One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (38 page)

These secret bombings were uncovered by an intrepid twenty-eight-year-old freelance reporter named Sylvana Foa and two Senate staff investigators, Dick Moose and Jim Lowenstein. Moose and Lowenstein were in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, checking out a tip that the American embassy was coordinating the B-52 raids with the Pentagon. They had no proof until Foa struck up a conversation with Lowenstein.

“Listen,” she said. “Do you want to hear something interesting?” She turned on her five-dollar pocket radio and tuned it to an open frequency. “There were American pilots talking to an American air controller,” Lowenstein recalled. The embassy was vectoring the bombers to their targets, a blatant violation of the peace accords. On April 27 the staffers reported their findings to Sen. Stuart Symington, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Symington went to the Secretary of Defense and didn’t get any place; went to the Secretary of State and didn’t get any place,” Lowenstein said. “And, as I recall, he finally went to the President and said, ‘This is what these guys say. This is what the law says. This is what this Committee is considering in terms of legislation.’”

Congress started drafting legislation to cut off funding for the war—regardless of the president’s powers as commander in chief—by requiring congressional approval for any combat-related spending in Indochina. In the words of William Stearman, the NSC’s senior Hanoi analyst, “The Presidency had been so weakened by Watergate that the American public, and certainly the Congress, would not continue our support for the Vietnamese forces much longer.”

*   *   *

The mercurial Al Haig, promoted from colonel to four-star general by Nixon, was the new Haldeman and Ehrlichman—the president’s chief of staff and palace guard. He was the only man Nixon could depend upon in his time of crisis. The Senate Watergate Hearings were set to begin in seventeen days—and the president had no counsel, no one in official command at the FBI or the Justice Department, and only Haig to trust.

Then another general—Vernon Walters, the president’s handpicked deputy director of central intelligence, a man of impeccable discretion who had worked with Nixon since 1958—delivered a set of documents to Haig. Copies would soon be in the hands of senators and Watergate investigators.

These scrupulously maintained memoranda of conversations, memcons for short, detailed the meetings among Walters, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman during the days immediately after the Watergate break-in. They described the orders from the White House to use the CIA to turn off the FBI’s investigation with a spurious assertion of national security.

May 11 became judgment day at the White House. First Haig read the memcons. They were devastating. One passage said: “It was the President’s wish that Walters call on Acting FBI Director Gray and … suggest that the investigation not be pushed further.”

Haig immediately called Nixon at Camp David. “It will be very embarrassing,” Nixon said. “It’ll indicate that we tried to cover up with the CIA.” In a second telephone call, the president put it more bluntly: “If you read the cold print it looks terrible.… I just don’t want him to go in and say look, they called us in and tried to fix the case and we wouldn’t do it.” Nixon wrote in his memoirs: “One of the things that made the memcons so troublesome was that Walters was one of my old friends; he would not have contrived them to hurt me. In addition, his photographic memory was renowned, and he was universally respected as a scrupulous and honest man.”

That same morning, page-one stories described the White House wiretaps Nixon and Kissinger had placed on presidential aides and prominent reporters starting in 1969. Kissinger, who was expecting to be appointed secretary of state, brazenly denied that he had chosen the wiretap targets among his NSC staff and national security reporters; he implied he was only following orders. Nixon shouted: “Henry ordered the whole goddamn thing.… He read every one of those taps …
he reveled in it, he groveled it, he wallowed in it.
”

That same day’s newspapers reported that the federal judge presiding over the espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case had dismissed the charges on grounds of government misconduct. Belatedly, the Justice Department, as required under law, had disclosed the misconduct—a warrantless White House wiretap recording Ellsberg, and the Plumbers’ break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.

The Pentagon Papers case was a total loss for the president: Ellsberg went free and the
New York Times
won a Pulitzer Prize. Nixon was embittered.

