The Wars of Watergate (89 page)

The State of the Union message spelled out Nixon’s position: He had complied with the court order, and the Special Prosecutor had sufficient material. Further requests, he suggested, reflected only partisan and personal enmities. Again, he had demonstrated his willingness that the affair be ended, and he had provided the means. The public posture served the private stonewalling. The President was in the fighting mood he had characterized in his New Year’s notes. He knew he had to stop the flow of evidence. “I wanted to stop it. In the past I had made the grievous mistake of saying I was going to stop it but failing to do so. Then, after paying the political price for refusing, we would cave [in] when the pressure started to build. I regretted not having followed my instincts about this in the past and wanted to begin following them right away,” he wrote. The moment was critical: “I even talked about destroying the tapes.”
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Before Jaworski received the formal word from St. Clair of the Administration’s refusal to release more tapes, Haig summoned him to the Executive Office Building on February 1. Haig told him that a “political” decision had been made to reject Jaworski’s request—political in the sense that the President had to focus on the impeachment proceedings, which the White House apparently believed took precedence over the Special Prosecutor’s work. It is not clear whether Nixon knew of the meeting; Jaworski’s account of it emphasized Haig’s concern that Jaworski not publicly state that the White House—and, in particular, Alexander Haig—had reneged on earlier promises of cooperation. After St. Clair had appeared in court in May to oppose Jaworski’s claims for more tapes, Haig called Jaworski and said cryptically, “I needed to know where they were going and they needed to know where I was going.” The two met on May 22 in the White House map
room, and Haig reiterated how much he wanted Jaworski “to believe that no agreement had been broken by him.”
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Haig had begun to worry about his own future.

The real threat to the President’s new defensive position came from the developing inquiry by the House Judiciary Committee. The majority and minority special counsels for the committee met St. Clair on February 11 to discuss access to evidentiary material. Two weeks later the committee requested forty-two tape recordings. A confrontation between Nixon and the committee was quite different from one with the Special Prosecutor. The House had an absolute constitutional right to consider impeachment; how far could the President interfere with, or fail to cooperate with, that process? Edward Hutchinson and Charles Wiggins (R–CA), the President’s most ardent partisans within the House committee, had said in January that Nixon should comply with the committee’s request for evidence. “Political reality,” Wiggins said, would persuade the President not to resist a subpoena. At a press conference on February 25, the day the committee made its request, Nixon underlined his own dilemma: he realized that he must cooperate with the House, but he resorted again to citing his responsibilities to maintain the integrity of “the presidency.”
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Jaworski made a rare blunder in a
New York Times
interview published on February 27, when he said that his office knew the full story of Watergate. In fact, Jaworski had said similar things before, and St. Clair had used the remarks to justify the President’s rejection of additional tape requests. The grand-jury indictments on March 1 apparently reinforced the conviction at the White House that the Special Prosecutor no longer was a threat. In a March 6 press conference, Nixon noted Jaworski’s public contention that he had the complete picture; in the meantime, the President would cooperate with the House committee by turning over all evidence he had provided the Special Prosecutor—ignoring the fact that the grand jury itself already had made such a provision. St. Clair pointedly made no reference to Jaworski’s repeated requests for access to more material.
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The President expanded his public appearances and reiterated his position that the Special Prosecutor’s and the House committee’s requests amounted to fishing expeditions. Within a week in mid-March, he traveled to Chicago, Nashville, and Houston, where he spoke to business groups, attended the Grand Ole Opry, and tried to project a happy, confident mood. He played the piano, praised his wife, and handled a yo-yo; in the meantime, in response to a question at a broadcasters’ convention, he refused to say whether he would comply with the House committee’s request. At that meeting, Dan Rather, the CBS White House correspondent, rose to ask a question. The media executives greeted him with cheers and catcalls. “Are you running for something?” the President mischievously inquired. With impudence to match, Rather responded: “No sir, Mr. President, are you?”

