One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (42 page)

The battles of Watergate reached a crescendo at the moment a war in the Middle East almost went global.

On October 20, the Yom Kippur War—so called because it had started on the Day of Atonement, which observant Jews devote to religious reflection—had been going on for nearly two weeks. The Arabs attacked the Israelis first. American intelligence on the Middle East, which relied heavily on Israeli intelligence, was caught unaware. Syria and Egypt gained the upper hand in the first days of the war, thanks to the element of surprise and Israeli military hubris.

“All our intelligence said there would be no attack,” the new secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, said at an emergency Cabinet meeting. “Why did Israel not figure there would be an attack?” He answered his own question, as was his style. The Israelis thought “there was no threat. The Arabs are too weak. So they interpreted the intelligence this way. We did the same.”

Kissinger, whose Senate confirmation hearings had been marred by questions over the White House wiretaps, had taken office on September 22. He remained in charge of the National Security Council, working in uneasy alliance with Al Haig, once his underling.

As Nixon sank deeper into the swamp of Watergate, Kissinger gained an imperial power over foreign policy, and Haig behaved like the acting president of the United States.
*
Nixon was increasingly incapable of playing his role as the leader of the free world. This telephone conversation between Kissinger and his NSC deputy Brent Scowcroft indicated Nixon’s incapacity:

S
COWCROFT
: The switchboard just got a call from 10 Downing Street to inquire whether the President would be available for a call within 30 minutes from the Prime Minister. The subject would be the Middle East.

K
ISSINGER
: Can we tell them no? When I talked to the President he was loaded.

That exchange was recorded at 7:55 p.m. on October 11, the fifth night of the war and the day after Agnew resigned.

*   *   *

The Israelis pleaded for American arms to help repel the invaders. Kissinger, Haig, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, and Joint Chiefs chairman Tom Moorer tried to mobilize a covert airlift of American weapons. Owing to a series of snafus, secrecy was lost, and giant U.S. Air Force cargo planes, their insignias highly visible, landed in Tel Aviv, their arrival caught on television cameras as Israelis cheered.

Both the Soviets and the Saudis had warned the Americans that this war in the Middle East was coming. The Saudis had explicitly told William Casey, the undersecretary of state for economic affairs and future CIA director, that they would use oil as a weapon unless America used its influence to pacify the Israeli army in its continuous conflicts with the Arabs. A few months earlier, Casey’s assistant Willis C. Armstrong had attended a lunch with Casey, the Saudi foreign minister, and the Saudi oil minister. He vividly recalled that the Saudis had said, “If you don’t do something to restrain the Israelis, there’s going to be a war in the Middle East. When the war breaks out, we’re going to have to put an embargo on oil to the United States.” Armstrong remembered: “Casey and I looked at each other after the lunch, and I said, ‘Shall we write that up?’ He said, ‘Nobody would believe us.’ But we were warned.”

The embargo began to take shape during the Yom Kippur War, shortly after the American arms shipments started arriving. The world price of oil quintupled. Soon millions of Americans began spending hours sitting in their cars, waiting in line to fill their gas tanks. Rage at the pump was nationwide.

The Soviets became deeply involved in the Yom Kippur War, resupplying their allies in Syria and Egypt. Brezhnev sent Nixon an increasingly tense series of messages, one proposing they work together diplomatically to stop the war, the second strongly suggesting that a joint U.S.-Soviet military task force serve as peacekeepers. A brief cease-fire had stopped the war, but then the Israelis broke it. The third message from Moscow was a threat: the Soviets might act unilaterally, militarily, in the Middle East to end the war.

The threat was real. American intelligence sensors in the Dardanelles, the narrow strait connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, detected Soviet ships carrying nuclear arms. This startling fact was confirmed thirty years later by David Michael Ransom and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, NSC staffers under Kissinger, though Ransom was at that moment serving as an intelligence watch officer at the State Department.

