One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (43 page)

“I for the first time realized that President Nixon was involved and culpably involved,” Jaworski recalled in an oral history. What he could never grasp was why anyone—in particular, the president of the United States—would preserve such vividly self-incriminating evidence on tape.

Nixon now reversed his earlier private pledge to congressional leaders that he would transcribe selected tapes and make the texts public. He consulted his White House lawyers, some of whom had started to suspect that they had a crook for a client. He saw how deeply they doubted he could weather the rough passages the transcripts would reveal. But he also knew that, one way or another, through the courts or through Congress, his words on tape might soon be inscribed in counts of an indictment or articles of impeachment.

Alone in his study at San Clemente at 1:15 a.m. on January 1, 1974, the president took out a yellow legal pad and began to put his thoughts on paper. “Do I fight all out or do I now begin the long process to prepare for a change, meaning, in effect, resignation?”

He paused to reflect. He picked up his pen.

“The answer
—fight
.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

United States v. Richard Milhous Nixon

R
ICHARD
N
IXON
’
S
seventh crisis lasted seven months. The president’s final battle to save himself began on January 3, 1974, hours after Congress reconvened. That day, White House lawyers rejected the Senate Watergate Committee’s request for more than five hundred tapes and documents.

Still sleepless in San Clemente, the president made another note in his diary at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 5: “Above all else: Dignity, command, head high, no fear, build a new spirit, drive, act like a President, act like a winner,” Nixon wrote. “Opponents are savage destroyers, haters. Time to use full power of the President to fight overwhelming forces arrayed against us.”

When he delivered his State of the Union speech on January 30, he addressed “the so-called Watergate affair.” He said, “I have provided to the Special Prosecutor … all the material that he needs to conclude his investigations and to proceed to prosecute the guilty and to clear the innocent. I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.”

The special prosecutor quickly issued a stern correction: the president had not delivered a long list of requested tapes, documents, and memos. The White House lawyers immediately responded that they would not comply with the demands.

On February 6, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to begin impeachment proceedings against the president. The grueling process began in the House Judiciary Committee, which had substantial subpoena powers. The committee received a copy of Jaworski’s list of crucial evidence on February 22.

Nixon wrote, “The biggest danger I saw in the year ahead was that both the Special Prosecutor and the House Judiciary committee would begin requesting more and more tapes—always with the disclaimer that each request would be the last. But there would never be an end,” he feared, “until all 5,000 hours of tapes had been requested and surrendered.”

He vowed not to surrender. He believed that if he were driven from office America would be undermined. But he lacked the strength to fight and lose. His beloved daughter Tricia later showed him a note from her own diary, written that winter.

Something Daddy said makes me feel absolutely hopeless.… He has cautioned us that there is nothing damaging on the tapes; he has cautioned us that he might be impeached because of their content. Because he has said the latter, knowing Daddy, the latter is the way he really feels.

Her poignant note is the most powerful evidence of what Nixon knew and when he knew it.

*   *   *

On March 1, the Watergate grand jury handed Judge Sirica a staggering indictment.
*
Seven men stood charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, including the former attorney general John Mitchell, the former White House chieftains Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and Nixon’s amoral adviser Chuck Colson. The charges included lying to the Senate, the FBI, and the grand jury itself.

Richard Nixon was named as an unindicted coconspirator by a unanimous vote of the nineteen-member grand jury. (It was actually a 38–0 decision; each grand juror had raised both hands in unison when polled.) This astonishing fact was kept secret, under judicial seal, at the special prosecutor’s request. Jaworski had political considerations to weigh, no less than Congress’s politicians had legal burdens to bear. He thought it best for the country that a president’s guilt or innocence be established by impeachment and conviction by Congress under the Constitution, not by indictment inside a courthouse.

On March 6, Nixon held a press conference and took a very pointed question. One of the perjury counts against Haldeman claimed he had lied to the Senate by averring that Nixon had said “it would be wrong” to raise a million dollars in hush money. The grand jury had heard the tape. What was the truth?

