The Wars of Watergate (121 page)

Political language can conceal the truth, as George Orwell and others have noted. Often truth is concealed with a knowing wink between the political leader and his audience, and much of it is concealed in the language of symbolic politics. Richard Whalen, a one-time Nixon adviser and speechwriter, described how Nixon confined his conservative instincts to private company, while publicly positioning himself to the left—where, he believed, the votes were. “You don’t know how to lie,” Nixon told an early political associate. “If you can’t lie, you’ll never go anywhere.” But for Nixon, lies led ultimately to a disgraceful resignation. At Republican leadership meetings throughout 1973 and 1974, Nixon’s allies pleaded with him to “get it all out on the table.” Nixon would say there was no more. But with repeated new disclosures, even those most steadfast among his supporters reached the point where, Congressman Barber Conable recalled, “you didn’t believe anything.” And still Nixon would insist, “it’s all out there.” The President informed Republican National Chairman George Bush, “George, I’m telling the truth.” But the tape revelations reportedly devastated Bush; lying, a friend said, just was “not in George Bush’s book.”
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Nixon confronted Democratic majorities in Congress throughout his presidency, a fact which doubtless contributed mightily to his sense of peril. But a numerical majority dictates organizational control, not necessarily ideological dominance. Friendly Southern Democrats and Republican loyalists regularly eased Nixon’s path through his first term. Conflicts existed, to be sure, but he was not a President denied. The domestic achievements that Nixon and Ehrlichman claimed with such pride offer ample testimony to the President’s success with Congress. The unfolding events in 1973 and 1974 weakened Nixon’s support base in Congress, and the President’s lies, deceit, “stonewalling”—to use the popular phrase of Watergate—eventually destroyed it.

The Saturday Night Massacre convinced many that Nixon had something to hide. The exposure of the taping system betrayed a sinister side to the White House. The 18 1/2-minute tape gap, the incorrect transcripts, and the President’s shifting explanations inexorably chipped away at his credibility. The Republican and Southern Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee watched the President descend the slippery slope away from truth, convinced that he had lied. Repeated sentiments such as he expressed
in August 1973—“That was and that is the simple truth”—were seen as hollow and perverse. The Republican loyalists on the House Judiciary Committee realized the irreparable damage of Nixon’s lying. After the release of the “smoking gun” transcripts, they expressed amazement and dismay that for so long he had suppressed the truth about his role in Watergate; consequently, they sadly noted, the truth “could not be unleashed without destroying his presidency.”

William Buckley thought that presidents must on occasion violate laws, but he judged that Nixon’s denials of his actions magnified the violations. For Buckley, the denials, not Nixon’s lawbreaking, constituted the President’s “real” crimes. Nixon repeatedly promised the “truth,” an old refrain that echoed the “Checkers” speech of 1952 when he said that the “best thing is to tell the truth.” Barry Goldwater did not share Buckley’s brief for moral relativism. “Truth is the foundation of a stable society,” he insisted. “Its absence was the crux of Nixon’s failure.” With biting contempt, Goldwater read the indictment: Nixon had lied to his family, his friends, his political supporters in and out of Congress, the nation, and the world. “Tell the truth,” Goldwater told Nixon when he visited the former President in his San Clemente exile in 1975. When he wrote his memoirs thirteen years later, Goldwater was still waiting for the truth from Richard Nixon.
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Because he lied, Richard Nixon lost his political base. That deceit was intended to obscure the overwhelming evidence that he
had
abused power and he
had
obstructed justice. The actions of the President and his men were serious. More than seventy persons were convicted or offered guilty pleas as a consequence of the Age of Watergate. These included several Cabinet officers, two Oval Office aides, and numerous presidential assistants. Revisionism, to be whole, must produce more than pardons at the bar of history; it must produce the necessary exculpatory evidence.

