixon went up to the mountaintop at Camp David. After a brief White House Cabinet meeting the next morning, in which Watergate went unmentioned, he flew down to Key Biscayne, where he remained until April 24. He spent much of his four-day Easter weekend boating with Rebozo. Nixon deleted the names of his visitors from that weekend’s White House logs. But one of them was Horace Chapman Rose, known as Chappie, Ike’s treasury undersecretary and Nixon’s occasional confidant for two decades. Toward the close of a bleak three-hour talk, Chappie Rose quoted William Gladstone, whose first term as British prime minister began in 1868, a century before Nixon was elected president. The aphorism—which may have been apocryphal—was that the first essential for a prime minister was to be a good butcher.

The president prepared his knives.

Wednesday, April 25: Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had a harsh three-hour talk in the Executive Office Building. Ehrlichman had just learned about the White House tapes. “If matters are not handled adroitly, you could get a resolution of impeachment,” Ehrlichman said, “on the ground that you committed a crime.” He argued that the president should listen to the tapes and assess the threat they represented. Nixon handed this immense task to Haldeman.

Thursday, April 26: Mark Felt was certain he would be chosen to lead the FBI after Gray’s fall: a grave miscalculation. He served as acting director for three hours. Instead, Nixon named William D. Ruckelshaus, the administrator of the new Environmental Protection Agency, as the acting director of the Bureau.
*
The mild-mannered Ruckelshaus was thunderstruck at Nixon’s ferocity that day. “I had never seen the President so agitated,” he remembered. “I was worried about his stability.… He was extremely bitter.”

Nixon feared the legal perils he faced. “I don’t think it should ever get out that we taped this office,” he told Haldeman, who spent five hours that day trying to transcribe the “cancer on the presidency” conversation at Nixon’s request, looking for exculpatory evidence. The president worried that “this blackmail stuff” could surface. They recalled raising the matter of hush money—“the Pappas thing”—on that March 21 tape. But Haldeman told the president that the snippet with the strongest shock was when Dean warned Nixon that “people may go to jail.… And that really jarred you.”

*   *   *

Friday, April 27: Nixon fled Washington for Camp David, where he stayed for the final days of his cruel April.

Camp David is a lovely compound of wood-and-stone lodges on the Catoctin Mountain of Maryland, sixty-two miles north by northwest of the White House, deep in a forest divided by a narrow road. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had it built by government-paid laborers for the Works Progress Administration, an exemplar of the New Deal programs Nixon hated. FDR called it Shangri-La. President Eisenhower renovated it and renamed it after his grandson, David, who married Richard Nixon’s daughter Julie in December 1968. Its buildings, transport links, armed security, and encrypted communications were maintained by the navy and the CIA.

In late April, the fields below Camp David fill with apple and cherry blossoms, the rising road glistens with burgeoning aspens and birches, the campgrounds bloom with daffodils and tulips. Nixon hadn’t come to smell the flowers. He had come to fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman. For good measure, he decided to dismiss his attorney general, accept John Dean’s resignation, and create a new palace guard.

Saturday, April 28: The president called his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, at 8:21 a.m. “That’s quite a collection of headlines this morning, isn’t it?” Nixon said.

The front page of the
New York Times
was covered with four big stories above the fold. One said Pat Gray had resigned as acting FBI director. “Haldeman and Ehrlichman Reported Fighting Ouster,” read another. A third said: “Dean Is Reported Asking Immunity” from federal prosecution. But the double-decker headline atop page one was the shocker: “A JUSTICE DEPT. MEMO SAYS LIDDY AND HUNT RAIDED OFFICE OF ELLSBERG’S PSYCHIATRIST.”

Watergate prosecutors had uncovered the raid. As Nixon now knew, Ehrlichman had signed off on the break-in. The law required the prosecutors to disclose the crime to the trial judge in the Pentagon Papers case. A dismissal of the charges on grounds of government misconduct looked inevitable.

“What the hell. We’ve just begun to fight, haven’t we?” Nixon said to Ziegler. “After all, a hell of a lot of other crap is going to hit.”

“That’s right,” Ziegler said.

“This is a time for strong men, Ron,” the president reassured his spokesman. “Our day is going to come.”

Nixon called Haldeman twenty minutes later. The president wanted Bill Rogers as his consigliere in his hour of calamity. What did Haldeman think of that? “There is a crisis here of enormous proportions,” the ever loyal Haldeman told the president. “The way for him to finish his service to the nation is by moving and cleaning this up.” Twenty minutes after that, Nixon called Rogers.

Nixon said to Rogers that “John and Bob are going to make their move … and then I’m going to move on Dean” and dismiss Kleindienst. On Monday he would address the nation on Watergate—“not for the purpose of saying everything that happened, but because I just want the country to know that I’m in charge, that we’re getting to the bottom of it.” He wanted Rogers to guide his hand and steel his nerves.

“What time would you like me up there, Mr. President?” Rogers asked.

“Frankly, the sooner the better,” Nixon said. “I want to get it done, get it done, done.”

Rogers was remarkable for making the trip at all. Nixon, after scorning and humiliating his secretary of state for four years, now craved his counsel—exactly as he had in 1952, when Rogers saved Nixon’s reputation. That episode formed chapter two of
Six Crises
.