“The Soviets were shipping warheads to Egypt,” said Ransom, later an American ambassador in the Middle East. “That sent Kissinger into an extraordinary series of moves to bring the fighting to an end.”

The extraordinary moves began, one hundred hours after the Saturday Night Massacre, in the White House Situation Room. The principals at the meeting were Kissinger, Schlesinger, Moorer, Haig, and CIA director Bill Colby. The president was not present.

“Nixon was in his family quarters,” Sonnenfeldt said. “There were rumors that he was drunk.” They were not rumors.

This midnight conclave was recorded only in the diary of Admiral Moorer, declassified in 2007. Until then, the meeting remained one of the more mysterious events in modern American history.

Moorer’s diary of the night of October 24 had—to use a phrase Kissinger favored—the unpleasant odor of truth. Its record begins at 10:30 p.m., when Kissinger’s high-ranking aide Larry Eagleburger called Moorer for an urgent meeting in the Situation Room.

The diary begins: “We had just received a real piss-swisher from Brezhnev regarding the Arab/Israeli Conflict.” (
Piss-swisher
is navy slang; its polite equivalent is pot stirrer.)

“The Brezhnev letter proposed that the USSR/US urgently dispatch to Egypt, Soviet and American military contingents to ensure implementation of the Ceasefire and, further, containing the threatening sentence: ‘… it is necessary to adhere without delay. I’ll say it straight. If you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally.’”

All agreed that what the Soviets proposed in the Middle East was a potential disaster. If U.S. and Soviet soldiers started landing in the middle of the battle, each side standing with its allies, it could look like the opening day of World War III.

“This would not be a NATO war,” Moorer wrote (his italics are verbatim). “Any direct confrontation on the ground with the Soviets would be very difficult. In short,
the Middle East is the worst place in the world for the US to get engaged in a war with the Soviets.”
No one disagreed.

“The big question then became
Why did the Soviets suddenly reverse themselves and without any warning all day then ‘bang’ we receive the Brezhnev threat?”
Nobody had any clear answers. But they all surmised that the Soviets were responding to Israel’s breaking the brief cease-fire. The Israeli violation of the agreement broke the camel’s back, Kissinger agreed.

Kissinger had bigger thoughts, recorded word for word by Moorer:
“the Soviets were influenced by the current situation the President finds himself in … if the Democrats and the US public do not stop laying siege to their government, sooner or later, someone will take a run at us.…
Friday the Pres US was in good shape domestically. Now the Soviets see that he is, in their mind, non-functional.
… The overall strategy of the Soviets now appears to be one of throwing d
é
tente on the table since we have no functional President,
in their eyes, and, consequently,
we must prevent them from getting away with this.
”

In the absence of a functioning president, these five men, led by Kissinger, decided to send strong signals to the Soviets to back off. They raised America’s global nuclear alert level to DEFCON III, one step short of imminent nuclear war. They dispatched three warships to the Mediterranean, alerted the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, and recalled seventy-five B-52 nuclear bombers from Guam. Since that entailed the immediate movement of many thousands of American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, Moorer said the decisions would immediately be leaked—which was not a bad thing, since the Americans wanted to signal to the Soviets how seriously they took the threat.

“At 0400 we went to bed to await the Soviet response,” Moorer’s record ended, save for one last thought:
“If the Soviets put in 10,000 troops into Egypt what do we do?”

The United States might have gone to war—or it might have done nothing. As Larry Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under President George H. W. Bush, later noted, “One of the things that I recall now with a great deal more equanimity than I did at the time is what was never really understood: the degree to which the Watergate crisis, particularly in its final months, meant that if we had been put to the test somewhere in the foreign policy arena, we would not have been able to respond. We were a ship dead in the water.”

Through good luck and, perhaps, blind fortune, Moscow and Washington backed away from the specter of a Third World War. Kissinger, to his great credit, began a three-year attempt to try to negotiate peace in the Middle East. To his discredit, when word of the nuclear alert leaked, as it did almost instantly, he deceived the press, saying the president had saved the day, when Nixon had spent the night in a stupor.

