The Wars of Watergate (107 page)

Even after the revelations of the June 23, 1972, tape, the President received extraordinary gestures of support. A California restaurateur, who had sent the President $10,000 to help him pay his income taxes, offered to turn over his interest in twenty-nine restaurants to finance a defense. “I love Richard Nixon—he is the greatest President this country has ever had,” he declared. An Indiana Republican Congressman offered the same sentiments on the
Today
television show on August 8. “Don’t confuse me with the facts. I’ve got a closed mind,” Representative Earl Landgrebe said in response to the question whether he would vote to impeach the President. He would “stick with” Nixon, even if “I have to be taken out of this building and shot.… President Nixon has been the greatest President this country has had.” But after the “smoking gun” tape became public, James Kilpatrick could take no more. “I am close to tears,” he wrote. “Nixon’s duplicity is almost beyond bearing.” Had he told the truth from the outset, Kilpatrick declared, Watergate would have been a nine-day wonder, Nixon would have been re-elected, and no more would have been heard of the affair. Kilpatrick had believed the President when he said he knew nothing of the cover-up and that he was not a crook. Now, he sadly concluded, “it no longer really matters.… My President is a liar. I wish he were a crook instead.”
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But Richard Nixon was nothing if not a seasoned political hand. He had heard rumors for months that congressional Republicans might view his resignation as a relief from the terrible onus of voting on impeachment and as the way to remove the President as a political albatross for the party. Nixon undoubtedly had put his personal concerns above those of his party; yet, for all his disdain, he knew that he still had to reckon with it as a force of political life. He knew that winning was everything, and he offered a political twist to the sports metaphors he often favored when he noted that generosity or magnanimity had little to do with the outcome of events: “[T]he burden of the wounded must be removed in order for the rest to survive.”
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He knew that either he must remove that burden himself, or others would do it.

Resistance to the legal process, faith in the President, and contempt for
their opponents characterized Nixon’s inner circle almost to the end. Preventing the “death of a thousand cuts” seemed to be the rallying cry for the President’s men. Haig complained, however, that to some White House aides the slogan meant that Nixon should resign rather than suffer such a painful ordeal—the “pussy fire group,” he contemptuously called them, comparing them to Vietnamese who would not stand and fight. Some in the White House felt besieged: “It was us against the world.” Every day, it seemed, brought what Stephen Bull called the “Oh, Shit Syndrome,” meaning another revelation, another disclosure, another indictment. Some left, “either under handcuffs, [or] running for the hills,” another aide recalled. But some, like Bull, believed the President would extricate himself—until Bull learned of the June 23 tape.

Still, Bull knew that the White House atmosphere was different; “things just were not happening,” he recalled, and the blank pages of the presidential logs offer mute testimony to that fact. For some, like Richard Moore, there was now little to do aside from “long lunch hours.” For Moore, it was a time of fear that his friends would go to prison or that he himself would be indicted. Others, like Alan Greenspan, saw the final days as a time to help the President, and, more important, as a time to serve the republic. Greenspan had consistently rejected offers of Administration positions, but near the end he became Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, fearing that “the normal process of government would deteriorate or even collapse” unless firm action were taken. Such advisers as Leonard Garment were “amazed” that the President continued to function as well as he did. Nixon, he remembered, “took it right to the end.” Finally, for the President’s family, of course, it was a mournful time, all the more difficult, apparently, because he could not bring himself to discuss the situation with them. “[W]e never sat down as a family to talk about Watergate,” Julie Eisenhower wrote. For Nixon himself, it was a “nightmare” time.
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Richard Nixon should be taken at his word. When he learned that Republicans and Southern Democrats had banded together to support impeachment, he knew he could not finish his second term. Thereafter, the only question concerned the manner of his leaving. He later wrote that he decided to resign just before the Judiciary Committee voted, meaning, of course, that his talk to his Cabinet on August 6 was pure sham. Other accounts suggest greater uncertainty in his decision. In these versions, Haig is a hero of sorts, a man who kept the President on the course of resignation, sparing the nation more agony. Haig himself may have been the source of such tales; John Mitchell thought that Haig need not write any account of Watergate: “Haig has already gilded the history. I don’t think he has to write any more.”
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Such accounts add a measure of drama, to be sure; yet they betray the history of
a man who measured his career by a careful calculation of what was best for him. In all probability, Richard Nixon needed little push from others.

