The Wars of Watergate (80 page)

Unfortunately for his own reputation, Bork had failed to co-opt the press at the outset. He did not call in reporters to explain his actions and promise a continuing investigation, because, as he contended, he was “new to Washington.” He also bitterly remembered that Richardson offered no satisfactory public explanation for what had occurred between himself and Bork. When Bork accompanied Richardson to a press conference after the Attorney General’s resignation, Richardson promised to explain the matter if it were raised. No reporter questioned Bork’s role.
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Henry Ruth, Cox’s deputy, told reporters about the Sunday meeting with Bork and Petersen and said that he had been assured the investigation would be vigorously pursued. Bork publicly repeated the President’s instructions: “It is my expectation that the Department of Justice will continue with full vigor the investigations and prosecutions that had been entrusted to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force.” He assured reporters on October 22 that he would follow those orders, as well as implementing the President’s desire to fold the prosecutors’ functions into the Justice Department. As Acting Attorney General, Bork said, he had “ultimate authority and responsibility.” Significantly, Bork announced he would support Cox’s proposal to extend the Watergate grand jury for another six months. Despite rumors of mass resignations, there were no major defections in either the Justice Department or the Special Prosecutor’s office following Cox’s departure.

At an October 24 press conference, Bork recognized storm signals and stated: “We will go wherever we need to get the evidence for this prosecution.” Bork knew his reputation was on the line; he would not leave Washington, he said, as the man who compromised the Watergate investigations. Finally, he acknowledged that he had been considering reinstatement of the Special Prosecutor. The idea, he admitted playfully, “has crossed my mind.” Two days later, the President grimly announced that he would appoint a new Special Prosecutor but insisted that this individual would not be given access to confidential presidential documents, although Nixon promised to make summaries available.

In his October 26 press conference, Nixon denounced the media in words reminiscent of his famous “last press conference” in 1962. The reporting, he said, had been the most “outrageous, vicious, [and] distorted” he had witnessed in twenty-seven years of public life. Although the nation had been “pounded night after night with … frantic, hysterical reporting,” he assured reporters and his audience that they had not affected him or his job performance. Asked if he felt any stress because of the pressure of both domestic and foreign crises, the President smiled wanly and said, “The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.” Reporters were puzzled by his statement
that he did “not blame anybody” for the distorted news coverage and asked for specifics. The reply was vintage Nixon: “Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger.… You see,” he said with a nervous grin, “one can only be angry with those he respects.”
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On October 23, Bork signed an order abolishing the Special Prosecutor’s office effective October 21, and incorporating its functions into the Justice Department. Undoubtedly, at that moment, before the White House fully understood the national mood, there was every intention of giving the Attorney General—and hence the President—greater control over the Watergate prosecutors. Yet, from the moment Bork assumed office until he named a new Special Prosecutor on November 1, Cox’s Watergate Special Prosecution Force experienced no significant interruption in its work. The staff carried out its functions, had the FBI and the IRS continue their authorized investigations, and most important, encountered no interference whatsoever with their duties from Bork, Petersen, or any White House officials. The prosecutors neither were dismissed nor did they have any compelling cause for principled resignation. Whatever the original White House intent in challenging the Special Prosecutor, its only accomplishment had been to get Archibald Cox out of office.

Subsequently, Robert H. Bork’s critics charged him with being “irrelevant” and “passive.” Those descriptions were of a later vintage, designed to discredit Bork’s 1987 nomination to the Supreme Court. In fact, however, Bork was neither the passive instrument his detractors portrayed, nor was he any kind of hero in the affair, as his supporters—including Elliot Richardson—later testified.
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On October 23, Judge Sirica asked the President’s lawyers if they were prepared to respond to his August 29 order for the White House tapes, as modified by the appellate court. Charles Alan Wright, who had eagerly and somewhat confidently anticipated a Supreme Court review, shocked spectators when he announced in Sirica’s court that the “President of the United States would comply in all respects” with that order. Wright said Nixon believed that his offer of summaries was adequate but realized that even if the court agreed, he would have been accused of defying the law. Dramatically and firmly, Wright said that “this President does not defy the law,” and he intended to comply fully with the order. When Wright appeared as the President’s representative before Sirica, he confronted eleven former Cox aides at the prosecution table, anticipating the need to argue for compliance. Bork did nothing to prevent their appearance. The Special Prosecutor’s functions remained intact, and the President had been stymied in his effort to rid himself of his persecutors.