“I meant that the whole transaction was wrong, the transaction for the purpose of keeping this whole matter covered up,” the president replied. “I directed that Mr. Haldeman, Mr. Ehrlichman, Mr. Dean, and Mr. Mitchell [meet] so that we could find what would be the best way to get the whole story out.” These were two sentences with two bold lies. Fortunately for Nixon, he was not under oath.

Then Jaworski sought sixty-four additional tapes as evidence in the trial of
United States v. Mitchell et al
. On April 18, Judge Sirica subpoenaed them. That set up a confrontation potentially fatal to Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Among these tapes was the hottest smoking gun of all: the conversation about using the CIA to block the Watergate investigation.

Nixon sought a political solution to his legal crisis. He chose the edited-tape gambit—the same strategy that had created the Saturday Night Massacre. Of all Nixon’s many self-inflicted wounds, this was among the worst, confirming an observation Haldeman had made to the president a year before: “It is almost like we have a death wish.”
*

*   *   *

On April 29, Richard Nixon spoke for thirty-five minutes on national television, seated next to a table stacked with binders full of expurgated tape transcripts. He said the binders contained “all the additional evidence needed to get Watergate behind us and get it behind us now.” They would leave “no questions remaining about the fact that the President has nothing to hide.”

The 1,308-page “Blue Book” was published by the Government Printing Office the next day. Long excerpts immediately appeared in newspapers and magazines. The transcripts left the American citizenry amazed and amused and appalled.

The transcripts had been carefully edited to conceal both foul play and foul language. Some of the censored parts were still as compelling as the content. For instance, Dean discussing Howard Hunt’s demands for money with the president on March 21, 1973.

D: You have no choice but to come up with the $120,000 …

P: Would you agree that that’s the prime thing that you damn well better get done…?

D: Obviously.…

P: [Expletive deleted].

“Expletive deleted” entered the American lexicon. By May 1, publishers were printing three million paperback copies of the “Blue Book.” The transcripts read like FBI wiretaps of gangsters plotting a heist, except that these men were sitting in the White House, not a warehouse. Here was the president of the United States talking, in that same conversation.

P: How much money do you need?

D: I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years.

P: You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.… Who would handle it? Any ideas on that?

He did
not
say it would be wrong. The revulsion of some Republicans in Congress—the people who could protect Nixon from impeachment and conviction—was intense. “Deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral,” said the Senate minority leader, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania.

The White House now drew the line. Nixon would provide nothing more to the special prosecutor than the Blue Book. His lawyers moved to quash Sirica’s subpoena for the sixty-four tapes Jaworski sought. The judge struck back, ordering the White House to produce the tapes forthwith. Nixon defied him. The U.S. Supreme Court, responding to Jaworski’s direct appeal, agreed to take the case on an emergency basis. The High Court agreed that in July it would hear oral arguments in
United States v. Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States.

The House committee’s members knew the Blue Book transcripts had been falsified. The committee’s chief counsel, John Doar, had six of the relevant tapes in hand. The White House had supplied them to the federal grand jury under Judge Sirica’s orders; they had served as essential evidence against Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. Sirica took the tapes and conveyed them to the impeachment committee, a perfectly legal if completely secret procedure.

John Doar, who called himself a “Lincoln Republican,” had fought bravely for civil rights as a Justice Department official in the 1960s. As chief counsel, he had been studying the constitutional standards and the legislative history of impeachment since December.
*
His committee’s able and aggressive staff included a recent Yale Law School graduate named Hillary Rodham.

On May 9, Doar convened the first of eighteen executive sessions of the impeachment committee, presenting a lengthy “statement of information” that could form a template for a bill of impeachment. The committee heard witnesses ranging from John Dean to Leon Jaworski to White House lawyer James D. St. Clair. Considerable political conflict flared within the closed chambers.