The President may have heard a favorable signal on August 7, when Robert McClory told the White House congressional-liaison man that Rodino had asked him to communicate his view that he had “absolutely no interest in pursuing any kind of criminal action against the President should he elect to resign.” According to McClory, Rodino promised to end the impeachment inquiry as well if Nixon stepped down. Speaker Carl Albert concurred, although he added that he had no influence over the Special Prosecutor’s course of action. The news from McClory undoubtedly had some appeal. If Nixon learned of that development, then he would have done so just prior to his meeting with Goldwater, Rhodes, and Scott. That conversation, taken together with the news from Rodino, might well have been influential. Rodino later proved to be as good as his word: he promptly closed down the inquiry after the resignation. Democrats were off the hook of carrying out the formal, irrevocable act of impeachment; moreover, any further action on their part would have reeked of vindictiveness and easily generated a counter-reaction of sympathy for the fallen President.
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That evening Nixon began to work in earnest on his resignation speech and arranged to meet Vice President Ford the next day to discuss a transition. In that meeting, the President recommended that Ford retain Haig; the rest of the meeting was awkward, as both men seemed to understand, yet were unable to express, what was required of each.

The following night, Nixon saw more than forty longtime, steadfast supporters. “I just hope I haven’t let you down,” he told them. But he said later that he knew he had—as he had “let down the country … our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government.… I … let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.” Earlier, he met with congressional leaders from both parties. He told them what he would say to the nation that evening: he had “lost his base” in Congress, and he believed the outcome of the impeachment process to be inevitable. Speaker Albert best remembered that Nixon never discussed the question of whether he had done wrong. Perhaps that was asking too much. Instead, the President broke down in tears.
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Nixon’s last full day in office proceeded routinely. He vetoed annual appropriations bills for the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency on the grounds that they were inflationary. On a lesser, but far more symbolic note, he nominated a judge to fill a federal court seat in Wisconsin which had been vacant for three years. Nixon had sought unsuccessfully to appoint an old friend, Republican Representative Glenn Davis,
but the American Bar Association, as well as state groups, had mounted an intense campaign in opposition. The new appointment on August 8 painfully measured the President’s decline and powerlessness.

Later that day, Nixon addressed his simple letter of resignation to the keeper of the seals, the Secretary of State: “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.” Richard Nixon had raised Henry Kissinger—the immigrant, the Harvard outsider, the Rockefeller retainer—to a point where he received almost exclusive credit for achievements that properly belonged to the President, and where he far outstripped Nixon in public esteem. Now, Kissinger received a letter unprecedented in American history. Nixon’s gods of fortune mocked him.

