The Wars of Watergate (108 page)

Nixon seemed sincere as he expressed hope that his act would heal the nation’s wounds. And he offered what apparently he had not told the congressional leaders who had conferred with him: “I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong—and some were wrong—they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the Nation.” It was Richard Nixon’s only moment that approximated contrition.

The rest of the talk focused on his achievements—the end of the Vietnam war, the opening to China, the conciliatory responses of the Arab nations to his diplomatic efforts, and the agreements with the Soviet Union. Nothing was said of any gains toward that domestic peace which Nixon had promised more than five years earlier. Finally, he insisted that resignation would not be his St. Helena; rather, he promised that the nation would see more of him in the years to come.

The networks followed the President’s resignation speech with the “instant analysis” that Nixon and Agnew had so bitterly assailed. Nixon undoubtedly savored the irony. Now, the commentators treated him generously—“a touch of class,” “conciliatory,” “few things in his presidency became him as much as his manner of leaving.” He also would have heard more familiar chords. One commentator remarked: “From the viewpoint
of Congress, that wasn’t a very satisfactory speech.”
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Nixon had expressed “regret,” to be sure; but finally, the reason he gave for resigning was that Congress had deprived him of a “political base,” making it impossible for him to continue in office. It was the opening salvo in his campaign for history.

Six years earlier, to the day, Nixon had delivered perhaps the best speech of his career as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination. He had told the nation that he would restore respect for the law. “Time is running out,” he said at that time, “for the merchants of crime and corruption in American society.”

The morning after his resignation announcement, the President gave another speech, a “spontaneous thing,” he called it, as he spoke in the East Room of the White House to an assembled group of White House and Administration workers. As often before in his career, Nixon was anxious to bare his soul—never more so than in this, his darkest hour, and perhaps the darkest hour of the American presidency. But it was the wrong time. Now, the time was more appropriate for a quiet fade-out—unless he had another goal in mind. Perhaps he did. The Friday morning talk marked the flip side of the speech the night before—different words, yet all part of the same album designed to impress indelibly the image of Richard Nixon as a man grievously wronged and a man not about to leave the public stage forever. It was, he said, “a beginning.”

In the open society of America, the most private of moments often become the most public of spectacles. When a president embraces his family, visits the Lincoln Memorial, or receives a foreign visitor, we know the probing eye of the television camera will accompany him not only to give us “news,” but to allow us vicariously to experience the event itself. Richard Nixon’s last appearance before White House workers and Administration loyalists seemed, by its nature, a private event. The President could have conducted it in private, had he preferred. His family, he admitted, protested that “after all the agony television had caused us, its prying eye should [not] be allowed to intrude on this last and most intimate moment of all.” But he sensed an opportunity to serve himself and seized the moment. “That’s the way it has to be,” he told them, adding that he owed it to his supporters and to the people. His daughter dutifully found her name mark on the floor.
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Clearly, Nixon would persist in his unceasing quest for gaining love and understanding from America. Spontaneous? In all likelihood, the occasion had all the spontaneity of a pointillist painting.

Nixon had borne adversity through the years, sometimes with grace, other times with petulance, but always with verve. As he prepared to depart from office, he was reconciled to the inevitability of his punishment. The moment presented him with the opportunity to display a rarely seen introspective
side of himself. Whether wallowing in the banality of self-pity or reciting his achievements with a feisty grit and pride, he remained a compelling phenomenon to admirers and adversaries alike.

Nixon appeared that day as he had so often before: the solitary man, fully exposed, with only a microphone and his family as stage props to shield him; the blatant self-consciousness, the twitching smile, the beaded perspiration, the eyes riveted to the red-lighted television camera, almost oblivious to the live audience before him—all that had become so familiar over more than a quarter-century. Familiarity itself gave reality to the moment; it also, on the surface at least, belied rampant rumors of the President’s drinking, drug use, and depression. Yet, for Nixon, the reality was failure, pain, and shame. Somehow, he steeled himself against such agony.

