Nixon placed other similar calls that night, and the sound of his voice on the tape suggests he was either drunk or perhaps mixing alcohol with pills. When Dean had visited him one night earlier that month, he had smelled liquor on the president’s breath and seen him reach down into his desk drawer for a pill bottle. He had trouble getting the cap off, Dean noticed. Just weeks earlier, Nixon had received a visit from Jack Dreyfus, who had introduced him to the drug Dilantin. That may have been the occasion when, as Dreyfus told the author, he provided the president with another batch of a thousand pills.
Those who closely observed Nixon had been concerned about his condition for some time. The UPI’s Helen Thomas had noted that “his eyes seemed not to see us” during an interview. Checking a press conference transcript against a tape recording, John Osborne had written “tremor” beside ten passages. Secret Service agent Dennis McCarthy, escorting Nixon back to the family quarters after the April 17 address, found himself with a man in distress.
“We had walked only a few feet,” McCarthy recalled, “just far enough to be out of sight of the office, when he abruptly stopped, leaned against one of the columns, and began to cry . . . his shoulders heaved as he sobbed, and he took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it against his eyes. He stood there for at least a full minute, until he seemed to get control of himself, straightened up, and walked on without ever saying a word to me. . . .”
Days earlier, sounding “highly agitated,” Nixon had phoned Henry Kissinger and asked if it was time to “draw the wagons around the White House.” Kissinger murmured something noncommittal. Two weeks later the president made a strange remark to press aide Ziegler. “Good God Almighty,” he said, decrying the attacks on him, “. . . the whole hopes of the whole goddamned world, of peace, Ron, you know where they rest? They rest right here in this damned chair. . . . The press has got to realize that . . . whatever they think of me, they’ve got to realize I’m the only one at the present time in this whole wide blinking world that can do a goddamn thing, you know. Keep it from blowing up . . .” “Yes, sir,” Ziegler tactfully responded.
The firing of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Ziegler thought, was Nixon’s lowest emotional moment. “He looked out of the window and said, ‘Ron, it’s over.’ And I knew he was referring to himself and the presidency.” The next day, when the president saw an FBI agent posted in front of Haldeman’s office door to prevent unauthorized removal of documents, he physically shoved the man. Then he summoned an immediate cabinet meeting.
“No sooner had the President sat down,” recalled Kleindienst, then in his last hours as attorney general, “than he began pointing his finger at me in an agitated manner.” Nixon was still raging about the guard he had found posted outside Haldeman’s office, and wanted someone to blame. When the tirade continued, Kleindienst walked out.
Nixon headed for Key Biscayne after the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He reportedly spent his days there sitting silently with Rebozo and his nights, away from Pat, in a converted office some distance from the house.
He seemed in good form a few weeks later, at a White House dinner for prisoners of war recently released from captivity in North Vietnam. Behind the backs of the freed servicemen, though, Nixon is said to have made disparaging remarks. He threw away gifts they had brought him.7
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During the election campaign the previous year, according to one of a fifteen-strong team of CIA psychologists, all but one had concluded that the president “lied in public most of the time.” He had continued to lie, liberally, in 1973. In March he had authorized Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott to say in his name that the White House had nothing to hide. The tapes show he gave a similar false assurance to Billy Graham.
“I don’t give a shit what happens,” Nixon had said to Mitchell on March 22. “I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save it. . . .” He had proffered the sly lawyer’s advice on how to avoid telling the truth without actually committing perjury: “. . . just be damned sure you say ‘I don’t remember; I can’t recall. . . .’ ” He coolly informed Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen: “I don’t lie to people.” Then, the very next day, he told Haldeman that Magruder was “supposed to lie like hell” before the grand jury.
John Ehrlichman likened the Nixon of early 1973 to “some sea anemone which recoils and closes when it is threatened. I began to feel that he didn’t know what the truth was. He didn’t know what he had said, didn’t know what he had done, and the fact was whatever he was saying was truth at that particular moment.”
