It was a masterful, composed performance, with none of the strange gestures or slurring that had marred other appearances. Nixon assured the nation that “those materials, together with those already made available, will tell it all.”
The story they told, however, was not the complete one. The transcripts had been edited, under the active supervision of the president himself. While it mattered little that they were peppered with the phrase “expletive deleted,” the version he offered was incomplete. The Judiciary Committee was swiftly able to establish that fact, for the transcribed conversations included several that the committee had already received in audio form. A comparison of the versions revealed troubling discrepancies, as in the following:
Transcript for March 22, 1973, as released by Nixon
PRESIDENT: Well, all John Mitchell is arguing then, is that now we use flexibility in order to get off the cover-up line.
Judiciary Committee transcript
PRESIDENT: but now—what—all that John Mitchell is arguing, then, is that now, we, we use flexibility.
DEAN: That’s correct.
PRESIDENT: In order to get on with the cover-up plan.
A twenty-five-hundred-word segment had also been deleted from the transcript of the same tape, one that included the now-infamous passage in which Nixon had ordered: “I want you all to stonewall it . . . cover up, or anything else.” The deletion was made at his personal behest.
The effect of the release was wholly negative. Ford, the new vice president, had previously come out strongly on Nixon’s behalf. Now he declared, “The time has come for persons in political life to avoid the pragmatic dodge which seeks to obscure the truth.”
The Republican leader in the Senate, Hugh Scott, called the released material “deplorable, disgusting, immoral.” Senator Goldwater underscored a glaring sin of omission. “The thing that hurt the American people,” he said, “is that no place in these tapes does the President bang on the desk and say, ‘Gentlemen, this has to stop, and stop now.’ ”
The Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, told Nixon bluntly that he had failed to comply with its subpoena and issued new ones. When he turned them down, they warned that his continued defiance “might constitute a ground for impeachment.” On May 9, in room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the committee’s thirty-eight members took their seats and began to hear the evidence. The countdown to the end of the Nixon presidency had begun.
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As the country grew jittery rumors flew, some of them baseless. Word went around Washington that the president had visited a psychiatric hospital while on a visit to Phoenix. When he summoned Gerald Ford to a private meeting, resignation was deemed imminent. Nixon failed to oblige. When the yacht Sequoia became stranded short of its dock, and Nixon used the tops of submerged pilings to cross to dry land, wags observed that he could walk on water.
In June, when Nixon left Washington on a grueling five-nation trip to the Middle East, it was difficult for him to walk at all. On a stopover at Salzburg, Austria, Haig found him alone in his bedroom with his swollen, discolored left leg resting on a chair. He was suffering from a resurgence of phlebitis, the painful inflammation of a vein he had suffered in the Far East a decade earlier. Painful, and also dangerous, for the ailment can result in a blood clot’s breaking loose and causing a fatal embolism. Nixon was flouting medical advice in traveling at all.
“I thought I would be buried in the shadow of the Pyramids,” he later admitted to Dr. Hutschnecker, the psychotherapist. Dr. Tkach, his personal physician, who was at his side in Egypt, worried not only about his patient’s phlebitis but about his reckless behavior. He plunged into crowds and rode in open cars in one of the most dangerous, volatile regions of the world. “You can’t protect a president,” one of the Secret Service agents on the trip commented dryly, “who wants to kill himself.”
Skeptics criticized the journey as “impeachment diplomacy,” an attempt to distract attention from the deepening trouble at home. Kissinger thought Nixon was “beyond hoping that it might deflect his critics. . . . Deep down, he must have realized that matters were out of control.” The reception Nixon received in the Middle East was tumultuous and lavish, but he was dogged by depression. John Osborne observed a moment when “Mrs. Nixon and President and Mrs. Sadat stepped away from Mr. Nixon and he was alone upon a terrace, his back to the Pyramids. . . . We saw him, but he didn’t see us. His gaze and his thoughts were far away, and sadness was all about him.”
