The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  He apparently had not noticed what Libya’s charismatic, ambitious strongman Colonel Muammar Gadhafi, said when he’d expropriated the holdings of Occidental Petroleum in 1971: “People who have lived without oil for 5,000 years can live without it again for a few years in order to attain their legitimate rights.” And what with the new War Powers Act, and America’s anxiety about getting into “another Vietnam,” American saber rattling did not resound like it used to.

  In the Sinai Desert, on October 14 and 15, Israel’s American tanks bulled past Egypt’s Soviet ones, ferried across the Suez Canal to crush the surface-to-air missile batteries. On October 16, the first Israeli troops poured into Egyptian territory, President Anwar Sadat asked the Soviet Union to convene the United Nations to seek a cease-fire—and the Arab states in OPEC declared themselves the world economy’s new fist, unilaterally raising their price for crude oil from $3.00 to $5.11 per barrel. The next day they announced they would sell no oil to the United States, and that until Israel withdrew from occupied Palestinian territories, they would reduce production altogether by 5 percent a month.

  Nixon, unimpressed, asked Congress for $2.2 billion to pay for continued resupply of Israel. On Saturday, October 20, the fighting entered its fifteenth day and a CBS reporter asked Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger about the soldiers being sent to Israeli airports to help unload American matériel: “Could this become another Vietnam? . . . Mr. Secretary, isn’t there a danger, in sending these dozens of American military personnel to Israel, that they for some reason might be captured and then it would be necessary to send more U.S. personnel to rescue them?”

  Then the confrontation back home took an astonishing turn.

  ARCHIBALD COX WAS EVERYTHING RICHARD Nixon hated: a know-it-all Kennedy-loving Harvard professor. At every opportunity in the tapes case, with moralistic hauteur, Cox described the president’s obduracy as just the sort of thing one would expect from a crook with a guilty conscience. His argument was that the tapes should simply be turned over to himself and the grand jury, with no intervening review by any judge; his briefs dismissed “executive privilege” concerns as irrelevant “where there is reason to believe that the deliberations may have involved criminal conduct.” He also kneecapped the argument that the president was protecting the effectiveness of future presidents; Cox pointed out that “the interest in free discussion by government officials cannot outweigh the interest in the integrity of the government itself.” Indeed he eviscerated any notion that principle had anything to do with the president’s arguments at all. Nixon claimed that what would collapse all future expectations of Oval Office privacy was the very act of anyone, ever, at any time listening to these conversations. But, noted Cox, hadn’t Bob Haldeman, in his opening statement to the Ervin Committee, revealed that the president had loaned him tapes of Oval Office conversations? Haldeman had told the committee, claiming the tape recorder as his silent witness, that it was true that the president told Dean they could raise a million dollars to pay off the burglars—and that the president had added, “but that would be wrong.” (TAPES CLEAR NIXON—HALDEMAN, the headlines had read.) Pointed out Cox: “Not even a President can be allowed to select some accounts of a conversation for public disclosure and then to frustrate further grand jury inquires [sic] by withholding the best evidence of what actually took place.” The point was both devastating and humiliating.

  After making that argument, Cox left Judge Sirica’s chambers wondering why Nixon, if he wasn’t involved, wouldn’t just turn over the tapes to prove himself innocent. Publicly, he said, “There is no reason to believe that respondent”—that is, Richard Nixon—“would disregard a final binding order fixing legal responsibility.” Even Richard Nixon would never summon men at arms to assert his authority over another branch of the government. That would be dictatorship. That would be unimaginable.

  On the morning of Saturday, October 20, John Dean’s appearance in Sirica’s courtroom to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and of defrauding the United States was knocked off the front page by news that the president would be skipping his appointed showdown with the Supreme Court. In a late-night secret Oval Office meeting, said the news, Howard Baker and Sam Ervin had arrived at a compromise: instead of Judge Sirica getting to listen to tapes he would read a summary prepared by the president. “The authenticity of this summary,” the president explained in a public statement, “would be assured by giving unlimited access to the tapes to a very distinguished man, highly respected by all elements in American life for his integrity, his fairness, and his patriotism, so that the man could satisfy himself that the statement prepared by me did indeed include fairly and accurately anything on the tapes that might be regarded as related to Watergate.”

  That “very distinguished man,” Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, whom Nixon kept referring to as “Judge” Stennis, was nearly deaf and seventy-two years old. He had supported the president down the line on just about all his controversial decisions, and knew next to nothing about Watergate developments because he had spent most of summer recuperating from a mugging on a street outside the Capitol early in the year—a detail that granted the president the added maudlin advantage of sympathy: nobody in the polite little village that was Washington, D.C., would dare challenge a damned thing Stennis said.