Nixon rambled through memories and aphorisms. The advice for others, as so often, was autobiographical. “[T]hose who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” He joked—awkwardly, as usual—that he had to find a way to pay his taxes, and that he read books although he was “not educated.” He urged his supporters to be proud of their work and the milestones of the Administration. His “old man” was “a great man because he did his job,” and every job counted to the hilt, regardless of what happened. His mother, too, was remembered. No books would be written about her, “but she was a saint,” he said, as tears welled up in his eyes.

And then, as he had the night before, Nixon sought to identify with Theodore Roosevelt, a patron saint for presidential toughness. In that first talk, he had quoted Roosevelt’s praise for the “man in the arena,” the man who fought valiantly and ceaselessly for what he believed, and the man who knew the heights of achievement and who, if he failed, failed while “daring greatly.” For his “intimate” gathering, Nixon identified with still another side of Roosevelt—a tender, passionate, loving man obscured behind the image of walking tall with a big stick. The young Roosevelt’s beloved first wife had died of Bright’s disease when she was a mere twenty-three years old (and on the same day as Roosevelt’s mother). Nixon quoted a delicate, moving passage from Roosevelt’s autobiography that described her death and his enduring love for her. With her death, Roosevelt wrote, “the light went out from my life forever.” How strange that Nixon should have identified with Teddy Roosevelt’s lament for his inexplicable loss. For after all, Richard Nixon’s cause for grief was all too explainable.

On Sunday morning, September 8, President Gerald R. Ford attended St. John’s Church, across from Lafayette Park. Afterward, he invited a pool of reporters and photographers into the Oval Office, where he read a brief statement and then signed a proclamation granting Richard Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any crimes “which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed” during his presidency. The time had come, the President said, to end this “American tragedy” and restore “tranquility.”

Ford had no precedents, of course—the situation of his predecessor was unique. But significantly, he gave as his first reason for the pardon the “common knowledge” that the “allegations and accusations” against Nixon threatened his health. He thought that Nixon and his family had suffered long enough, but added that they would suffer no matter what Ford did. Then he turned to the considerations of “equal justice,” contending that Nixon would be “cruelly and excessively penalized either in preserving the presumption of his innocence or in obtaining a speedy determination of his guilt in order to repay a legal debt to society.” Ford anticipated long delays in the legal process and endless litigation, circumstances, he said, which would only exacerbate “ugly passions” and challenge the “credibility of our free institutions.” Interestingly, Ford noted that the former President might win his freedom on due-process grounds, with the result that the “verdict of history” might be “even more inconclusive” as to his guilt or innocence. At the end, however, Ford returned to his theme of “ending”
Watergate and restoring “tranquility”; the nation could not afford to “prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed.”

With that, Ford signed the proclamation and released a statement of acceptance from the former President, who acknowledged his “mistakes and misjudgments.” The news of Nixon’s pardon erupted across the country, and the new President of the United States found that he had ignited a firestorm of his own.
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Among the enumerated powers granted to the President in Article II of the Constitution, few are more absolute than the “power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” The framers frankly acknowledged the “political” purposes of a pardon. Alexander Hamilton in
Federalist
74 warmly endorsed its discretionary aspect. There would be, he said, “seasons of insurrection or rebellion,” or “critical moments, when a well-timed offer of pardon … may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall.”

When or what was that “critical moment” in 1974, that moment that might “restore the tranquility of the commonwealth?” Gerald Ford assumed the presidency on the crest of a wave of popularity and goodwill. “Our long national nightmare of Watergate” was over, he said as he took his oath of office. The change was cause for celebration: “Our Constitution works,” and here “the people rule,” he told the country. It was time to return to the nation’s business. Three days later, he promised Congress that controlling inflation had his top priority; moreover, he pledged he would not tolerate “illegal tappings, eavesdropping, buggings, or break-ins.” The new President and his imagemakers worked strenuously to protect the appearance of an “open presidency.” Ford’s simple earnestness appeared so credible; people seemed desperately eager to again believe their leaders.