Kissinger, for his part, discerned the diplomatic downside. “We sensed in the exaggerated solicitude of our hosts,” he recalled, “the pity that is the one sentiment a head of state can never afford to evoke.” Kissinger realized that lame as Nixon was politically as well as literally, “he could not provide what was most needed: a reliable guide to the long-term thrust of American foreign policy.”
After the briefest return home, the president set off to the Soviet Union. At a stopover in Brussels, reporters heard he was being visited at the Hilton by a mysterious Mr. Christopher. It turned out to be Bebe Rebozo, smuggled into the hotel by a back entrance. Rebozo’s recent advice to Nixon, he had told the press days earlier, was that he should resign: “It’s like a fight manager saying, ‘You betta get outta there, they’re beating your brains out.’ ” In fact, Rebozo swung back and forth on the resignation issue.
The Soviet trip, Nixon’s third summit meeting with Brezhnev, bordered on the surreal. He stayed in the sumptuous Kremlin apartments that had once housed the czars, huddled with the Soviet leader at his grand residence on the Black Sea coast, and—in a rare break in the schedule—found time to dine alone in the moonlight with Pat.
“Since she was a very little girl,” Nixon would recall Pat telling him that night, “when she looked at the moon, she didn’t see a man in the moon or an old lady in the moon—always the American flag. . . . She pointed it out to me and, sure enough, I could see an American flag . . . of course, you can see in the moon whatever you want to see. . . .”
During the Black Sea phase of the trip, the UPI’s Helen Thomas became certain there was something “seriously wrong” with the president. “He walked slowly, pacing himself as if he were in a daze. All the life seemed to have drained out of him. He appeared to be only going through the motions.”
“No mention of Watergate was ever made during the discussions,” Viktor Sukhodrev, Brezhnev’s former interpreter, said in the nineties. “Nixon was clutching at the [sic] straw, trying to show that he alone could really talk to the Soviets, trying as hard as he could to prove that he was the real expert in foreign affairs.”
The president understood, Kissinger thought, “that the biggest obstacle to serious negotiation was the Soviet conviction that if he survived politically he would lack authority, but that in all likelihood he would not survive.”
Nixon fumbled statistics and had trouble concentrating. He failed on occasion to observe the special vigilance that any politician, businessman, or journalist had to exercise in those days in the Soviet Union. As an old hand, he knew it was essential to be alert to the likely presence of hidden microphones.
One night, he recalled, he did remember the drill and made a point of meeting with Kissinger and Haig in his car, “where we could talk without being bugged.” At other times, according to former KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, he was careless, so loose-lipped that the Soviet agents responsible for surveilling him were decorated after the summit. The last of the Nixon tapes ultimately may be not those generated in the White House but those preserved in the archives of Russian intelligence.
Foreign affairs expertise had been Nixon’s greatest talent, and the slippage in 1973 and 1974 was in professional terms the most significant aspect of his fall. Two significant events had occurred in the space of a few weeks that spring, a left-wing army coup in Portugal and India’s first nuclear test. United States intelligence had failed to anticipate either, a fact that should have aroused presidential ire and a demand for acti
on. Yet the CIA director of the day, William Colby, recalled no response from Nixon at all.
Nor did Nixon pay any serious attention when, two weeks after his return from Moscow, a major problem erupted in southern Europe. A coup in Cyprus was followed by a Turkish invasion. Then democratic forces toppled the government in Greece—the junta Nixon had long favored. Turkey next mounted a second invasion of Cyprus, establishing a new statelet that remains internationally unrecognized to this day.
This grave crisis would persist for weeks and involve complex decisions about the status of American nuclear weapons in the region. Yet Nixon remained in retreat at San Clemente, paying insufficient attention. He spent only six days of his last six weeks in office at the White House.