  In a statement published in the Saturday morning papers, written in the rueful tones of a man determined to protect the rights of a poor, pitiable, helpless victim from her traducer, Nixon explained, “The attorney general made what he regarded as a reasonable proposal for compromise and one that goes beyond what any president in history has offered.” He said Archibald Cox had had it within his power to end this excruciating constitutional crisis all on his own, because if only he had accepted this magnanimous offer “there would be no further attempt by the special prosecutor to subpoena still more tapes or other presidential papers of a similar nature.” But Cox, villainously, had refused. “Though I have not wished to intrude upon the independence of the special prosecutor, I have felt it necessary to direct him, as an employe of the executive branch, to make no further attempts by judicial process to obtain tapes, notes, or memoranda of presidential conversations.”

  An “employe of the executive branch.” What did that mean? Was it a threat?

  Yes, it was. The president had presumed that the backstopping of Ervin and Baker would be enough to rid him of this meddlesome priest, and this irksome tapes business, once and for all. Instead, on the evening of Saturday, October 20, he had to order a massacre.

  THE GRAY-HAIRED HARVARD PROFESSOR IN the bunched suit stepped up to the press conference microphones. Networks broke into the soap operas. This show was more melodramatic anyway. Arms folded, Archibald Cox said that to comply with the president’s orders “would violate my solemn pledge to the Senate and the country.” He then explained that the president, in “refusing to comply with the court decrees,” was selling the nation a bill of goods: that a summary of tape contents would probably not even be admissible in court—which may have been Nixon’s point in insisting on summaries. He promised to continue court efforts to obtain the tapes themselves, and said that if the president refused to comply with his orders, he would find him in contempt of court.

  In Syria, Israeli forces reached within ten miles of Damascus. In Oslo, the announcement was made that Henry Kissinger (but not Richard Nixon) would share the Nobel Peace Price with his North Vietnamese negotiating partner, Le Duc Tho. And in Washington, Chief of Staff Alexander Haig relayed to Attorney General Elliot Richardson a direct order from the President of the United States. On D-day in 1944, Richardson had been a twenty-three-year-old platoon leader who pulled to safety a fellow officer shot in a minefield. He later recalled that the decision he now faced felt equally stressful. He had been ordered by the president to fire Archibald Cox. He decided to refuse it, and resign instead.

  Alexander Haig, who everyone remembered had shown up in his general’s unifo
rm on his first day as chief of staff, like he was Pinochet or something, telephoned Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, now acting attorney general, with the same demand: “This is an order from your Commander-in-Chief.” Ruckelshaus refused and resigned, too.

  The acting attorney general was now a man named Robert Bork, who wore a funny little beard and was so far to the right he had opposed outlawing racial segregation. He followed orders. The word went forth: the office of special prosecutor had been abolished as an independent entity. The TV cameras then recorded an unbelievable scene: FBI agents, acting on a White House directive, sealed the prosecutor’s office—thousands of pages of evidentiary documents, interview tapes, painstakingly prepared reconstructions of criminal and near-criminal events, the entire bureaucratic infrastructure of the investigation, all the prosecution’s evidence for every last Watergate trial from lowly Bud Krogh to mighty John Mitchell: now it was impounded, off-limits to anyone.

  Men at arms, summoned by the President of the United States asserting his authority over another coequal branch of the government; the most sensitive and crucial inquiry in the constitutional history of the republic—cut down, perhaps for good. To the suspicious circles it felt as though a fascist takeover was imminent.

  NBC’S ANCHORMAN: “THE COUNTRY TONIGHT is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history.” The head of the American Bar Association said Nixon was waging “an intolerable assault upon the courts, our first line of defense against tyranny and arbitrary power.” A former ABA head, the prominent Houston lawyer Leon Jaworski, who had been considered friend enough to the president that his name was suggested to head his defense, said the FBI’s actions “resembled those of the Gestapo.” Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia said that “this sounds like a Brown Shirt operation thirty years ago.” Senator Robert Packwood of Oregon, a Republican, said that “the office of the Presidency does not carry with it a license to destroy justice in America.” Edmund Muskie came out for impeachment. And Sam Ervin now revealed the president had deceived him into accepting the Stennis compromise—privately claiming to Ervin that the deal was for verbatim transcripts, then turning around and telling the public it was for summaries.

  Archibald Cox, too, rushed out a statement: “Whether we shall continue to be a government of laws and not men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people to decide.”

  On Sunday, as Israeli forces encircled the Egyptian Third Army and pushed within forty miles of Cairo, and Henry Kissinger flew to Moscow for emergency discussions about the Middle East crisis, Western Union offices in Washington were flooded by more than a million telegrams. Senator James Buckley, William F. Buckley’s brother, and three conservative Republican House members announced that 90 percent of their constituents wanted the president fired. HONK FOR IMPEACHMENT, read signs in Lafayette Park; the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue became bedlam as motorists obliged them. “If he didn’t hear,” an observer said, “he had cotton in his ears.” A thirty-four-year-old couple from Baltimore soon ran out of their supply of three thousand impeachment bumper stickers. “We both voted for Nixon because he had a secret plan to end the war,” one told the AP. “Now he’s got a secret plan to end the Justice Department.”