Nixon actually spoke of resigning that spring, sixteen months before the final fall. “Maybe,” he told Kissinger during one after-dinner phone session, “we’ll even consider the possibility of, frankly, just throwing myself on the sword . . . and letting Agnew take it. What the hell.” Kissinger told him not even to consider it.
Two weeks later, when speechwriter Ray Price was working on the Haldeman-Ehrlichman resignation speech, the president again floated the notion that he too could quit. If Price agreed, Nixon said as if past caring, he should just “write it into the next draft.” The president seemed “unraveled . . . distraught,” Price recalled. “. . . I was very concerned about his state of mind.”
Nixon brought up the subject of resignation twice more in the weeks that followed, both times with his family. Pat urged him to fight on, as did his daughters, arguing that the country needed him.
Nixon wavered between despair and defiance. Ehrlichman, who had dared mention the possibility that he might be impeached, recalled his reaction as having been flat, “like dropping a dead cat into the Kool-Aid.”8 Weeks later Nixon would be claiming to Alexander Haig, Haldeman’s replacement, that he, the president, was “the one person who is totally blameless in this. . . .” “I wouldn’t give a damn,” he told Kissinger, “if they proved red-handed that I was there in the Watergate, you know, and wearing a red beard, collecting the evidence. Hell, I wouldn’t even consider—the President of the United States isn’t going to resign . . . not over this chicken shit stuff.”
The atmosphere at the White House was by now growing increasingly surreal. “I came away feeling very comfortable,” said one senior member of Congress after a meeting with Nixon in the Cabinet Room. “It was obvious that he was trying too hard to appear normal, as if nothing had gone wrong.”
Kissinger noticed in early April that the president was no longer paying proper attention to business. Gone were the plethora of annotations he had habitually appended to memorandums. Once, presented with a document that required him to indicate his preferences, Nixon checked all the boxes.
Kissinger considered what he was seeing nothing less than “the disintegration of a government that a few weeks earlier had appeared invulnerable. The President lived in the stunned lethargy of a man whose nightmares had come true. . . . Like a figure in Greek tragedy, he was fulfilling his own nature and destroying himself.”
A year to the day after the Watergate arrests, when John Dean was about to testify before the Senate, Nixon received the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. He had insisted on going ahead with the summit, Kissinger believed, because “to concede that his ability to govern had been impaired would accelerate the assault on his presidency.” Yet the fact was, in Kissinger’s view, that Watergate had “deprived him of the attention span he needed to give intellectual impetus to SALT,”—the arms control talks.
As Nixon was seeing Brezhnev off at an air base in California, the Soviet leader wandered away unexpectedly to chat with the press. Instead of taking this in stride, Nixon snapped angrily that his counterpart had surely said all he needed to already. It was a gesture of considerable rudeness, a diplomatic discourtesy.
“By the end of the visit,” Kissinger gathered from Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, “the Soviet party understood that the summit had been overshadowed by Watergate. . . . More gravely, the summit began to convince the Sovi
et leaders that Nixon’s problems might turn out to be terminal.” This perception of U.S. weakness at the top, Kissinger has suggested, encouraged the Soviets to risk acting as boldly as they would less than four months later, when war erupted in the Middle East.
The “domestic passion play,” as Kissinger called Watergate, now threatened to enfeeble the nation, not only the man.
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By the early summer of 1973, Nixon’s ultimate fate was no longer really in his hands. Two considerable forces were now moving inexorably forward on the Watergate investigation, and a third was stirring. The Senate committee which was hearing witnesses in the glare of constant publicity, had been joined in the field by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, appointed at the insistence of the Senate Judiciary Committee because of the perception that the White House had been interfering with the course of justice. Cox’s Prosecution Force, unlike a congressional committee, could bring people to trial, though not—it was thought—the president of the United States.
