The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  Tuesday, August 6. Nixon’s account of the cabinet meeting differs from that of others who were present. In his version he opened by discussing Watergate, offered his gratitude for his colleagues’ support, and asked their opinions on whether he ought to resign. In fact, others agree, he first held forth on “the most important issue confronting the nation”: inflation.

  When he did turn to the topic of Watergate, he said he had rejected the notion of resigning. “What he sought,” thought Kissinger, who was seated to the president’s right, “was a vote of confidence . . . a show of willingness to continue the fight. . . . All he encountered was an embarrassed silence.”

  Then Vice President Ford spoke up, politely making it clear that he expected soon to be president. Nixon replied with more discussion of the economy. Attorney General Saxbe and, even more forcefully, future president George Bush, at the time Republican National Committee chairman, interrupted to say it was time to end the crisis.

  After the cabinet had dispersed, Kissinger returned to tell the President directly, in the Oval Office, that he owed it to the country to resign. “Nixon had never sought my views. Nor did he do so now,” the secretary of state remembered. “He said he appreciated what I said. . . . He would be in touch. Then there was silence.”

  Haig called later that day and told Kissinger that Nixon was, after all, “tilting toward resignation. But it would be a close call; in the evening his family might change his mind again.”

  The only thing that was clear about the situation, at that moment of awesome historic and personal confusion on August 6, was that nothing was yet clear. It was made even less so, and more frightening, by a phone call Tricia’s husband, Edward Cox, made that afternoon.

  Cox, a New York attorney, had flown down to join the family conference over the weekend and then returned to his office in New York. From there he placed a call to the Republican party whip, Senator Robert Griffin. He and Julie’s husband, David, he said, disagreed with their wives and thought their father-in-law should resign. On the Sequoia the night before, however, the president had insisted that he intended to hang on.6

  Cox added more disturbing information. Nixon was drinking, and his mental condition was troubling. He had been “walking the halls” in the White House, “talking to pictures of former presidents, giving speeches and talking to the pictures on the wall.” Finally, Cox confided, he was worried Nixon might commit suicide.

  Nixon would insist in old age that killing himself at that juncture had never crossed his mind. Yet there had been a disquieting moment that same afternoon, Haig was to recall, when the president had said he envied the soldier’s way out: “Leave a man alone in a room with a loaded pistol.” Haig thought the president was speaking figuratively, but he worried nonetheless. “I told the White House doctors,” he revealed in 1995, “if Mr. Nixon had any pills to take them away. . . .”

  David Eisenhower had similar worries. He too reportedly feared his father-in-law might take his life, and for months he had been “waiting for Mr. Nixon to go bananas.”

  Anthony Lukas, one of the most reliable of Watergate chroniclers, quoted a White House aide who compared Nixon in the last days to Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny: “given to sudden rages, to wild speculations, terrible doubts. . . .”

  Suspicion and doubt sow suspicion and doubt. The uncertain days of August 1974 sparked unprecedented precautions, the logical outcome of months of anxiety about the president’s mental stability.

  _____

  The concern had been mounting since the firing the previous year of Special Prosecutor Cox, followed within days by the nuclear alert over the Middle East War.

  “A new element crept into our calculations about the effect our actions might have on the president,” Assistant Prosecutor Ben-Veniste remembered. “If there was a streak of instability there, then it meant we would have to be extra careful to keep from pushing Mr. Nixon over some invisible line into disaster—maybe disaster for all of us.”

  Leon Jaworski, Cox’s successor, had a variant of the same worry when he warned grand jurors against indicting the president. “He gave us some very strange arguments,” deputy foreman Harold Evans recalled. “He gave us the trauma of the country, and he’s the commander in chief of the armed forces, and what happens if he surrounded the White House with his armed forces?”

  By the summer of 1974 the apprehension had spread to Congress, focusing on two issues in particular. Was the president so disturbed that he might start a war? Also, might he attempt to use the military to keep himself in office? A group of legislators, headed by Jacob Javits, the Republican senator from New York, even consulted the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Bertram Brown.

  “I had breakfast with a half dozen senators,” Brown recalled. “It was to talk about these issues, whether he would lose his cool. . . . Whether he was going crazy, becoming psychotic, whether he would start a war. I gave them some clues on what to watch out for. The clues were irrational statements, disappearing—not knowing where he was—and not eating.”

  Alan Cranston, senator from California, had become alarmed when, as the impeachment process got under way, Nixon began courting members of the House, inviting them on his yacht. The president had spoken, Cranston heard, of how he could press a button and in twenty minutes fifty million Russians would be dead, and—after that—how many Americans?

  Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, who was on the Armed Services Committee, worried that Nixon might use the army to seal off the Capitol. “He made sure there was somebody in the office twenty-four hours a day,” Hughes’s legislative aide Margaret Shannon recalled. “It was sort of like before World War Two. You knew something was coming down the pike. You just had no idea what Nixon would do. . . .”

