The Wars of Watergate (99 page)

Tom Railsback, of Illinois, had significant personal and political ties to the President. His first race in 1966 had benefited from Nixon’s vigorous campaigning that year, and his election marked the Republican revival following the debacle of 1964. Railsback’s district contained the strong union towns of Rock Island and Moline, yet he had only a 22-percent rating from labor.
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Perhaps most striking of all, the seven congressmen of the “fragile coalition” came from districts that had delivered impressive majorities for Richard Nixon in 1972:

Each of the seven took his own path in considering impeachment. In recollecting their decisions, all stressed the weight of evidence, giving surprisingly little attention to any concern about whether impeachment would reduce the President’s capability to govern effectively, but they varied in how to calculate the sentiments of their constituents. Most had been impressed by presidential lawyer Herbert Kalmbach’s testimony to the committee in
July and by the callous fashion in which the White House had involved him in the hush-money payments. But such presidential friends and supporters as Mitchell and LaRue did not strike the seven congressmen as very credible. For Railsback, committee Counsel Richard Cates’s July 20 briefing had been decisive, while he thought St. Clair had failed to make a case for the President. On July 21, Railsback concluded that Nixon’s lies constituted a serious obstruction of justice, that he was directly involved in the cover-up, and that he had abused power.
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Butler could trace his concerns back much earlier. He had predicted in March that there would be “an explosion” in Republican ranks. He had decided then that he would vote regardless of the political consequences; “the job’s not that good anyway,” he told a friend. Cates’s summaries impressed Butler as well; equally important, he was shocked by the closed-minded and abusive approach taken by such Republican partisans as Hutchinson and Latta. During this time, Butler resisted several White House invitations for special briefings. Butler admittedly had never particularly liked Nixon. He considered the President “cold-blooded”; for him, the tapes revealed an “accumulated effect of the [lack of] Nixon credibility”; they also displayed Nixon as the “man in charge.” Butler’s decision that Richard Nixon must be impeached preceded his adoption of any theory of impeachment, although he eventually subscribed to Gerald Ford’s 1970 latitudinarian view of the House’s power to define the grounds for impeachment. Butler had started with a rather narrow construction of grounds for impeachment, but he gradually came to believe that the role of the House was simply to file charges before the Senate if it believed that “clear and convincing evidence” had been established. He did not think that presidential actions must be criminally indictable to merit impeachment.

Railsback, on the other hand, had strong ties to the President. He liked him personally and remembered that Nixon had campaigned on his behalf. At one point, he told Julie Nixon Eisenhower that if her father produced the requested materials, he still had a chance. Railsback gave the same message to Republican National Committee Chairman George Bush. Railsback recalled bitterly that the only reply was more stonewalling. He found the President’s defense efforts disturbing, especially the tampering with tape transcripts. But he also criticized the committee’s staff for failing to do much original investigation on its own.

Mann, like Butler, had entertained doubts about Nixon since he had arrived in the House in 1969. He thought the President’s war and fiscal policies, and his explanations in the Watergate affair, had been “calculated to mislead, or at least were not candid.” He considered Nixon “so political,” “so partisan,” that he would engage in any type of manipulation to further his own ends. But Mann, certainly conscious of the President’s strong support in his district, remained publicly undecided until early July. At that
point, Doar began to visit Mann to discuss proposed articles of impeachment. In time, the two developed mutual admiration, alternately flattering and using one another.

Thornton believed that Nixon had damaged “the system” with his abuses of power. He saw the White House itself—apart from the executive agencies—as a virtual fourth branch of government, checked by no one. The President’s lack of cooperation with the impeachment inquiry buttressed Thornton’s conviction that the arrogant pattern of abuse was endemic. “Ford brought his life to the Judiciary Committee,” he said, “whereas Nixon brought his lawyers.” As for his constituents, Thornton believed that they trusted him to make a “serious and judicious” decision.

Flowers spent a great deal of time nursing sentiment in his constituency. For example, in Alabama he described the Fielding break-in as a threat to all Americans. Thinking as a lawyer, Flowers found Nixon’s discussions with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and his use of grand-jury information, to constitute a particularly striking obstruction of justice. An IRS investigation of Governor Wallace and his brother struck Flowers as “arrogant” and an attempt to manipulate Alabama politics. For him, that was a specific enough abuse of power to warrant impeachment. But Flowers also was very much a man of the House. Nixon’s rejection of the committee’s subpoena “jolted my blood-warmer,” he said. He thought that the President had improperly thwarted the committee’s role and angrily told his colleagues in March that Nixon had “to stop playing games with the Constitution.” The next day, he heard the March 21, 1973 tape of the meeting in which Dean revealed the cover-up to Nixon—“disgusting,” he called it—and became convinced that the President must be impeached. At that point, however, Flowers had a tough primary fight on his hands, and he kept his silence, aware that many of his constituents purportedly believed George McGovern would become president if Nixon were impeached.

Cohen had been dramatically affected by the Saturday Night Massacre (as had Butler). He and Elliot Richardson lived near each other and had a thriving friendship. Cohen had clashed with the Republican leadership as far back as Ford’s confirmation hearings, when he objected to Ford’s cavalier dismissal of the approach to Judge Byrne in the Ellsberg case. Cohen asked probing and well-prepared questions, but he was limited by time constraints. At one point Hutchinson refused the normal courtesy of granting Cohen some of Butler’s time, indicating how much the Republican leadership distrusted him. Cohen criticized some of his colleagues, particularly Railsback, who deplored in private what the President had done but held back on any public commitment or action, such as voting to subpoena presidential tapes. Unlike others, Cohen had no problem defining the criterion for impeachment. As Robert Frost had said of love, the reason to impeach was indefinable but unmistakable, and he would know it when he saw it. Cohen
confronted significant opposition in his district, and he realized that a majority of his constituents opposed impeachment. His mail was vicious, obscene, and—Cohen’s father was Jewish—anti-Semitic.