  The American Civil Liberties Union took out an ad explaining: “Why it is necessary to impeach President Nixon and how it can be done.” Its membership rolls exploded. Ralph Nader announced a grassroots campaign for impeachment. Seventeen law school deans jointly demanded appointment of a new special prosecutor. At the AFL-CIO’s annual convention, nine hundred delegates adopted a resolution demanding impeachment or resignation—a humiliation indeed: AFL-CIO chief George Meany had been a key recruit toward Nixon’s dream of a post–New Deal “New Majority.” The next day Meany released a statement averring, “The events of the last several days prove the dangerous emotional instability of the President,” and that he should either resign or be impeached.

  Since early in April, when then–attorney general Mitchell defiantly told senators if they wanted White House aides to testify before them, they would have to wait for the House to proceed, as the Constitution stipulated, toward impeachment, the “I” word had been the White House’s ultimate tool to shut critics up. The presumption was that any such constitutional apocalypse was unthinkable. No longer. When the House returned to business on Monday, October 22, congressmen introduced forty-four Watergate-related bills. Twenty-two, sponsored by eighty-four separate members, called for impeachment or an investigation of a possible impeachment.

  AT LEAST THE INTERNATIONAL CRISIS had been stayed. On Monday, the superpowers jointly agreed to sponsor a United Nations cease-fire to go into effect two days later. On Tuesday Democrats voted for the Judiciary Committee to hold impeachment hearings; the din from Lafayette Park was still seeping through White House windows as Charles Wright and Alexander Haig attempted to assure reporters that tyranny had not befallen the land. But Haig did not help his case when he boasted with a grin that it had been his own idea to send the FBI to seal Cox’s office, and that his actions had been entirely appropriate.

  Tuesday was the day Judge Sirica set for the White House to answer his order to produce the tapes—a date set at a less dramatic time, but one Sirica still demanded the White House honor. It was also the day, at high noon, that Speaker of the House Carl Albert told a crowded press briefing that he had authorized the House Judiciary Committee to begin work on an impeachment inquiry. Sirica’s ceremonial courtroom was jammed. Everyone in Washington wanted to be there to hear Nixon’s lawyer turn the next screw, and to see what this courageous judge would do in response. It was as if the Constitution hung on a hinge.

  Sirica read aloud his August 29 order to produce the tapes, so nervous that he accidentally read a part of the document twice.

  Charles Wright stepped to the well of the courtroom: “Mr. Chief Judge, may it please the court. I am not prepared at this time to file a response. I am, however, authorized to say that the President of the United States would comply in all respects with the order of August 29. . . .”

  Since Sirica could not believe what he had just heard, he asked the lawyer to repeat himself.

  “He will comply in all respects with what Your Honor had just read. As the court is aware, the President yesterday filed with the clerk of the court a response along different lines, along the lines indicated in the statement to the country Friday. That statement, if it was ever officially filed with the court, is now withdrawn. . . .

  “This President does not defy the law, and he has authorized me to say he will comply in full with the orders of the court.”

  “This President does not defy the law”: people used to take that for granted. At least, though, the crisis had been averted. Crises were being averted all over—for a minute, at least.

  THE SOVIETS SAID ISRAEL WAS the first to break the cease-fire, by preparing a move on Damascus. They issued an ultimatum to the president: stay Israel’s hand, even if it takes American military force, or “we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider taking appropriate steps unilaterally.” Maybe that meant arming all the Arab states. Or pouring troops into the Middle East. American intelligence learned that seven Soviet airborne divisions—hundreds of thousands of personnel—had been mobilized, aircraft readied in Yugoslavia to move them, and forty thousand amphibian naval infantry prepared to sail the Mediterranean toward the battle zone. Nixon called it “the most serious threat to U.S.-Soviet relations since the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Compounding the frustration, the United States had been pressing Israel to honor the cease-fire. But in a post-Vietnam strategic context, America had trouble getting even allies to do what it wished.

  Alexander Haig, Schlesinger, and the CIA director met late into the night, without bothering to wake the Watergate-addled president. They decided to move the military from DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 3—all troops reporting to barracks for possible mobilization for battle. Soviet officials, who were bluffin
g, were amazed at the panic. “Who could have imagined the Americans would be so easily frightened,” one said. A Johnson administration official told Time that the administration had received similar bluster at the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and simply ignored it.

  The Middle East war ended to headlines that Union Oil’s profits soared 62 percent in the third quarter and Exxon’s were up 81 percent, and the conclusion was immediately drawn: DEFCON 3 had all been a Watergate-motivated hoax. KISSINGER; ALERT ISN’T A COVER-UP, read headlines for a press conference in which the exasperated national security advisor said, “We are attempting to conduct the foreign policy of the United States with regard to future generations. . . . There has to be a minimum of confidence that the senior officials of the American government are not playing with the lives of the American people.”

  Around then Gail Sheehy returned to a bar she had visited in summer, now for an October 24 issue of New York in which every feature article was about Watergate.