  As early as June, when Nixon was en route to the Middle East, Gerald Ford’s aides had begun considering how a transfer of power might work—or not work. Close Ford associate Philip Buchen and Clay Whitehead, director of the White House Office of Telecommunications, held one such conversation in a car to ensure privacy. What if Nixon was impeached and convicted in the Senate but refused to give up power? What if he lost his mind and tried to use the military to stay in office? The two men wondered if they should raise these dire possibilities with the secretary of defense, James Schlesinger.

  In fact, the secretary was already alert to such fears. His attention had been drawn to the president’s state of mind by a phone call a few months earlier from Joseph Laitin, the public affairs spokesman of the Office of Management and Budget, based in the Executive Office Building, just across from the White House.

  In an interview with the author Laitin vividly recalled the encounter with Nixon in the spring of 1974 that prompted him to phone Schlesinger. “I was on my way over to the West Wing of the White House to see Treasury Secretary George Shultz,” Laitin said. “I’d reached the basement, near the Situation Room. And just as I was about to ascend the stairway, a guy came running down the stairs two steps at a time. He had a frantic look on his face, wild-eyed, like a madman. And he bowled me over, so I kind of lost my balance. And before I could pick myself up, six athletic-looking young men leapt over me, pursuing him. I suddenly realized that they were Secret Service agents, that I’d been knocked over by the president of the United States.”

  Laitin was so shocked at Nixon’s appearance that he postponed the meeting with Shultz and returned to his office. “I sat there stunned,” he said, “and I thought, you know, ‘That madman I have just seen has his finger on the red button.’ I had a number for Schlesinger, a phone that only he would answer. I called him, and I asked him if the president could order the use of atomic weapons without going through the secretary of defense. I said, ‘If I were in your position, I would want to know who the nearest combat-ready troops were who would respond to the president’s wishes to surround the White House. I would want to know what the next nearest combat-ready division was, which would not only be able to overcome
them but also respond only to the chain of command. That’s what I have to say.’ Then there was just a click at the other end, as the secretary of defense hung up.”7

  A single call from a friend, describing a president apparently gone momentarily berserk, would not on its own have prompted Schlesinger to take any precautions. Yet his position placed him in line of a constant flow of information from all manner of sources. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Zumwalt, had told him of Nixon’s bizarre diatribe to the Joint Chiefs the previous Christmas, when he had seemed to be feeling them out, to determine “whether in a crunch there was support to keep him in power.”8

  Given his own access to the president, Schlesinger also had firsthand experience of his behavior. More than once, according to Zumwalt, Schlesinger himself said privately that Nixon was behaving in a “paranoid” way.

  Around the time of the Laitin phone call the secretary had begun to make certain he stayed more than usually informed of the goings-on in the Oval Office. Then, in late July, he asked for a meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force General George Brown.

  “I told him,” the former secretary recalled in an interview with the author, “that every order that would come from the White House had to come to me directly, immediately upon receipt. . . . The message had to be gotten through that there were not to be any extraordinary measures taken. The message did get through.”

  General Brown later confirmed that the conversation with the defense secretary had taken place. Schlesinger had asked “if the House voted impeachment and the Senate trial process was long and drawn out and going unfavorably for the president, could the president get an order down to the end of the military establishment without our knowing it?” Brown thought that the “normal process would prevent any such happening because troop orders must go to a high Pentagon command center. . . . I would have it in two minutes, and I’d be in the secretary’s office in thirty seconds.”

  After the conference with Schlesinger, the general briefed the Joint Chiefs. Admiral James Holloway, who had recently succeeded Zumwalt as chief of naval operations, recalled the scene. “Brown’s hands were shaking. He told us, ‘I’ve just come from the office of the secretary of defense. I made some notes. I want to read them to you.’ What the secretary wanted was an agreement from the Joint Chiefs, all of them, that nobody would take any action or execute any orders, without all of them agreeing to it.”

  “General Brown said they were afraid of some sort of coup involving the military,” a former member of the Joint Chiefs told the author on condition of anonymity. “We almost fell off our chairs. If anyone was thinking of a coup, it was not anyone in uniform. None of us wanted to conjecture on ‘What if we get a screwy order from the president?’ We knew it would take care of itself. We had in the JCS five people with an average of forty years’ experience, and they are picked for their good judgment. . . . They would have found a way to make sure the right thing happened.”

  The “right thing” under the circumstances was to abide by the provisions of the National Security Act, which required that the president transmit all military orders through the defense secretary, who in turn would relay them to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “I did assure myself,” Schlesinger has said of the episode, “that there would be no question about the proper constitutional and legislative chain of command. And there never was any question.”

  The secretary was also concerned to ensure that the system not be circuited, that “no idiot commander somewhere was misled.” He wondered in particular about the air force, in part because of admiration for Nixon among its ranks for his role in effecting the release of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam. Most had been downed pilots.