The other question raised by reporters was how a handful of unelected officials could raise a global military alert, mobilize the Eighty-Second Airborne, and send nuclear bombers aloft in a secret midnight meeting without consulting Congress or, as it became evident, the president. In the charged atmosphere created by the Saturday Night Massacre, it looked like the Nixon administration might indeed become a government of men, not laws.

It seemed worse to Elliot Richardson, the sacked attorney general: “A government of laws was on the verge of becoming a government of one man.”

*   *   *

That one man had reasons to drink himself to sleep on the night of October 24. The president had said that day his enemies would assassinate him; Nixon told Kissinger that they wanted “to kill the President. I may physically die.”

Real threats faced the president along with his roiling fears.

Hours before the Situation Room meeting, the House of Representatives, for the first time since 1868, began formal proceedings to impeach the president of the United States. Then Nixon’s constitutional lawyer, Charles Alan Wright, announced that the White House would at last turn over the subpoenaed tapes to Judge Sirica. And Nixon caved in to demands from Republican leaders in Congress, responding to the overwhelming outrage of their constituents, to reestablish the special prosecutor’s office.

The new sheriff in town was Leon Jaworski, a prosecutor of Dachau concentration camp commanders and a past president of the American Bar Association. He also was the 1972 chairman of Texas Democrats for Nixon. That fact did not immediately endear him to Cox’s army of investigators, but Jaworski told them he would follow the evidence wherever it led, even into the Oval Office. Congress wanted to hear him say that explicitly.

Q: You are absolutely free to prosecute anyone; is that correct?

A: That is correct. And that is my intention.

Q: And that includes the President of the United States?

A: It includes the President of the United States.

Archibald Cox’s files had been preserved, most of his staff stayed on, and the restoration of a government of laws began.

*   *   *

The Internal Revenue Service had discovered that Nixon had paid $792 in income tax in 1970 and $878 in 1971.
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With a salary of $200,000 per year, he should have been paying considerably more. In 1969, Nixon had donated his pre-presidential papers to the National Archives and received a huge deduction, but his lawyers had backdated the deed of gift to dodge a change in the tax laws. The disclosures about his taxes were damaging; the response from the president on November 18 was disastrous.

“I am not a crook,” said Richard Nixon, a retort that did not resonate among the American people.

After the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon needed a new attorney general, his fourth in five years. He chose one of the Senate’s own, William B. Saxbe, an Ohio Republican and former state attorney general, calculating he would be quickly confirmed. Saxbe was, by his own description, “a wild hare,” an unorthodox Republican, but he was more than willing to take the job; he found the Senate stultifying. He went to the White House; he found the atmosphere like a hospital ward. His interview was short; Saxbe had one question. He wanted to know if the president was in any way implicated in Watergate.

“Nixon lied to me,” Saxbe said.

On November 21 came the revelation in Judge Sirica’s courtroom that two of the subpoenaed tapes could not be found and that the third had essentially been obliterated by the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. Moreover, the gap had two distinct tones: five minutes of white noise, which could be explained by Rose Mary Woods’s human error involving the foot pedal. But that noise was followed by an entirely distinct sound, like a distant whirlwind.

Called to the stand by the judge, Haig testified that only three people had had access to that tape, which recorded Nixon and Haldeman roughly seventy-two hours after the Watergate burglars had been arraigned. Those three were Rose Mary Woods, Steve Bull, and Richard Nixon. Electronics experts, including National Security Agency technicians, established that the foot pedal was not at fault. Haig suggested to Sirica that an unseen sinister force had erased the tape. The judge suspected that Nixon was the force in question. But there the mystery ended, unsolved.

And in truth what was not on the tapes was immaterial. What mattered was what was on the tapes.

By December, under orders from Judge Sirica, the special prosecutor, his investigators, and the grand jury had custody of three tapes. And the first they heard, dated March 21, 1973, was the conversation about the cancer on the presidency, highlighted by Nixon’s assertion that he could get a million dollars in hush money.