“Doesn’t the President of the United States have the responsibility to conduct an investigation with regard to leaks in the goddamn place?” Nixon argued to Haig on May 11, regarding the wiretaps. “I got to go to the court to ask them? Screw the court.” The court begged to differ.
*

John Mitchell publicly denied signing the wiretap authorizations. Nixon had a one-word response to that: “Bullshit.” He was right about that. But that same afternoon, FBI agents had wrung a modicum of truth from Mitchell.

He confessed that the taps were part of “a dangerous game we were playing.” He also told them where transcripts of the wiretaps might be found: in the White House safe of John Ehrlichman. The acting FBI director William Ruckelshaus recalled: “An FBI agent, sent by me to the White House to guard those records and others in Ehrlichman’s office, was badly shaken when the President of the United States seized his lapels and asked him what he was doing there.” He was upholding the law of the land—and helping to make a case against the president of the United States.

Nixon saw no alternative but to fight to keep these documents secret. “Good god, if we were going to stonewall executive privilege and a lot of other things we can sure as hell stonewall this,” he told Haig on May 12.

How they were going to stonewall the Huston Plan was another question. Nixon had endorsed every kind of government spying on Americans—opening their mail, bugging their phones, breaking into their homes and offices—until J. Edgar Hoover himself killed the program. John Dean had placed a copy of the incendiary plan in a safe-deposit box and given the key to Judge Sirica. He intended to turn the copy over to the Senate Watergate Committee.

Nixon’s constant refrain had been contempt for court rulings on wiretapping, break-ins, any aspect of “the national security thing.” Nixon insisted: “I’m going to defend the bugging. I’m going to defend the Plumbers [and] fight right through to the finish on the son of a bitch.” But when he thought about people actually reading the patently illegal Huston Plan, he changed his tune. “The bad thing is that the president approved burglaries,” Nixon said on May 17; he could be perceived as “a repressive fascist.”

The tension at the White House was unbearable. With the Watergate hearings days away, Nixon screamed at his underlings as he schemed to save his presidency. Ziegler cautioned him to stay calm: “If we allow ourselves to be consumed by this—”

“—We’ll destroy ourselves,” the president said.

Rose Mary Woods tried to console him. She said that Dr. Hutschnecker, Nixon’s psychoanalyst, had just called her: “He’s thinking of you all the time and if there’s anything on God’s earth that he can do.…”

“They may kill me in the press, but they will never kill me in my mind,” Nixon said. “I’m going to fight these bastards to the end.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“The President of the United States can
never
admit that”

W
ATERGATE WAS
now more than a botched burglary. Warrantless burglaries and bugs, bald-faced lies obstructing justice, black bags crammed with hush money, B-52 bombings erased by falsified records—whether in the name of national security or the reelection of Richard Nixon—were abuses of presidential power.

Under the rule of law, the Senate Watergate Hearings were not a trial. But the rule of law had been taking a beating of late. The Justice Department and the FBI had been discredited. Few trusted Nixon to clean house rather than cover up the dirt. Piercing the shield of executive privilege that the president claimed would require a sharp force.

So the Senate unanimously commanded the new attorney general, Elliot Richardson,
*
a Republican stalwart who had run the Pentagon loyally since Nixon’s second inaugural, to appoint a special prosecutor with the independent authority to investigate the president. He chose a man tailor-made to enrage Nixon: Archibald Cox, President Kennedy’s solicitor general. Richardson vouched for Cox’s capacity to handle “the grave, difficult and delicate issues” he would confront. Nixon described the genteel Cox as “the partisan viper … planted in our bosom.”

The prevailing political atmosphere—in particular, the fact that Cox was investigating the president himself—compelled Nixon to make an unusual concession. He agreed that only the attorney general had the power to dismiss Cox. The special prosecutor was an independent force; the president could not slay the viper with the stroke of a pen. Cox requested and received the files of the prosecutors who had put the Watergate burglars in prison—and who were continuing to call witnesses before the federal grand jury overseen by Judge Sirica. They meticulously prepared an eighty-seven-page pr
é
cis of their findings, listing twenty-seven people who were potential targets for indictment.