  As he considered how steady or otherwise senior officers of the various services might be, Schlesinger wondered in particular about General Robert Cushman. As a brigadier general during Nixon’s vice presidency Cushman had been his national security adviser. During the presidency, as deputy CIA director, he had been involved in providing agency facilities to Watergate burglar Howard Hunt.9 By the summer of 1974 he was commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, an appointment that, unusual for the corps, was seen as a political appointment. In that capacity he now served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “General Cushman was a pleasant but weak man,” Schlesinger is said to have commented privately. “He might have acquiesced to a request from the White House for action. The last thing I wanted was to have the marines ordered to the White House and then have to bring in the army to confront the marines. It would have been a bloody mess.”

  Schlesinger also found himself calling for answers to the questions his friend Laitin had asked in the spring. The nearest significant troop concentrations to the White House, he learned, were marine units under Cushman’s command, one at a barracks on the outskirts of Washington—at Eighth and I streets SE—another at a facility in Quantico, Virginia.

  The secretary was also interested in the mobility of the army’s 82nd Airborne Division, which had been secretly brought in to protect the White House during antiwar demonstrations early in the presidency. How swiftly could the 82nd move troops to Washington from its base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina? A significant force, Schlesinger learned, could be in the capital in about five hours.

  When Pentagon correspondents first reported the gist of these precautions, soon after Nixon’s fall, President Ford would move quickly to squelch them. “No measures were actually taken,” a spokesman claimed. During research for this book, however, the author was told otherwise by a former army operations intelligence specialist named Barry Toll.

  A much-decorated veteran, Toll was in 1974 serving on one of the battle staff units, known in the military as doomsday teams, on permanent standby to brief the president and top commanders in the event a military crisis should “go nuclear.” In August 1974 he was based at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, with the Worldwide Military Command and Control System.

  “The last week or so of the Nixon administration,” Toll said in 2000, “we received a top secret, ‘eyes only,’ limited distribution order effectively instructing us not to obey the president—on anything, not just nuclear, until further notice. The order came in as topmost priority, Flash Override. It was signed, at the Joint Chiefs’ insistence, as I understood it, by not one but two cabinet officers. The names I recall as having signed were Secretary Schlesinger and Secretary Kissinger. There had been similar orders in the past, up to five that I saw over the months, at times when, as I understood it, the president had been drunk.”

  While Toll testified on elements of these events to a Senate committee, his account remains uncorroborated.10 Information from Henry Kissinger, meanwhile, indicates that consideration was given to using the 82nd Airborne in the last tense week of the presidency.

  “Haig was in touch with me every day,” the former secretary of state has written. “Usually I started my day at the White House in a brief meeting with him. On Thursday, August 1, he said matters were heading towards resignation, though the Nixon family was violently opposed. On Friday, August 2, he told me Nixon was digging in his heels; it might be necessary to put the 82nd Airborne Division around the White House to protect the President. This I said was nonsense; a presidency could not be conducted from a White House ringed by bayonets. Haig said he agreed completely . . . he simply wanted me to have a feel for the kinds of ideas being canvassed.”

  “The end of the Nixon presidency was an extraordinary episode in American history,” former Secretary Schlesinger said in 2000. “I am proud of my role in protecting the integrity of the chain of command. You could say it was synonymous with protecting the Constitution.”

  In his dry way the chairman of the Joint Chiefs agreed that Schlesinger had acted correctly. “I think,” General Brown later commented, “the secretary had a responsibility to raise these sort of matters.”11

  Mercifully, nothing untoward happened.

  _____

  Wednesday, A
ugust 7. Alexander Haig was feeling simultaneously relieved, worried, and angry: relieved because the president had been speaking as though he were really going to resign; worried, because he had received word that Barry Goldwater and other Republican leaders were about to confront Nixon in person and “demand” that he resign; and angry about what he viewed as dark machinations within Congress.

  “Do you know where the coup was coming from?” Haig was still saying in outraged tones two decades later. “The legislature! The Congress! Not from the military.”12 In August 1974 Nixon thought so too and might yet have balked at resignation if pressured.

  “Senator, you simply cannot let this [congressional maneuver] happen,” Haig told Goldwater at a hastily arranged meeting. “This is a banana republic solution. . . . If the President goes, he must go on his own terms, by due process of law, as the result of his own uncoerced decision.” Goldwater promised that he and his eminent associates would not so much as mention the possibility of resignation when they met with Nixon.

  Consequently, when Nixon received Senator Goldwater and two colleagues, no one mentioned the real reason for the meeting. “We sat there in the Oval Room,” Goldwater remembered, “and the president acted like he just played golf and had a hole in one. You’d never think the guy’s tail was in a crack.”

  Nixon put his feet up on the desk and prattled on about Lyndon Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower and what fine men they had been. Then, almost casually, he asked “how things stood in the Senate.” The senators told him the numbers in an impeachment vote were likely to go decisively against him. The president stared up at the presidential seal on the ceiling and murmured that he seemed to have run out of options. The senators then left.