The Wars of Watergate (85 page)

Several weeks earlier, speaking to newspaper editors at Disney World in Florida, the President admitted that he had made some mistakes but insisted that he had never profited from his years of public service. “I have never obstructed justice,” he claimed. He welcomed a public scrutiny of his records, because “people have got to know whether their President is a crook.” With no hesitation, he quickly and forcefully responded: “Well, I am not a crook. I earned everything I got.” These words would haunt him the rest of his days.

The Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation’s staff report appeared in April 1974 and included the finding that the President owed nearly $500,000 in back taxes and interest. The staff copiously documented Nixon’s tax affairs and subjected them to such scrutiny that they even found he had a right to take another $1,007 deduction for sales taxes and an additional $10 for gasoline taxes in 1972. The impact of the staff report further humiliated and disgraced the President, particularly as charges of personal corruption had stalked him before and because he had so moralistically preached against the chicanery of others.

In a statement issued on April 3, Nixon contended that his tax lawyers could make a successful case in his behalf, but since he had agreed to abide by the tax committee’s judgment, he had ordered that payment be put through. Any errors in his returns, the statement concluded, were made by those to whom he had “delegated the responsibility for preparing his returns and were made without his knowledge and without his approval.” “In law school I majored in tax law,” Nixon had said in June 22, 1972 press conference, and he had added that as a lawyer, he did quite a bit of tax work. Neither remark was true, but once again Nixon implied that if only he had personally controlled matters, the results would have been different.

The President paid $284,000 in April 1974, but he did not pay the 1969 deficiency of nearly $150,000, because the statute of limitations had run out. Despite his promise to make it a gift to the nation, Nixon sold the San Clemente property in 1979 and shortly thereafter demanded that the government bear the cost of removing the Secret Service’s “security improvements.” Patriotism was his refuge, as he sent the General Services Administration a check for $2,300 to cover the cost of a flagpole he wished to retain on the estate. Richard Nixon bitterly recalled that the attacks on his “financial probity and integrity … hurt Pat most of all.”
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Several days prior to the Cox dismissal, the Special Prosecutor’s office had begun to move against corporations that had made illegal campaign contributions and engaged in other illegal activities on behalf of the President.
Much of this material had been developed in the later stages of the Senate Select Committee’s investigation. On October 17, 1973, American Airlines pled guilty to a violation of the U.S. code on campaign contributions and was fined $5,000. The same day, the 3M Corporation similarly was fined $3,000, and a corporate officer was fined an additional $500. Before the year was out, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Braniff Airways, Gulf Oil, Ashland Petroleum, Phillips Petroleum, and the Carnation Company submitted guilty pleas, as did a number of their officials, and all were duly fined. During the next year, another ten companies followed the same pattern. The most prominent was the American Ship Building Company, which was fined $20,000 in August 1974; its chairman, George M. Steinbrenner, received a $15,000 fine, the highest for any corporate official. Steinbrenner originally had been charged with five counts of illegal campaign contributions and four counts of obstruction of justice.

Steinbrenner, a longtime Republican, had switched to the Democrats in the early 1960s. By 1972, however, he was complaining to House Democratic leader Thomas O’Neill that Republican campaign officials had pressed him hard to contribute to the Nixon cause. Steinbrenner claimed that Maurice Stans pressured him to head up the Democrats for Nixon in Ohio, while Herbert Kalmbach suggested a formula according to which Steinbrenner wrote thirty-three separate checks for $3,000, each to be sent to a different Nixon campaign committee. In addition to his fines, Steinbrenner was suspended for two years from his presidency of the New York Yankees by baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Around the same time, a baseball player convicted of manslaughter received no penalty from the Commissioner; that activity, Kuhn noted, had happened in the off-season.
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Apparently, Steinbrenner had written his checks between April and October.