The forty-eight hours following Cox’s dismissal witnessed an extraordinary outburst of official and public indignation, instantly and dramatically reported on television. NBC’s anchorman solemnly suggested that “the
country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history.” Opponents and even supporters of the President appeared on television to denounce his “reckless act” and his “Gestapo tactics.” Outside the White House, marchers held signs proclaiming, “Honk for Impeachment.” Nixon bitterly criticized the “apocalyptic” reporting that “painted the night’s events in terms of an administration coup aimed at suppressing opposition.” But subsequent surveys of the television scripts sharply disagreed with his assessment. Most of the material, the surveys revealed, was “pretty bland, pretty straight and pretty sketchy in detail.” Still, the images of outrage and protest conveyed a harsh message.

The Administration was mesmerized. Leonard Garment remembered thinking about little in those days except to marvel “over the mischief we had wrought and the public relations disaster we had brought upon ourselves.” The resignations and dismissals created a public reaction that surprised and dismayed the White House, as Haig admitted. The normally voluble Chief of Staff seemed stunned by events. The Washington Western Union telegraph office received nearly half a million telegrams, a record that dwarfed the response to any prior event. The White House hurriedly summoned Wright back from his classes in Texas and announced that Ruckelshaus had resigned and had not been dismissed as earlier stated. The Administration was in disarray and confused—“like being in the belly of the whale,” Garment noted—and had no sense of how to respond. A White House “talking paper” gamely tried to stanch the flow of negative comment, but the hostility toward Cox or any independent investigation undermined the veneer of the President’s readiness to compromise. Periodically, Nixon’s supporters claimed he had wide support for his dismissal of Cox, but their pronouncements seemed pallid.
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The responses of Washington political figures and media commentators were predictable, but new voices were also heard. Chesterfield Smith, the President of the American Bar Association, told his group that Nixon’s actions had threatened the “rule of law and … the administration of justice.” He charged that the President had taken “overt” action to “abort” established processes and had instituted an “intolerable” assault on the courts. Smith backed Cox’s contention that the President could not choose the nature of evidence essential to criminal proceedings. Finally, he praised “three great lawyers”—Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Cox—who “honor and cherish the tradition of the legal profession” and who had placed “ethics and professional honor before public office.”

Former Nixon speechwriter William Safire urged Congress to “raise the rumpus it is entitled to raise as a result of the Richardson confirmation double-cross.” Somewhat cryptically, Safire urged Congress and the grand jury to “find out what lies behind the tapes.” Shortly afterward, Senator James Buckley and three of the most conservative Republicans in the House
reported that their mail was running 90 percent in favor of impeachment. One of the congressmen insisted that the protest was “not organized” and was a “grassroots” phenomenon. More predictably, the AFL-CIO on October 22 called for the President to resign and for the House to impeach him if he did not.
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Retreat was inevitable all along the line. The “firestorm” following Cox’s dismissal and his superiors’ resignations had given a new momentum to events, a momentum that influenced Wright and Bork and ensured that Nixon could not thwart any investigation of his actions.

In the early morning hours of October 25, the President reportedly had ordered a worldwide military alert of American forces, both conventional and nuclear. The move reflected the Administration’s perception of Soviet intentions to intervene in the Middle East to enforce the precarious cease-fire between Israeli and Arab armies. Several hours later, Nixon briefed congressional leaders, who promptly gave him full support. A careful reading of the Nixon and Kissinger memoirs reveals that the Secretary of State and Haig ordered the alert, not the President, who by then was deeply jolted by the aftershocks of the Cox dismissal. Certainly, Kissinger’s ostentatious public diplomacy and posturing left Nixon’s role only dimly perceived. The President’s passion for control began to focus almost exclusively on Watergate.