As the President prepared to resign, groundless rumors surfaced that the White House might use military force to maintain power. The reports were fueled by the curious behavior of Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. According to later reports given by the ever-elusive unnamed “senior Pentagon official,” Schlesinger had requested that General George S. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, monitor all orders from any source to military units. Schlesinger was supposedly concerned that Nixon or his aides might attempt to reach military units outside Pentagon channels, to order action that would block the “constitutional process.” Apparently, some believed that the Air Force might assist the President because of his efforts in securing the return of prisoners of war from North Vietnam. Some thought that Marine units or the Eighty-second Airborne Division would stage a coup. On a more practical level, Schlesinger may have feared that a hostile foreign power might attempt to take advantage of the domestic crisis. His suspicions of the Soviets, particularly as his views differed greatly from Nixon’s and Kissinger’s were a matter of public record. Kissinger, in a July 3 Moscow news conference, had blamed internal factions within the United States and the Soviet Union for the failure to achieve more substantial arms agreements—a clear reference to what Kissinger viewed as Schlesinger’s obstructionism.
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General Brown sent a message on August 8 to various American military commanders in the United States and abroad, advising increased vigilance. Yet he also urged them not to be overly ambitious in implementing the order. The next day, two other messages went to the same commanders over Schlesinger’s name. The first conveyed remarks of President Ford: “I know that I can count on the unswerving loyalty and dedication to duty that have always characterized the men and women of the Department of Defense. The country joins me in appreciation for your steadfast service.” The other communique, signed by Schlesinger, stated: “Mr. Ford will have, consistent with
our best traditions, the fullest support, dedication, and loyalty of all members of the Department of Defense.”
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Military men reacted sharply to Schlesinger’s personal message. Former Joint Chiefs Chairman Thomas Moorer at the time thought that Schlesinger’s communique was “ridiculous,” for no military officer could take action outside “the form of command.” An adjutant at the Readiness Command in Florida thought that the Ford message was “redundant” and “stated the obvious.” The second message from Schlesinger, he believed, was “of little interest,” since it stated “what the military do without prodding throughout their careers.” General Bruce Palmer, formerly second-in-command in Vietnam, and then head of the Readiness Command, reacted sharply. He was “irritated” and “resented” the message. Palmer thought it “not only unnecessary but insulting to our uniformed men and women,” and he blamed it on the overactive imagination of Pentagon staff assistants. “Civilian supremacy was bred into me,” Palmer later said—although he worried about “a bloated civilian establishment” and a breed of younger officers with little knowledge and understanding of the American Constitution.

Haig himself pointed with pride to the orderly transition of power, strongly implying that he had a role in ensuring that process. “There were no tanks,” he told senators during his confirmation hearing as Secretary of State in 1981. “No troops were drawn up. There were not any sandbags around the White House. There may have [been fears] inside where you were, but there were not outside. There was no indication that anything was amiss at all. It was quiet. The lights were on. It was beautiful.… And that was the transfer of power in our system, because I think, at least in part, of this shared responsibility that we have.” But Haig, typically, could also say precisely the opposite, in other remarks largely designed to preserve an air of mystery about events, an air that he alone understood. In 1979 he referred to Watergate as one of the “most dangerous periods in American history, [one in which] change occurred within the provisions of our Constitution and established rule of law. This was not a foregone conclusion during those difficult days.” Did this refer to the difficulty of securing Nixon’s resignation? Haig was asked. “I’ll stick to what I told you,” he cryptically remarked. Haig’s religious and military training gave him a special blend of the mysterious and the mundane, qualities that he exploited and parlayed throughout his career.
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The President spent the afternoon of August 8 correcting and memorizing his resignation speech, to be broadcast that evening. “One thing, Ron, old boy,” he feebly joked to Ziegler, “we won’t have to have any more press conferences, and we won’t even have to tell them that[,] either!” Of course,
he had said a similar thing a dozen years earlier in California. He also said that he looked forward to writing, noting that it might be done in prison. “Some of the best writing in history has been done in prison. Think of Lenin and Gandhi,” he said.

At 9:00
P.M.
the thirty-seventh President addressed the nation from the White House for the thirty-seventh time. Comparatively little of his talk had to do with Watergate and his resignation. If Richard Nixon were indeed to write from prison, first he would broadcast his own apologia. Watergate had been “a long and difficult period.” He wished to carry on and persevere in the presidency, but events of the past few days convinced him that “I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort.” He wanted to “see the constitutional process through,” but with the loss of his political base, he said, the process had been served, and there was no need to prolong it. Because of the Watergate situation, he contended, Congress would not give him the necessary support to govern effectively. With a hint of defiance, he asserted that he had never been a quitter. To resign was “abhorrent to every instinct” within him. But he would put “the interests of America first.” America, he said, needed a full-time President and a full-time Congress; an impeachment battle would only drain both the institutions and the nation. “Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow,” he added.