By Christmas 1973, Fish believed that impeachment existed as a real possibility but could not be decided by “a poll and popular sentiment.” Impeachment involved a “very, very defined constitutional responsibility” that popularity or party could not affect. Yet he realized the importance of giving “the people understanding [of] what you are doing.” Fish did not believe that the committee would find “the smoking gun,” but he thought enough evidence existed “to spell out the pattern of events in which you could draw conclusions and inference[s]” sufficient to impeach. Before July 22, Fish remembered, the time was “a very lonely thing”; he did not discuss evidence with Republican colleagues, only political implications. Unlike Cohen, Fish had no desire to operate on his own: “I was perfectly willing to confess that I did want company.”

Railsback recalled that the inquiry was not “all roses,” that at times it became “very antagonistic,” “disputatious,” and “impassionate.” The words and actions of Nixon’s partisan enemies aroused Railsback’s personal and party loyalties, but he also knew that House Republican leaders had sensed his doubts and had grown wary of him. One GOP committee staff member remembered that many Republicans disliked Railsback and thought that he, and others in the group, were “weak men” who easily succumbed to popular pressures. For the Republican stalwarts, impeachment was a partisan matter, like voting for the Speaker.

The coalition itself had divisions. Fish praised Railsback for his courage; Butler, however, found him too preoccupied with “politics.” Railsback’s longstanding rivalry with McClory may well have animated his drive for leadership within the coalition. McClory had expressed doubts about Nixon’s innocence, and his position as the second-ranking Republican gave him great credibility.
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Yet McClory, along with Hogan and Froehlich, who had some misgivings about the President’s conduct, were excluded from the coalition’s deliberations. “I don’t think any of those folks would have contributed anything,” Butler remarked.

The seven congressmen later agreed that their coming together had an inevitability about it. They had been singled out in the media for some time as the undecided votes on the committee—“undecided” meaning, of course, “unknown.” Cohen rejected any allegations of manipulation by the House leadership. Neither O’Neill’s pressures, Rodino’s patience, nor Doar’s maneuvers, he said, had influenced formation of the coalition. At bottom, he insisted, with support from the others, “each member ultimately came … to his [own] conclusion.”

On July 22, all the coalition’s members had their first look at Doar’s draft articles of impeachment. They later agreed that the “ambiguous and vague and arbitrary” language galvanized them into action. That evening, Flowers told Railsback to “get your guys together and I’ll get mine and let’s sit down and visit about this.” Flowers then spoke to Mann and Thornton, who agreed to meet with the others. The next morning the seven gathered in Railsback’s office. Fish was surprised to find the Southern Democrats. At the outset, Railsback asked whether they could find an alternative route to impeachment, such as censure of the President. Flowers pointed out that the committee had responsibility only for deciding the issue of impeachment. They were in the “driver’s seat,” Flowers remembers; the “thing” was “in their hands,” and they realized their power. What was “fragile” was not the coalition members’ attachment to one another; rather, it was their link to the nominal liberal majority, who now found themselves “at the mercy of seven swing votes.” Prospects for bipartisanship on the committee had been dim at the outset, but the coalition, which was truly bipartisan, now found itself with the extraordinary ability to determine the nature and outcome of the impeachment hearings. Without them, impeachment would be a partisan contrivance and forever tarnished.

During these months Nixon’s moods swung between optimism and gloom. He thought in June that the Democrats feared being held accountable for the disruptions in domestic and foreign policies that impeachment might cause. He also believed that they did not relish Ford as his successor, or the prospect of confronting a united Republican Party. (Later Nixon contended that the Democrats, by contrast, wanted Ford, because he would be easier to defeat in 1976 than any other Republican.) In early July, Nixon looked forward to the 1974 elections, and then beyond, ambitiously anticipating his last chance to impose the “conservative viewpoint” over the McGovernite “radical leftist viewpoint.” He envisioned a day when he would look back over recent events “and see that we shouldn’t have been worried about things all along.” Several weeks later, as the Judiciary Committee prepared to vote and as he awaited the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Special Prosecutor’s subpoena of tapes, the President shifted to a more existential posture: “I intend to live the next week without dying the death of a thousand cuts.… Cowards die a thousand deaths, brave men die only once.” It was, he wrote in his diary, his “Seventh Crisis in spades”; he could only “hope for the best and plan for the worst.” Publicly, Nixon was defiant. He assured supporters on July 18 that he would leave office “in 1977 when I shall have finished my term of office to which I was elected.”

On July 12 a California jury found John Ehrlichman guilty of perjury and of conspiring to violate Daniel Ellsberg’s civil rights. At the end of the
month, the court imposed a twenty-month-to-five-year sentence. Nixon uttered an old refrain. It was a “tragic irony” that Ehrlichman went to jail and Ellsberg went free. Ehrlichman saw it as much more. Shocked, he learned that Fred Buzhardt had signed an affidavit stating that the White House documents contained nothing material to Ehrlichman’s defense. Ehrlichman believed then and in later years that he had been betrayed and went to jail for a crime the President had authorized.
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Old California friends entertained the President in Bel Air on July 21. It was a pleasant evening, but Nixon later remembered that it was the last time he felt any real hope. He compared his situation to being in the eye of a hurricane. He knew that the political consensus to impeach had been reached. Two days later, he called Governor George Wallace from San Clemente, desperately seeking to enlist Wallace’s help in dissuading Walter Flowers from voting for impeachment. But Wallace told Nixon that it would be improper. The conversation lasted only six minutes. When it ended, the President turned to Haig and said: “Well, Al, there goes the presidency.”
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