The committee’s thirty-eight members ranged from the most conservative to the most liberal representatives in Congress. At the center of this spectrum stood four relatively moderate Republicans and three staunchly right-wing southern Democrats; these seven men were of no one mind. Each article of impeachment might stand or fall on the way they swayed.

The Constitution says a president may be impeached for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Treason was not at issue. Bribery was a touchy subject; many members of Congress performed unseemly favors for campaign contributors. But high crimes and misdemeanors—now, that was rich terrain. The phrase originated in fourteenth-century proceedings of the British Parliament. The history of Anglo-American jurisprudence showed that acts worthy of impeachment included the abuse of the powers of high office. “Abuse of power” was thus a high crime—and another phrase about to enter American discourse, alongside “expletive deleted.”

“Obstruction of justice” was by now common parlance, owing to the criminal proceedings against the president’s men. Nixon had been obstructing justice for two years, since the Watergate burglary, and his continuing defiance of the subpoenas was part of that pattern. Obstruction of justice was a felony designed to disguise a felony. And as Nixon had said more than once on tape: It wasn’t the crime. It was the cover-up.

After six weeks of deliberation, the committee began drafting formal articles of impeachment against the president of the United States at the end of June. In July—after the Supreme Court heard
United States v. Nixon
—the debate would begin.

*   *   *

During a seven-week stretch, from June 10 to July 29, Richard Nixon spent only seven days in the White House.

Nixon fled Washington and began an epic voyage, through the Middle East and Europe, then on to Moscow. He was determined to reappear on the global stage as the leader of the free world, the most powerful man on earth.

The sheer will Nixon showed by undertaking this trip was formidable. He began dictating his diary on tape again, a practice he had dropped for many months. Just before his departure on June 10, he recorded, “The great tragedy is that it seems to be a year and a half almost that is lost.”

On top of the sadness and the stress, he was not a well man. Nixon suffered from phlebitis, a blood clot in a vein of his left leg that caused swelling and suffering. The danger of the disease is that the clot can break loose, flow into the bloodstream, enter the lungs, and create a potentially fatal embolism. The phlebitis flared up just before he took off, and it pained him.

The first stop was Salzburg, Austria, a way station intended to let the president reset his body clock before a grueling week in the Middle East. Nixon was housed at Schloss Klessheim, an imperial building inside a gated park, with a soaring salon, cream-and-gold walls, and glittering crystal chandeliers. One among the president’s huge contingent was a State Department official, Alfred Joseph White, who assisted Nixon’s brief chat with the chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky. “He came out to greet Chancellor Kreisky,” White recalled. “The limp was very noticeable. He had a haggard, grey, drawn, exhausted look and seemed in pain. The agony of his situation was plainly evident. He seemed a bent and broken man in those ghastly few minutes. His Presidency was crashing down around him, and it showed.”

The next stop was Egypt, and the trip was a smashing success for all, owing greatly to dialogues between Kissinger and the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, which had started in November, after the Yom Kippur War, as part of Kissinger’s ceaseless shuttle diplomacy among the Arabs and Israelis.

Sadat was the son of peasants but behaved as if born to the presidency. He was amenable to reestablishing diplomatic relations with the United States, breaking Egypt’s military reliance on the Soviets, and consolidating the cease-fire with Israel. In January, Sadat had formally invited Nixon for a state visit.

On June 12, in Cairo, President Sadat awarded Richard Nixon Egypt’s highest civilian decoration, the Collar of the Nile. The route of their motorcade from the airport to the presidential palace was lined with as many as one million cheering Egyptians chanting Nixon’s name at the top of their lungs. The president of the United States was elated. Nixon and Sadat later traveled by train for three hours to the grand palace of Alexandria. They waved from an open coach to millions more who stood along the tracks, and they were greeted at their destination by mounted lancers in splendid regalia.