Nixon’s deeds as well as his own words, on tape, in public, and in his memoirs, convicted him. “I brought myself down. I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in,” he bitterly observed. But he reminded us of what he was: “And, I guess, if I’d been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.” Resignation, he once said, meant that he was guilty, and it would weaken the presidency he so cherished.
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For two years, he had resisted cooperation in the name of “preserving the presidency”—meaning, of course, himself. But in the end, he willingly sacrificed the presidency in order to save the President.

Political philosophers since the ancient Greeks have sought to understand the links between politics and ethical behavior—“virtue,” as eighteenth-century men were fond of calling it. They agreed at least, Dwight Macdonald once wrote, “that there is some connection between ethics and politics
and there is a problem involved.” They all, he observed, rejected the “simplistic” view, so congenial to the “pragmatic” American mind, that there was no connection and no problem.
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The eagerness of Nixon and his supporters to dismiss his misdeeds because “everyone does it” perversely twisted the conservative political tradition to which they subscribed, a tradition that rests upon virtue and morality. As the impeachment inquiry reached its climax, Congressman William Cohen recognized that perversion as he wondered how we had moved from the
Federalist Papers
of the 1780s to the Nixon tapes of the 1970s. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who had few illusions about human nature, nevertheless understood that leadership must rest on something other than covering up crimes or scheming to punish alleged enemies.

Americans idealize their presidents and hence expect them to meet the highest moral standards. People demand leaders better than themselves; such is the stuff of “heroes.” Nixon’s “tricky” image was one he never escaped. Watergate reinforced, and then confirmed, that image.

Competence and expertise were not enough to protect Richard Nixon. The President symbolizes “legitimacy, continuity, and morality”; Nixon tarnished the symbol, and it cost him dearly. What is clear, above all, is that the country had come together on the fundamental proposition that virtue mattered, that some ethical standard applied in political life. Thomas Jefferson once remarked that the whole art of government consists in being honest. George Washington, who gave a “Farewell Address” in 1796 far different from Nixon’s, said that virtue and morality formed the “necessary spring of government” and were “indispensable supports” for political prosperity. “The mere politician,” Washington insisted, “ought to respect and cherish them.” Washington and the cherry tree myth are deeply ingrained in American civil religion. Richard Nixon never understood. Nearly a decade after he resigned, he wrote: “Virtue is not what lifts great leaders above others.”
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But even those words of self-incrimination pale next to the most fateful ones he ever uttered: “I hereby resign.”

Thanks to congressional vigilance in 1974, the National Archives has preserved most of the Watergate-related paper materials in the Nixon Papers. The Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974 mandated that the National Archives “provide the public with the full truth, at the earliest reasonable date, of the abuses of governmental power popularly identified under the generic name ‘Watergate.’ ” That law prevented Richard Nixon, despite the support of President Gerald Ford and his staff, from removing the former President’s papers to California; the law also stipulated that the National Archives, and not Nixon, should retain control of the papers.

The Archives’ staff has done its work: those papers, as well as ones documenting other Nixon Administration activities, have been processed and made ready for research use. But Richard Nixon, his lawyers, and his past and present aides repeatedly have intervened to thwart the implementation of the rules governing the use of the papers. After thirteen years of legal and bureaucratic battles, the Archives in 1987 opened the first of the “Watergate Special Files.” The former President, however, objected to the release of approximately 150,000 documents, and more than two years later, the Archives was still reviewing appeals against those objections. The materials in question range from such items as a memorandum on the Save the Seals Campaign, a comment on the Davis Cup tennis team, and a copy of Mrs. Nixon’s schedule, to tantalizing documents giving Kissinger’s views on the Joint Chiefs of Staff after it was revealed they had spied on him, comments on Chief Justice Burger’s beliefs, and H. R. Haldeman’s files for the 1972 presidential campaign, all of which Nixon’s lawyers have insisted are “personal” or “third-party” protected documents.