Nixon’s resiliency in the face of the Watergate crisis is difficult to measure. Outwardly, he appeared like King Canute, vainly sweeping back the sea. On May 5, 1974, Alexander Haig appeared on ABC’s
Issues and Answers
and brashly asserted that for the past year, the President “has run this country and its business.… [H]e has done it successfully and I am confident that he will continue to.” The work of the presidency went on, in ironic, but certainly unintended, confirmation of Nixon’s earlier adage that the nation did not need a President for domestic affairs. Melvin Laird admitted that the President was “consumed with this other matter, but we functioned.” Laird and his staff worked on the budget process and domestic legislation. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer thought little was different. The President had always been uninterested and lackadaisical about domestic affairs. In an emergency, however, Moorer thought the President was “decisive.”

Other observers, however, saw a presidency adrift. Henry Kissinger later referred to the “collapse of executive authority due to Watergate.” On a more personal note, he thought that Watergate had so affected the President’s behavior as almost to undermine Kissinger’s diplomatic efforts with Syria. Those efforts, of course, succeeded, making Kissinger’s retrospective view altogether self-enhancing.

As early as April 1973, Kissinger thought that Watergate had grown “into bewilderment and frustration for those seeking to keep the government operating and into panic for those directly involved.” He undoubtedly had a special frustration of his own. At that very time, Nixon had told Haldeman and Ehrlichman that William Rogers’s resignation as Secretary of State must be delayed, despite Kissinger’s eagerness for Rogers’s departure and his own accession to the office. “[T]he hell with Henry on that,” the President said; Kissinger had to be told that “there are bigger things here.”

Kissinger’s memoirs are ambiguous on the question of presidential paralysis during the period. At times, he portrays a president still in full command of his powers, determined to exercise the full range of his authority and expertise in foreign-policy matters. And yet, Kissinger also depicts a president who was bored by the most calamitous or momentous of international events, and who, to Kissinger’s mind, often threatened to upset carefully balanced negotiating postures.
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After the Arabs instituted an oil embargo in late 1973, threatening America’s supply of essential petroleum products, new confusion and distress swept the nation. Garment thought that the latest crisis might present an opportunity for the President to demonstrate leadership. The country needed, Garment told Nixon, “a sense of direction, [to know] that someone is in control, taking care of people’s basic needs in a bewildering, even frightening time.… It’s up to you to give people the feeling that someone’s in charge.” Nixon could not afford the appearance of excessive delegation of power, he declared. But Garment also realized that Watergate handicapped the President, and despite his clarion call for action, the President’s lawyer remained pessimistic: “If you can make it through the next few months, you may be able to weather Watergate. I honestly don’t know.”

Garment urged the President to be “exceptionally tough,” and to establish national priorities for allocation of scarce oil—even if doing so meant offending people by banning Sunday driving. He linked the energy crisis and Watergate by contending that the President’s actions would determine his ultimate fate. If he did not act decisively, Garment warned Nixon, his critics would “say you were brooding over Watergate, paralyzed, unable to control your advisors, when you should have been thinking of the people’s need, planning ahead, acting.” In response to the Arab oil embargo, the President secured a lowered national speed limit and an extension of daylight savings time, traveled to California on a commercial jet, and reduced the number
of lights on the national Christmas tree. He also delivered a nationwide address on the oil embargo. At the end of the talk, Nixon reiterated his intention of not resigning. He would, he said, continue to work sixteen to eighteen hours a day and make every effort to erase any doubts as to his integrity.
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But he did little to allay the fears of an energy shortage—or to dissipate the increasing concern that Watergate had sorely crippled his presidency.