The only process by which a sitting president can be forced from power is impeachment. The House of Representatives is the prosecutor, the Senate the judge and jury. The ultimate penalty is removal from office, and there is no appeal. Only one president, Andrew Johnson, had ever faced impeachment before, in the mid-nineteenth century, and he had been acquitted.9
Impeachment was a virtually unthinkable remedy, but senior men in the Congress were now thinking about it. “The time is going to come,” House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill had said months earlier at a private meeting with Speaker Carl Albert, “when impeachment is going to hit this Congress.” Peter Rodino, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, had thought at the time that O’Neill was wrong. In June 1973, however, he told his chief counsel, Jerry Zeifman, to start preparing for the process—“just in case.”
On July 12 Ervin’s seven senators gathered to discuss a problem: Nixon had sent a letter refusing to produce documents relevant to the investigation, claiming “executive privilege.” The committee decided to respond both by writing to the president, explaining that his position could cause a “fundamental constitutional confrontation,” and requesting a telephone conference between him and Ervin.
Nervous jokes were made as the senators gathered in Ervin’s office to await the telephone call. “Should we all stand when the telephone rings?” one joked. Another responded that they should indeed, and “all sing ‘Bail to the Chief.’ ” Then the president came on the line.
“We could hear Ervin’s side of the conversation,” chief counsel Sam Dash recalled in 1997. “He was talking respectfully about working out some arrangement about the documents and how perhaps he and Senator Baker could go and see Nixon. . . . And then suddenly the senator was saying: ‘But, no, Mr. President, we’re not out to get you, Mr. President. We’re just trying to do our duty.’ Then again: ‘No, we’re not out to get you, Mr. President. . . .’ ”
Ervin concluded the conversation a quarter of an hour later looking flushed and troubled. Nixon had been “shrieking” and “hysterical,” the senator told his colleagues, “emotionally distraught.”
When word came that evening that the president had been taken to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, some of Ervin’s staff assumed he had suffered a mental breakdown. In fact, he had pneumonia, which was to keep him in the hospital for eight days. Meanwhile, within twenty-four hours, came the revelation that doomed him. The Senate committee learned about the existence of the White House tapes.
Twice that spring, in conversations with Haldeman, Nixon had expressed concern about the taping system. “Frankly,” he had said one April morning, “I don’t want to have in the record discussions we’ve had in this room on Watergate.” He and Haldeman agreed that the recording system would henceforth be activated only when the president switched it on. It was a sensible, if belated, precaution, but the taping of compromising conversations continued.
A week later, when Nixon asked if the system was still in place, he was informed it was. Should the tapes be preserved? On balance Nixon seemed to think they should, but he was nervous. “I don’t think it should ever get out that we taped this office,” he told Haldeman in one of their last taped conversations. “Have we got people that are trustworthy on that? I guess we have.”10
It got out in July as the president lay in the hospital, aptly enough on Friday the thirteenth. That day, three Senate staffers sat in the Dirksen Office Building interviewing Haldeman’s former aide Alexander Butterfield, who had recently moved on to a new job.
Ironically it was a Republican, deputy minority counsel Donald Sanders, whose questioning brought the breakthrough that sealed Nixon’s fate. Sanders had two leads to go on. Investigators had come by a White House summary of Nixon’s version of his meetings with Dean, a summary that seemed almost unnaturally detailed and complete—unless it had been prepared from a recording. Dean, moreover, had told how Nixon had behaved oddly at one of their meetings, moving away to a corner and speaking in a virtual whisper. Dean had wondered at the time, he testified, whether the president was secretly taping him, hoping to set him up.
Sanders, a former FBI agent, asked Butterfield if he knew why Nixon would have behaved as Dean had described. “I was hoping you fellows wouldn’t ask me that,” Butterfield slowly replied, then went on to reveal the existence of the president’s recording system. The White House and Camp David, he told his questioners, were positively riddled with microphones.