The Archives holds several thousand hours of presidential tape recordings of conversations with aides and whoever else walked into Nixon’s various offices and retreats. The Nixon Archives’ staff carefully listened to the tapes for more than nine years, edited them to accommodate national-security and family considerations, and prepared a 27,000-page “finding aid” indexing
each conversation. But fifteen years after Congress provided that the material be made available as soon as possible, those tapes remain closed, because of the former President’s objections as well as from an apparent reluctance on the part of the administrators at the National Archives to challenge him. For now, we can surmise the tapes’ contents by following the elaborate daily notes of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman as they talked to Nixon. Ehrlichman, incidentally, has predicted that new tapes will reveal an “unadmirable,” “petty,” and “small” side to Nixon. The disclosures, Ehrlichman added, would mark a major setback in Nixon’s struggle for history. Given Nixon’s lengthy struggle to suppress the tapes, we can be reasonably certain they will not exonerate them.

The currently available Nixon Papers in the National Archives are invaluable. The President’s Personal Files, different topical subjects contained in the Nixon Central Files, the Staff Secretary’s Files, and the collections of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, John Dean, Egil Krogh, and David Young provide important documents for Watergate and the Nixon presidency. No doubt, as more material is released in future years, we will have an even more focused picture. The tape recordings and transcripts of materials used in
United States v. Mitchell
are also housed in these collections.

It is worth noting that the records of Richard Nixon himself significantly diminish after the dismissal of Haldeman and Ehrlichman in April 1973. Memoranda between the President and his aides flowed freely prior to that date, and are crucial for understanding the ideas and style of Nixon. After Alexander Haig became Chief of Staff, however, we have precious few documents passing between Nixon and his aides; the quantity undoubtedly decreased as the President found himself preoccupied with Watergate. Haig, contrary to the letter and spirit of the 1974 law, managed to remove most of his papers from the White House, as did Henry Kissinger. They remain sealed and unprocessed in the Library of Congress. Presumably, Haig will use them in his promised memoir; one hopes he will then allow access to others. If Kissinger’s tight control of his records offers any kind of precedent, however, it is unlikely Haig will do so.

The Gerald Ford Library in Ann Arbor has relevant papers in the “Pardon” materials of the White House Central Files. The Philip Buchen, Alexander Butterfield, and Ron Nessen collections were of some use, but the materials of Congressman Edward Hutchinson, ranking Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, proved exceptionally valuable. The Library of Congress Manuscript Division has the papers of Joseph Alsop, William J. Brennan, Leonard Garment, Fred Graham, and Elliot Richardson. Leon Jaworski’s papers and videotaped interviews of him are in the Texas Collection at Baylor University. The Sam Ervin Papers in the Southern Historical Collections of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are
useful for sampling the Senator’s mail for sentiments of his constituents. Earl Silbert graciously shared his personal diary with me.

The Civil Reference Branch of the Archives has custody of the papers of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. Previously unreleased material, however, had to be obtained through the Freedom of Information process. The Senate Select Committee Records are in the Legislative Records Section of the Archives. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened some 16,000 pages of investigative materials. The FBI records are essential for understanding the early “leaks” to journalists.

The Freedom of Information Act provided access to a number of collections and files in various agencies, but in the past decade, bureaucrats have become increasingly adept at reducing many of the documents to nullities. Indeed, the Act, as I have suggested, at times appears as a conspiracy on behalf of the Xerox Corporation and Magic Marker pens, given the promiscuous deletions and copies of meaningless materials passed on to researchers.

Interviews provide mixed results. Generally, I chose not to interview anyone who had written his own account unless I determined that the subject wished to add to the existing record. Time and different conditions alter memory and the perception of truth. Reliability is elusive. One prominent presidential aide has given at least three different versions of his role in the decision not to destroy presidential tapes.

Richard Nixon has not allowed scholars to interview him about Watergate, and he will not permit taping, according to one historian who has interviewed him. Those ground rules—among other reasons, to be sure—disqualified me. I am satisfied, however, that Nixon has left an adequate historical record.