While in California he found time to express sadness over the death of Dizzy Dean, the former baseball star, and to address by telephone a Washington meeting in support of himself. The State Department, though, found communications with the Western White House blocked—priority was being given to heavy traffic on Watergate. The president was preoccupied with his personal crisis, as Kissinger saw it, and “in no position to concentrate. . . .”3
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The last moment of good cheer for the Nixon family, in Tricia’s judgment, was a dinner party with old friends in Bel Air on July 21. “Ever since,” she wrote in her diary, “something was lost. . . . At times it was like being in the eye of a hurricane . . . quite calm, quite still. . . . You recall a time without ‘Watergate’ or when Watergate simply meant a rather extravagant place to live. An isolated moment. But then your eyes open and the darkness you see is the darkness of the storm.”
Far away in the capital, the Senate Committee’s final report was issued. Twenty-three-hundred damaging pages long, it called Watergate “one of America’s most tragic happenings,” reflecting “an alarming indifference displayed by some in high public office or position to concepts of morality and public responsibility and trust.”
The House Judiciary Committee subsequently released five volumes of evidence, amounting to 3,888 pages. It presented a stark chronology, without comment, of a widespread abuse of power.
Nixon, no longer discussing the substance of Watergate, had begun doing his arithmetic, counting Judiciary Committee heads. Would key Republicans, and southern Democrats effectively controlled by George Wallace, vote his way? On July 23, when news came that the southern Democrats were defecting, Nixon called Wallace. “George,” he said to the man who, we now know, suspected Nixon’s men might have played a role in the 1972 attempt to assassinate him, “I’m just calling to ask if you’re still with me.” “No, Mr. President,” Wallace replied, “I’m afraid I’m not.”
The numbers were against him, and Nixon acknowledged as much to Haig. There remained one other crucial unknown. How would the Supreme Court rule on the special prosecutor’s demand for sixty-four further White House tapes? At midmorning on July 24 the justices announced their unanimous decision in the case of United States of America v. Richard Nixon, President of the United States: He was to turn over the sixty-four tapes “forthwith.”
It was shortly after 9:00 A.M. in California when Haig gave him the news. Woken from sleep, Nixon reacted at first with apparent calm. Later he reportedly “exploded,” cursing Warren Burger, whom he had named chief justice, and his other Supreme Court appointees.
When Haig called Watergate counsel Fred Buzhardt, Nixon took the phone for a moment. “There is one tape in particular that I want your opinion on,” he told the lawyer. “It’s the one for June 23, 1972. I want you to listen to it right away, then call Al and tell him what you think.” The June 23 recording was the one on which Nixon had told Haldeman—three times and just a week after the Watergate arrests—that it was “fine” to get the CIA to pressure the FBI to stop key Watergate inquiries.4
Buzhardt did call back after listening to the tape, with a blunt message. “This is the smoking gun,” he said, clear evidence of obstruction of justice. Haig remembered how seven weeks earlier Nixon had emerged from listening to the tapes on his own with the curt instruction “No one is to listen to these tapes. No one—understand, Al? No one. Not the lawyers. No one. Lock ’em up.”
Haig had suspected their potential even then. “I was overwhelmed by feelings of doubt and apprehension. Something fundamental had changed. There was something bad on the tapes, and Nixon had discovered it. . . . I had no idea what it might be.”
Now he understood. Nixon had known. He had long known that this was evidence that could destroy him, and had hidden it even from his own people. He had been found out, and it was only a matter of time until all the world and—most to the point—the members of Congress who would vote on his impeachment, realized the truth.
Visiting Nixon two days after the Supreme Court’s decision, Kissinger was appalled by the change in him. “His coloring was pallid. Though he seemed composed, it clearly took every ounce of his energy to conduct a serious conversation. He sat on the sofa in his office looking over the Pacific, his gaze and thought focused on some distant prospect eclipsing the issues we were bringing before him.”