The investigators knew at once what they had. Staffers of both parties rushed to notify colleagues, and the Republicans made sure the White House was warned that the secret was out. Nixon, delivered the news in the hospital, was appalled. Rose Woods called Butterfield to say: “You dirty bastard. You have contributed to the downfall of the greatest president this country has ever had.”
Unsurprisingly the taping system was shut down almost at once. Democrats hastened to claim that no president of theirs would ever have made such secret recordings, as in fact, several had, if not on the scale of the Nixon operation. Meanwhile a preemptive damage control operation got under way at the Kennedy Library. “Sensitive” tapes were hastily erased, according to Edward Kennedy’s aide Richard Burke.
At the same time, Nixon’s men headed to the hospital to discuss what he should do with his. Some advised destruction, but the lawyers warned that would be obstruction of justice. The president himself reportedly at first suggested having the tapes stored under his bed at the White House. So vast was the accumulated body of recordings, however, that the tapes would not have fitted in the room, let alone under the bed. Given the unfeasibility of that option, Nixon was of two minds as to what to do. “Should have destroyed the tapes after April 30,” he scribbled on the notepad at his bedside. Yet he told Alexander Haig, “I know what I did and didn’t do. I don’t think I knowingly committed any crime. I need those tapes to protect me.”
Today, with the release in recent years of several hundred hours of tape, including many categorized by the archivist of the United States under the heading “Abuse of Power,” it is astonishing that Nixon imagined they might exonerate him.
The Senate committee quickly subpoenaed recordings likely to have evidentiary relevance, as did the special prosecutor. Nixon refused to submit any at all, again claiming executive privilege. A long, long struggle had begun, during which the president’s lawyers were to argue that he had “absolute power to decide what may be disclosed.” “Unlike a monarch,” the special prosecutor was to counter, “the president is not the sovereign.” The Supreme Court would eventually rule that the only thing that was absolute was Nixon’s obligation to obey the law—but that decision was still a year away.
Even before the legal battle began, Special Prosecutor Cox had shared another concern with James Doyle, his aide and spokesman. “Do you think,” he asked, “the president is mentally ill?”
Nixon’s behavior in public on occasion fueled such concerns. At an appearance on a Florida college campus, Newsweek’s Washingto
n bureau chief Mel Elfin reported, the president did a walkabout that “seemed spontaneous but was guided by staff and Secret Service men with radioed stage directions. ‘Turn him right there and have him go to the faculty,’ and Mr. Nixon turned and went to the faculty. ‘Have him wave.’ Nixon waved.”
This was not just the normal management of a chief executive. The president had seemed “zombie-like,” Elfin was to recall. So oddly, indeed, had he acted that the reporter consulted doctors to ask if the symptoms were consistent with the taking of any particular drug.
In August, arriving at New Orleans’ Rivergate Center to address the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the president at first appeared “relaxed and confident.” Then, suddenly, he objected loudly to the presence of newsmen, grabbed Ron Ziegler by the shoulders, spun him around, and propelled his own aide with a hard push toward the photographers.
When Nixon launched into his speech, something was evidently wrong with him. “What was remarkable,” the New York Times correspondent thought, “was his manner on the stage. He paced about, smiling and gesturing in an exaggerated way. He stumbled over his words. . . . His voice fluctuated in volume and speed.”
Some in the audience thought the president was drunk, others that he was on “uppers,” which made him look like “Ed Sullivan on speed.” A spokesman told reporters he was not using any medication. Today, armed with the knowledge that Nixon used Dilantin, it seems more than likely that drug was the culprit. The symptoms are consistent with having taken too high a Dilantin dosage.
The word at the New York Times was that Nixon was seeing a psychiatrist. The therapist they had in mind was Dr. Hutschnecker, with whom Nixon had been in contact since the fifties, and reporters armed with his photograph for identification began looking for him wherever Nixon went. The doctor had in fact written to the president just weeks earlier, expressing deep concern and offering to see him. It is not clear whether Nixon accepted Hutschnecker’s suggestion, but his letter was found in Nixon’s desk after the resignation—a year later.11