Number twenty-seven was the president of the United States. They cited Vernon Walters’s memoranda as essential evidence. The Walters memcons, now circulating among senators and senior Justice Department prosecutors, included the meeting where Walters was told that the president wanted the CIA to shut down the Watergate investigation. The White House tape of that meeting would one day be known as the smoking gun.

The special prosecutor’s power was one among many weapons aimed at the White House that spring.

*   *   *

Two events took place in Congress that would change history. One was without fanfare, the other without precedent.

First, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was introduced by congressman Clement Zablocki, an unheralded Wisconsin Democrat. Its intent was to resolve the Constitution’s division of military authority between the president and Congress.

The Constitution makes the president commander in chief of the armed forces; it gives Congress the authority to declare war and the responsibility to support the armed forces by appropriating money. The War Powers Resolution said that the president had to consult with Congress about making war; it required a formal declaration of war, absent a national emergency caused by a surprise attack; and it gave the president sixty days to win congressional approval for financing a war. This bill would be passed into law, over President Nixon’s veto, six months later. It would prove a revolutionary act.

Then, on May 11, that tumultuous day at the White House, the House of Representatives voted 219–188 to cut off funds for the bombing of Cambodia.

The transmissions picked up by Sylvana Foa’s five-dollar pocket radio had reverberated around the world. This vote marked the first time the House had passed an end-the-war bill, an act within its power: under the Constitution, all spending bills must originate in the House. Between early February and the end of April 1973, the United States had dropped 83,837 tons of bombs on Cambodia, roughly seven Hiroshimas, at a cost of $159.5 million (about $840 million in today’s dollars). The Pentagon had been caught trying to transfer $150 million from other operating accounts into another three months’ worth of bombs for Cambodia.

Now the House had said no. If the Senate followed suit, that vote would go straight to the heart of the issues raised by the War Powers Resolution. Can the president conduct a war any way he wants? Or can Congress, since it buys the bombs and the war planes with tax dollars, control the president? Nixon could continue the bombing—and he did. But he risked laying his power on the line and provoking a constitutional crisis—and he would.

Nixon had undertaken many of the major military offensives of the Vietnam War without consulting Congress; he had created a three-billion-dollar slush fund, stashed throughout the federal government, for classified military and intelligence operations; he had established scores of secret statutes without consulting the courts—all by invoking a declaration of national emergency first proclaimed by J. Edgar Hoover at the start of the Cold War. A Senate select committee created in June 1972 was slowly and painstakingly uncovering these facts, showing how Nixon had usurped power, unconstitutionally placing the presidency above Congress and the courts.

“The balance between the three branches was under attack by Nixon,” said William Green Miller, staff director of the Special Select Committee on Emergency Powers and War Powers, and later the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. The war in Vietnam and “the misuse of power and intelligence in Watergate all are part of the constitutional debate” at the time. “The constitutional balance had to be restored.”

The issues of presidential powers and presidential secrecy had been festering for years. After the War Powers Resolution was introduced, Sen. J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee since 1959, said flatly, “Watergate is the bursting of the boil.”

*   *   *

On May 17, 1973, Sen. Sam Ervin Jr. brought the Senate Watergate Committee to order, banging a colorful wooden gavel handcrafted by North Carolina Cherokees. “The Founding Fathers,” he intoned, “knew that those who are entrusted with power are susceptible to the disease of tyrants, which George Washington rightly described as ‘love of power and the proneness to abuse it.’”

The committee’s first witness was Robert C. Odle Jr., the straight-arrow administrator of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. His conduct had been flawless, save for one fact: he had hired James McCord as CREEP’s security director.

Odle remembered hearing about the Watergate break-in a few hours after it took place, while he was working on a Saturday morning at CREEP headquarters. “That could never happen here,” Odle told a colleague. “I have this guy working for me named Jim McCord, and he has got this place really tight, and all I can say is I am glad McCord works for me.” At that moment, McCord was under arrest. When Odle learned that, “I was extremely concerned,” he testified. “I mean, here was our security director in jail.”