When Henry Kissinger faced reporters that day, he displayed surprise and dismay at questions suggesting that the alert was designed to divert attention from Watergate and the events of the past weekend. Bitterly, disdainfully, Kissinger told the media representatives that “it is a symptom of what is happening to our country that it could even be suggested that the United States would alert its forces for domestic reasons.” He assailed the “Watergate bloodhounds,” as he later described them, flatly accused the media of creating “a crisis of confidence” in foreign policy, and warned that there had to be “a minimum of confidence that the … American government [is] not playing with the lives of the American people.”
Newsweek
nevertheless suggested sinister Administration designs, and it quoted an “Administration source” as saying that “we had a problem and we decided to make the most of it.” In an editorial, the
Washington Post
responded to Kissinger, sharply reminding him that “our crisis at home was created by the President.”
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If Nixon still seemed master of foreign events, he could react only passively, even submissively, to the domestic storms that battered his Administration. In late October, his speechwriters prepared a text for a television appearance,
but Nixon canceled it. The draft bitterly denounced Cox for alone opposing the President’s offer to provide verified summaries of the tapes. The statement also deplored the “national shock wave” that fostered “cynicism and suspicion,” making difficult the task of governance. Most significantly, the planned talk promised that Stennis would carry out the assignment of preparing verified summaries for Judge Sirica, and that the President would not appoint a new Special Prosecutor. “Experience” had shown that the position was an “inherently … unworkable arrangement” that should not again be attempted.
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The decision to cancel the speech underlined the uncertainty within the White House.

At his October 26 press conference two days later, Nixon announced his intention to appoint a new Special Prosecutor, one with “independence” and “total cooperation” from the executive branch. Bork’s confusion and ambivalence in the Department of Justice during the past five days reflected the twists and turns of the White House’s strategy. Nixon pleaded that it was time to prosecute the guilty and clear the innocent. The President thought it would be unnecessary for a new prosecutor to use the judicial process against him. The compromise of tape summaries that he had offered to Cox, he believed, would be adequate. But the words were hollow, betrayed by Wright’s announcement that the President would comply with existing court orders. Nixon reiterated his familiar arguments on behalf of confidentiality, but again he seemed to be going through the motions. Worse yet, he badly misgauged the temper of Congress when he asserted that he did not think that legislators would have to develop new guidelines for the new Special Prosecutor’s independence. The old fight, however, was there when he blasted Cox as uncooperative and “more interested in the issue than he was in the settlement.” Indeed, Cox was loath to let go. He wrote to Sirica on October 22, reminding him that as “an officer of the Court,” he still could be of some service. “[A]lthough I am reluctant to intrude myself, I wish not to shrink from any obligations,” Cox told the judge—in words that Sirica interpreted as an offer to be counsel to the grand jury. Sirica took no action.
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The time had come to watch congressmen’s feet, not their mouths. Within days, House members had introduced over twenty impeachment or impeachment-inquiry resolutions. Despite the President’s yielding on the tapes, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino announced that his committee would proceed to organize an inquiry. Speaker Carl Albert the same day said that the House must lay “this thing to rest one way or the other.” The full House committee met on October 30 and empowered the Chairman to secure subpoenas without a committee vote. Rodino promised to consult with the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, Edward Hutchinson. His gesture was the first of many to foster a spirit of bipartisanship. A number of Republicans and several Southern Democrats in the House admitted candidly that the events of the past ten days had raised
questions regarding the President’s truthfulness. Walter Flowers (D–AL), generally a warm, conservative supporter of the President, was “thoroughly turned off,” especially by Nixon’s obsequious references to “Judge Stennis.” Some of Stennis’s intimates called him that, but Flowers thought the President’s doing it was “just a dirty trick” and an obvious “ploy” to elevate Stennis’s status for Nixon’s advantage.