Rogers, later Eisenhower’s attorney general, had taken charge when Nixon’s vice presidential nomination was threatened by allegations of a political slush fund. Rogers audited the fund and found it clean, and he helped Nixon fight serious-minded newspaper editorials calling for him to withdraw his nomination. When General Eisenhower himself considered dumping Nixon, Rogers stood steadfast in support. Nixon gave Rogers a draft of a speech he had written in his defense, and Rogers gave him the courage to go on national television and read it.

Vowing that he had never made personal use of political funds, listing his meager assets, including his wife Pat’s “respectable Republican cloth coat,” Nixon then admitted in all candor to accepting one campaign gift—just one. A man had heard on the radio that little Julie and Tricia Nixon would love to have a puppy. A black-and-white spotted cocker spaniel arrived in a crate from Texas. The girls loved the dog and named it Checkers. “And I just want to say this right now,” Nixon declared, “regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.” The Checkers speech was among the greatest moments in the early days of television.

Rogers had helped to salvage Nixon’s reputation; the president returned the debt of gratitude by treating him like a pariah for four years. And yet Rogers returned to do one last favor for Richard Nixon before accepting, after a decent interval, his dismissal as secretary of state.

Now, on that Saturday afternoon in April, after the morning fog had burned off, Nixon and Rogers spent five hours walking the grounds of Camp David and talking about the president’s political future. Nixon thought out loud about another reshuffling of his Cabinet and his staff; this quickly became a grim game of musical chairs, for he would need a new secretary of state, a new secretary of defense, a new attorney general, new FBI and CIA directors, and a new White House chief of staff—all in a matter of weeks.

Rogers returned the president’s attention to the immediate crisis. He strongly agreed that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had to resign, but he balked when Nixon asked him to deliver the blow. The president pleaded for one more favor: to help him draft the speech he planned to deliver on Monday. The secretary of state felt he could not refuse this last request. The words would be far more painful to write than the Checkers speech. But both talks had the same purpose: saving Richard Nixon from himself.

*   *   *

Sunday, April 29, was execution day. A few weeks before, for reasons only he knew, Nixon had removed the tape recording system from his study at Camp David’s Aspen Lodge, the room where he carried out his sentences against Haldeman and Ehrlichman. But their memories of that afternoon are all of a piece.

Ehrlichman wrote: “He looked small and drawn. It was impossible for me to remain composed as he told me he hoped and prayed he might die during the night. ‘It is like cutting off my arm,’ he began, and he could not continue. He began crying uncontrollably.… The Camp was in full spring bloom out there, I noticed. All the bulbs were up and out.”

Haldeman recorded: “The P was in terrible shape. Shook hands with me, which is the first time he’s ever done that.… We were looking at the tulips from the Aspen porch, talking about the beauty and all, and as we started back in, he said, well, I have to enjoy it, because I may not be alive much longer.… Then he went through his whole pitch about how he’s really the guilty one. He said he’s thought it all through, and that he was the one who started Colson on his projects, he was the one who told Dean to cover up, he was the one who made Mitchell Attorney General, and later his campaign manager, and so on. And … that he too probably will have to resign.”

Nixon—as he would do again on a far more fateful day—invoked the sainted memory of his pious mother. “I followed my mother’s custom of getting down on my knees every night and praying silently,” he said to Haldeman. “When I went to bed last night I had hoped, and almost prayed, that I wouldn’t wake up this morning.”

Monday, April 30: Nixon awoke alone, ate breakfast alone, and apart from a brief talk with his tireless secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and a long session with his talented speechwriter Ray Price, he spent the day alone, working on his address to the nation on Watergate. The speech, as Nixon wrote years later, was the start of “an increasingly desperate search for ways to limit the damage to my friends, to my administration, and to myself.”

He took his helicopter back to the White House, went to his barber, and walked into the Oval Office at 8:58 p.m., two minutes before he went on the air.

Richard Nixon, one of the most talented and tenacious presidents of the twentieth century, had the rare gift of blarney, a cajoling tongue capable of telling falsehoods with unblushing effrontery. He got off some good lines in his speech that night, such as “There can be no whitewash at the White House.” But he also told seventeen palpable lies about Watergate—concerning his role in the case, his fictitious in-house investigation of the crimes, and his commitment to uncovering the full story. He wrapped up his speech and then got rip-roaring drunk, as evidenced by his increasingly incoherent telephone calls, between 10:00 p.m. and midnight, to Haldeman, Rogers, Colson, the Reverend Billy Graham, and his new nominee for attorney general, Elliot Richardson. “Goddamn it,” he told Haldeman, “I’m never going to discuss the son-of-a-bitching Watergate thing again—
never, never, never, never
.” He had the gall to say to Rogers, whose forced resignation as secretary of state was imminent, “
You’re
the Cabinet now, boy,” and then laughed. “No bullshit.”

Rogers advised him: “Get some sleep now.”

*   *   *

While Nixon was anguishing in the White House, the peace accords Kissinger had struck were failing in Vietnam. “Still no cease-fire and no visible movement toward a political settlement” after ninety days, Ambassador Bunker reported from Saigon.

An especially harsh series of B-52 attacks struck Cambodia that spring. These bombings, like so many before, were covert and counterproductive. They killed civilians and they drove the surviving Communist troops eastward, closer to Saigon.