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Right-wing conservatives, long uncomfortable with Nixon on ideological grounds, began to assert themselves against him around this time. On March 19, Senator James Buckley (R-NY), one of their most prominent leaders, called for the President’s resignation. Buckley’s fellow congressional Republicans publicly criticized him; privately they harbored similar doubts. In his announcement, Buckley stole a march on Nixon’s traditional defensive position. The Senator argued that a resignation would halt the “agonizing inch-by-inch … attrition” of presidential authority. Unless Nixon resigned, the President’s power, Buckley said, would succumb “to the death of a thousand cuts”—a phrase that had become commonplace among Nixon’s advisers. People had lost faith in the President’s “credibility and moral authority,” a loss “beyond repair,” Buckley said. The President must sacrifice himself to save the presidency, an ironic twist of the very goal Nixon had established for himself. Later that day, the President mechanically insisted that he would not “run away” from the job he had been elected to do; to resign, he argued, might be “good politics but it would be bad statesmanship.”
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Buckley lost the point—that day.

Buckley’s remarks affected other wings of the Republican Party. Five days later, Howard Baker urged the President to cooperate with the House committee. House Republican leader John Rhodes (AZ) told Nixon that his party’s congressmen could not afford to defend him if he refused to submit evidence. Institutional loyalty and political common sense motivated both Baker and Rhodes. On March 28 the White House announced that ten of the forty-two tapes requested by the House committee did not exist, a remark that seemed to signal a change in posture. The President stopped making public appearances and issuing public rejections of the requests for the tapes; if impeachment were a real possibility, he could ill afford to lose the support of such key Republicans as Buckley, Baker, and Rhodes. The times were perilous: it was a week later that the Joint Congressional Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation revealed that Nixon owed nearly half a million dollars in back taxes and that he had made illegal, even fraudulent, deductions. The Judiciary Committee on April 4 demanded a reply to its request within five days. As the time expired, St. Clair wrote to the committee’s Majority Counsel, John Doar, requesting more time and complaining about excessive demands. What seems clear is that during the last ten days of March and the first ten days of April, the President and his advisers made a decision to release new tape transcripts.

The Judiciary Committee may have spurred that decision when it voted 33–3 on April 11 to subpoena the requested material. Peter Rodino complained that St. Clair had been dilatory in cooperating, despite the President’s promises that his special counsel would help the committee. Rodino also warned Nixon that he alone could not decide what evidence must be
produced. Five days later, Jaworski appeared before Sirica, seeking an order to deliver sixty-four more taped conversations, and the judge issued a subpoena on April 18. St. Clair again requested more time: White House secretaries were frantically transcribing tapes. The task was a tedious one: transcription, then a check by Buzhardt and St. Clair, and then one by Ziegler’s aide, Diane Sawyer, who would look for “non-substantive problems,” such as might be posed by the presence of obscenities. Finally, the President himself examined the transcripts.
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“Damage control” was the orthodox jargon for the procedure. Somehow, in some way, Nixon and his advisers believed, the manner of releasing the tapes still might serve their purpose.

Richard Nixon knew that his fate rested on the tapes. Perhaps he felt a bit buoyed by the news, arriving the day before he announced the release of the tapes, that his friends John Mitchell and Maurice Stans had been acquitted in New York on charges that they had solicited illegal campaign contributions and had attempted to block Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of the fugitive Robert Vesco. But that verdict could have afforded only small comfort, considering the task before him.

As always, legal problems became political ones and thus required a special public-relations twist to ensure favorable understanding. Nixon spoke on national television on April 29 to announce his decision to release the tape transcripts. He appeared with a stack of blue notebooks allegedly containing tape transcripts but in fact amounting only to a stage prop, part of the carefully contrived scenery for presidential appearances which also included, from time to time, family pictures and Lincoln busts, all designed to foster a favorable illusion on behalf of the President.