Except for attending one dinner party, the president had not left the compound since arriving two weeks earlier. He had spent much of that time staring at the ocean and reading a biography of the ill-fated Emperor Napoleon. Nixon was on the beach, changing after a swim, when a new phone call came in—the call that conclusively spelled his own fall from power.
In Washington the House Judiciary Committee had voted on the first of five articles of impeachment. It charged that Nixon had violated his constitutional oath, “prevented, obstructed and impeded the administration of justice . . . acted in a manner contrary to his trust . . . to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
The representatives on the committee had passed the resolution by a majority of more than two to one. They would also vote for Article II, stating that Nixon had “repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens . . . misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service . . . to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security. . . unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency . . . knowingly misused the executive power.”
Article III, charging Nixon with obstructing the work of the House of Representatives by disobeying its subpoenas, also passed. Two other charges, related to the secret bombing of Cambodia, tax evasion, and personal corruption, failed.
As a result of the conduct described in Articles I, II, and III, the resolutions decreed that “Richard Nixon warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”
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Nixon had always fought, always wanted his name to be synonymous with never giving up. Would he fight now and allow his case to go forward to the Senate for a prolonged trial?
On seeing the state of the man the day after the Supreme Court decision, Kissinger and Haig quietly agreed that the end of the presidency was inevitable. Nixon should resign, but they knew it would be folly to push him.5
Nixon flew back to Washington with Pat on July 28. The next day, alone in his office in the Executive Office Building, he phoned to ask John Mitchell his advice. “Dick,” said Mitchell, himself facing trial for Watergate crimes, “make the best deal you can and resign.”
The next day, Tuesday, Nixon sat listening to the June 23 tape again, still convinced—he said—that he had done no wrong. His attorneys, however, told him he was mistaken. Unable to sleep that night, Nixon rose at 4:00 A.M. and sat scribbling down his options. “There were strong arguments against resigning,” he was to write, the first of them being that he was “not a quitter.” He could not face “ending my career as a weak man. . . .”
On the other hand, Nixon mused, perhaps he should resign for the sake of the country and the Republican party. In the end, though, he turned the notes over and wrote: “End career as
fighter.” It seemed “the right thing to do.”
Hours later the president asked Haig in turn for his view on the June 23 recording. “Once this tape gets out,” the general told him, “it’s over.” Summoned to the presence again the next day, Thursday, Haig found Nixon looking “thin, battered, like a stroke victim.” He now agreed he would resign, and soon. Haig was to “tell Ford to be ready.”
As Haig met with the vice president, Nixon went back to the tapes. That evening, during a river cruise on the Sequoia with Bebe Rebozo, he again said he planned to resign. “You can’t do it,” Rebozo retorted now. “It’s the wrong thing to do. . . . You just don’t know how many people are still for you.” Nixon promised “one last try to mount a defense” and said he would consult the family.
He told Julie first, not Pat, that he expected to resign. When she sought out her mother afterward, Julie recalled, “A look of alarm spread across her face, and she asked, ‘But why?’ ” Pat wept, but only for a moment. Then she canceled plans to buy new china for the White House and started packing.
That night, in conclave with Rebozo and his family in the Lincoln Room, Nixon handed out transcripts of the June 23 recording. After they had read it and sat silently around him, he asked if the experience of the presidency had been worthwhile. They assured him that it had.
Pat, however, told him after the others were gone that she—like Rebozo—favored “fighting to the finish.” “Quite late that night,” Haig recalled, “he called me at home and told me that he had changed his mind. . . . ‘Let them impeach me,’ he said. ‘We’ll fight it out to the end.’ ”
So it went through the weekend of August 3 and 4. More advice came from the daughters, and reportedly from their husbands, to fight on. Haig and the presidential speechwriters struggled to draft Option A and Option B speeches. The incriminating June 23 transcript was publicly released on the Monday, to predictable outrage. Nixon took another cruise on the presidential yacht, with the family this time, then called a cabinet meeting for the following morning. He had another sleepless night.