Perhaps the nightmare was over. What remained of Watergate seemed to be a mopping-up operation, one for the Special Prosecutor to conduct through the orderly processes of the legal system. Peter Rodino had closed down the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry; the days of ever-more-dramatic political bombshells appeared over. Congress would pass the inevitable spate of “reform” legislation to rectify the certified abuses of power. True enough, the future fate of the former President appeared clouded. Would he be a witness at the forthcoming trials of his former aides? Would he find himself “in the dock,” the focus of his own criminal trial? That prospect undoubtedly haunted Richard Nixon and certainly worried his former associates.

But did Watergate or Nixon’s personal fate impair Ford’s ability to carry out his functions? Did they prevent a return to the “tranquility” that had
eluded the nation for nearly two years? We cannot portray national moods and conditions precisely; their fleeting elements can be captured only through the perceptions of beholders, each, of course, with his own interest at stake. It is clear, however, that Ford believed the nightmare still haunted the nation, and that he had an antidote. The new President’s cure had substantial merit; unfortunately, he fumbled its application, with costly short-run effects for him and for the nation.

At Ford’s confirmation hearings in November 1973, a senator asked the nominee whether a new president might terminate any investigation or criminal prosecution against the president he had succeeded. “I do not think the public would stand for it,” Ford replied.
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One year later, President Ford journeyed to Capitol Hill to explain his decision to grant a pardon to Richard Nixon on September 8. So much of the affair of the past two years had been extraordinary; its dénouement was no exception.

We have differing versions of when a pardon for Richard Nixon first received serious consideration. Seymour Hersh’s 1983 article on the subject in the
Atlantic
contended that Nixon selected Ford as his Vice President in October 1973 because “he thought that he could rely on Ford to pardon him.” Ford himself testified that on August 1, 1974, Haig told him that a pardon for Nixon, if he resigned, should be a possibility. J. Fred Buzhardt later insisted that he and his aides only had considered the contingency of Nixon pardoning himself and suggested that if Haig had indeed raised the idea of a Ford pardon, he had done so at Nixon’s behest.

Buzhardt and his staff had been considering Watergate-related presidential pardons for some time in 1974. When the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon must surrender tapes subpoenaed by the Special Prosecutor, Buzhardt knew that the June 23, 1972 tape was “devastating” and undoubtedly would have a “terminal effect.” He called Haig and St. Clair that same day, suggesting that the President pardon all the defendants and himself, and then resign. Buzhardt had researched the problem and was satisfied that Nixon had the authority to pardon himself, and to do so against prospective charges relating to acts committed while he was President. Buzhardt repeated that suggestion to Haig on August 1, when he knew that Haig was about to inform Ford of the crucial tape transcript. Buzhardt later insisted that he never proposed any discussion of a Ford pardon of Nixon, yet he drafted a pardon proclamation in Gerald Ford’s name, dated August 6, 1974, three days before Nixon’s eventual resignation. Within a few days of the transition, Haig informed Ford that “a White House lawyer” had determined that the President could pardon individuals even before a “criminal action” had been initiated.
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Haig remained at his post after August 9—much to the consternation of
Ford’s longtime retainers. At this critical juncture, Ford found himself surrounded with Nixon’s aides, notably Haig, Buzhardt, and Leonard Garment. Haig apparently had persuaded Ford that he had been running the government for the past ten months and that he was indispensable. The Chief of Staff quickly established himself in Ford’s mind as a man who did things, and thus he made the President somewhat dependent on him, according to Clay Whitehead, who served both Nixon and Ford. Sharing in the typical desire to manage Ford, Henry Kissinger “vetoed” a presidential meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Ford’s first day in office, but the President ignored him. In his anxiety to avoid appearances of a “Stalin-like purge,” and to avoid tarring innocent people with the Watergate brush, Ford kept much of the Nixon staff in place for several months. Many of Ford’s friends thought it his biggest mistake and that it demonstrated, once again, his excessive loyalty to Nixon.
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