Nixon’s elaborate speech seemed tailored to establish his interpretation of the tapes and to anticipate any negative reactions. What eventually appeared was a 1,200-page book, liberally spaced, of fragmented conversations which at times seemed incomprehensible or nonsensical when read in abstracted form. The transcripts occasionally included the phrase “Material Unrelated to Presidential Action Deleted.” This material referred to judgments made at the time solely by the White House, judgments which eventually proved to have resulted in the omission of significant material. Unfortunately for the President, however, the transcripts also contained some clearly reproduced unfavorable conversations and introduced the catch phrase “expletive deleted.”

In his speech, Nixon again said that the material now available would “tell it all,” a hardly veiled hint that he would resist demands for further disclosures. He warned that the transcripts had rough edges, that they would at first glance appear to make prophets of his critics. He had been reluctant to release the materials, “not just because they will embarrass me and those
with whom I have talked—which they will—and not just because they will become the subject of speculation and even ridicule—which they will—and not just because certain parts of them will be seized upon by political and journalistic opponents—which they will.” He worried most, he claimed, that the tapes threatened the degree of confidentiality so vital to the functioning of the presidency. Almost sheepishly, he also admitted that the transcripts were at odds with previous sworn testimony.

Nixon nevertheless insisted that the transcripts showed he had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in and that he was not aware of the cover-up until March 21, 1973. Again, he warned that Watergate kept him from more important tasks: “Every day absorbed by Watergate is a day lost from the work that must be done.” Jaworski noted the President’s eagerness to adopt the “good-guy attitude.” With that, Nixon staked his “trust in the basic fairness of the American people,” confident that they would see the records as only “fragmentary” remnants from a distant time, a time when the President had to cope with information he did not understand and which threatened his “hopes, goals, and plans for the people who had elected him as their leader.” He knew he had only been “trying in that period to discover what was right and to do what was right.”
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In a letter accompanying the transcripts, the President emphasized to the House Judiciary Committee that John Dean had withheld information from him until March 21, 1973. He glossed over the account of his September 15, 1972 meeting with Dean, in which he congratulated his aide for his work in containing revelations about the break-in. That interview, Nixon said, referred to Dean’s dealings with the Democrats’ civil suit and their attempts to exploit the burglary politically. The President’s letter, in general, sought to establish the White House interpretation of the documents in the hope of creating a favorable climate of opinion.
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But the transcripts were not an arcane bit of legislation requiring a lawyer’s skill in interpretation. They were about to be public; their words—and their deletions—conveyed a meaning that lay citizens could develop for themselves.

In the long run for President Nixon, the devil was in the details of the transcripts; most immediately, however, their overall flavor and import further devastated his public standing and left him naked to the winds of criticism. The October firestorm left burning embers; the release of the tape transcripts in April and May rekindled the flames. It was another disaster.

The transcripts soon appeared as a paperback book and sold widely. Newspapers reprinted excerpts, usually depicting the seamier parts of presidential conversations. The television networks offered lengthy reports on the contents of the tapes. Several re-enacted the scenes of taped conversations, using the words of the transcripts. Eric Sevareid of CBS labeled the conversations a “moral indictment without known precedent.” Even members of the President’s party expressed outrage. Hugh Scott called the transcripts
“shabby, disgusting, immoral.” Senator Robert Packwood (R–OR) deplored the lack in the taped conversations of “even any token clichés about what is good for the people.” Representative William Steiger (R–WI) deplored the President’s lack “of any sense of moral outrage.” Other Republicans thought that the disclosures represented a disaster for the President and the party. Elliot Richardson, referring to a White House appeal for Republican loyalty, bitingly called it “a prescription for suicide on the part of most Congressional candidates.” Vice President Ford, although he still thought the President was innocent of any wrongdoing, was “a little disappointed” by the transcripts. Indeed, what could a Republican loyalist think when the September 15, 1972 transcript described the ranking Republican member of the House Banking and Currency Committee as an incompetent and a fool?