Up close, Garment and others saw Nixon as possessing an uncanny ability to compartmentalize, to segregate his responsibilities from his personal turmoil and anxieties over Watergate. Yet the brooding and paralysis that Garment had feared were exactly what some perceived—even such admirers as the new FBI Director, Clarence Kelley. Late in 1973, Kelley received a summons to the White House. It was his first meeting with Nixon since his appointment nearly six months earlier. He noted that the President appeared haggard and tired, but his most vivid impressions were of an empty desk and a small statue of Abraham Lincoln, as if, Kelley noted, to signify Nixon’s identification with the integrity of a great president who, like him, was constantly under attack. Kelley remembered other meetings with Nixon, marked by crisp, concise conversation. Now, Nixon rambled and digressed. Abruptly, at one point, the President mentioned his taping, contending that his predecessors had done it extensively. Kelley was convinced that the President was “breaking down under enormous strain.” Nixon raised the Watergate investigation periodically, but never in any probing way. Finally, the President asked Kelley if he enjoyed his position and then expressed great pleasure with his work. Kelley never understood the purpose of the meeting, their last.
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Mordechai Gazit, the Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, accompanied Israeli Premier Golda Meir to the White House following the Yom Kippur War in the fall of 1973. Nixon reminded them that he had resupplied the Israeli army during the war, sent a new aid request for Israel to Congress, and declared a military alert to keep the Russians out of the Middle East. He then told his visitors that he would not be able to do so again. At first, Gazit thought that Nixon intended to project a toughness to the Israelis in order to stimulate the negotiating process. But Gazit eventually understood that the President simply meant that he no longer had the political power to act so decisively, clearly recognizing his deteriorating situation.
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After mid-1973 the news summaries prepared daily for the President no longer evoked his elaborate annotations. Kissinger noted their absence as well as the lack of comments on memoranda he addressed to the President. Once the President returned a memo with every option box checked, defeating the purpose of the paper.
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Nixon’s presidential papers, so filled with multiple daily memoranda to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, and others
from 1969–72, only rarely provide similar documents as the Watergate phenomenon gripped the White House after May 1973. Richard Nixon himself seems to disappear from his presidential papers.

Armand Hammer, a prominent businessman with longstanding ties to Kremlin leaders, met Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow on November 17, 1973. Hammer reported that Brezhnev was concerned about Nixon’s Watergate problems. The Soviet leader could not understand the fuss. “You have your own ways and, speaking confidentially, I must confess I don’t understand them,” Brezhnev said. He told Hammer he was worried about Nixon: “A man can only stand so much and then he’s bound to break down.” Brezhnev sanctimoniously promised not to take advantage of Nixon; he would not “jump on him, as others are.”
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Brezhnev’s admiration for Nixon may or may not have been genuine, but foreign powers, friend and foe alike, prefer a known quantity. The Soviets had found that they could do business with Nixon, in large part operating on the theory that a Republican president had less need to concern himself with right-wing reactions to any overtures to Russia. Now, as a British television report in May 1973 noted, the Soviets and China might welcome a scandal in “capitalism’s high place,” but like Britain, they preferred a strong government in the United States. The Japanese similarly worried that Nixon’s undoing would be “most unfortunate” for the “world at large.” An Austrian commentator saw the growing impasse in the American government as upsetting the world balance of power. Worse, he said, the preoccupation with domestic affairs only meant an abandonment of concern for American world responsibilities. The President’s foreign admirers gloomily predicted more “foreign political consequences of [his] dwindling of power.” After the events of October and November, the U.S. Information Service post in London reported to Washington in its “psychological assessment” that Nixon’s credibility had dropped sharply as the Watergate situation “became ever more muddled.”
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The President’s political standing with Congress had eroded to such an extent that the legislative branch now boldly asserted itself in foreign-policy matters. Congress ordered a cutoff of the Cambodian bombing effective in August 1973, and in November passed the War Powers Act. That law obligated the president to notify Congress of armed action within forty-eight hours of its onset, and further required him to withdraw military forces within sixty days unless Congress provided an extension. In Richard Nixon’s version of history, the War Powers Act and the limitation on the Cambodian bombing sent a clear signal to the Vietnamese enemy and directly led to the Communist takeover of Indochina by April 1975. Beyond Vietnam, he complained that the act made it “impossible” for a president to act “swiftly
and secretly.” Nixon blamed Congress, the media, and the “peace movement” for harnessing the president to “Marquis of Queensberry rules in a world where good manners are potentially fatal hindrances.”
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