One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  The diary begins: “We had just received a real piss-swisher from Brezhnev regarding the Arab/Israeli Conflict.” (Piss-swisher is navy slang; its polite equivalent is pot stirrer.)

  “The Brezhnev letter proposed that the USSR/US urgently dispatch to Egypt, Soviet and American military contingents to ensure implementation of the Ceasefire and, further, containing the threatening sentence: ‘… it is necessary to adhere without delay. I’ll say it straight. If you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally.’”

  All agreed that what the Soviets proposed in the Middle East was a potential disaster. If U.S. and Soviet soldiers started landing in the middle of the battle, each side standing with its allies, it could look like the opening day of World War III.

  “This would not be a NATO war,” Moorer wrote (his italics are verbatim). “Any direct confrontation on the ground with the Soviets would be very difficult. In short, the Middle East is the worst place in the world for the US to get engaged in a war with the Soviets.” No one disagreed.

  “The big question then became Why did the Soviets suddenly reverse themselves and without any warning all day then ‘bang’ we receive the Brezhnev threat?” Nobody had any clear answers. But they all surmised that the Soviets were responding to Israel’s breaking the brief cease-fire. The Israeli violation of the agreement broke the camel’s back, Kissinger agreed.

  Kissinger had bigger thoughts, recorded word for word by Moorer: “the Soviets were influenced by the current situation the President finds himself in … if the Democrats and the US public do not stop laying siege to their government, sooner or later, someone will take a run at us.… Friday the Pres US was in good shape domestically. Now the Soviets see that he is, in their mind, non-functional.… The overall strategy of the Soviets now appears to be one of throwing détente on the table since we have no functional President, in their eyes, and, consequently, we must prevent them from getting away with this.”

  In the absence of a functioning president, these five men, led by Kissinger, decided to send strong signals to the Soviets to back off. They raised America’s global nuclear alert level to DEFCON III, one step short of imminent nuclear war. They dispatched three warships to the Mediterranean, alerted the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, and recalled seventy-five B-52 nuclear bombers from Guam. Since that entailed the immediate movement of many thousands of American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, Moorer said the decisions would immediately be leaked—which was not a bad thing, since the Americans wanted to signal to the Soviets how seriously they took the threat.

  “At 0400 we went to bed to await the Soviet response,” Moorer’s record ended, save for one last thought: “If the Soviets put in 10,000 troops into Egypt what do we do?”

  The United States might have gone to war—or it might have done nothing. As Larry Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under President George H. W. Bush, later noted, “One of the things that I recall now with a great deal more equanimity than I did at the time is what was never really understood: the degree to which the Watergate crisis, particularly in its final months, meant that if we had been put to the test somewhere in the foreign policy arena, we would not have been able to respond. We were a ship dead in the water.”

  Through good luck and, perhaps, blind fortune, Moscow and Washington backed away from the specter of a Third World War. Kissinger, to his great credit, began a three-year attempt to try to negotiate peace in the Middle East. To his discredit, when word of the nuclear alert leaked, as it did almost instantly, he deceived the press, saying the president had saved the day, when Nixon had spent the night in a stupor.

  The other question raised by reporters was how a handful of unelected officials could raise a global military alert, mobilize the Eighty-Second Airborne, and send nuclear bombers aloft in a secret midnight meeting without consulting Congress or, as it became evident, the president. In the charged atmosphere created by the Saturday Night Massacre, it looked like the Nixon administration might indeed become a government of men, not laws.

  It seemed worse to Elliot Richardson, the sacked attorney general: “A government of laws was on the verge of becoming a government of one man.”

  * * *

  That one man had reasons to drink himself to sleep on the night of October 24. The president had said that day his enemies would assassinate him; Nixon told Kissinger that they wanted “to kill the President. I may physically die.”

  Real threats faced the president along with his roiling fears.

  Hours before the Situation Room meeting, the House of Representatives, for the first time since 1868, began formal proceedings to impeach the president of the United States. Then Nixon’s constitutional lawyer, Charles Alan Wright, announced that the White House would at last turn over the subpoenaed tapes to Judge Sirica. And Nixon caved in to demands from Republican leaders in Congress, responding to the overwhelming outrage of their constituents, to reestablish the special prosecutor’s office.

  The new sheriff in town was Leon Jaworski, a prosecutor of Dachau concentration camp commanders and a past president of the American Bar Association. He also was the 1972 chairman of Texas Democrats for Nixon. That fact did not immediately endear him to Cox’s army of investigators, but Jaworski told them he would follow the evidence wherever it led, even into the Oval Office. Congress wanted to hear him say that explicitly.

  Q: You are absolutely free to prosecute anyone; is that correct?

  A: That is correct. And that is my intention.

  Q: And that includes the President of the United States?

  A: It includes the President of the United States.

  Archibald Cox’s files had been preserved, most of his staff stayed on, and the restoration of a government of laws began.

  * * *

  The Internal Revenue Service had discovered that Nixon had paid $792 in income tax in 1970 and $878 in 1971.* With a salary of $200,000 per year, he should have been paying considerably more. In 1969, Nixon had donated his pre-presidential papers to the National Archives and received a huge deduction, but his lawyers had backdated the deed of gift to dodge a change in the tax laws. The disclosures about his taxes were damaging; the response from the president on November 18 was disastrous.

  “I am not a crook,” said Richard Nixon, a retort that did not resonate among the American people.

  After the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon needed a new attorney general, his fourth in five years. He chose one of the Senate’s own, William B. Saxbe, an Ohio Republican and former state attorney general, calculating he would be quickly confirmed. Saxbe was, by his own description, “a wild hare,” an unorthodox Republican, but he was more than willing to take the job; he found the Senate stultifying. He went to the White House; he found the atmosphere like a hospital ward. His interview was short; Saxbe had one question. He wanted to know if the president was in any way implicated in Watergate.

  “Nixon lied to me,” Saxbe said.

  On November 21 came the revelation in Judge Sirica’s courtroom that two of the subpoenaed tapes could not be found and that the third had essentially been obliterated by the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. Moreover, the gap had two distinct tones: five minutes of white noise, which could be explained by Rose Mary Woods’s human error involving the foot pedal. But that noise was followed by an entirely distinct sound, like a distant whirlwind.

  Called to the stand by the judge, Haig testified that only three people had had access to that tape, which recorded Nixon and Haldeman roughly seventy-two hours after the Watergate burglars had been arraigned. Those three were Rose Mary Woods, Steve Bull, and Richard Nixon. Electronics experts, including National Security Agency technicians, established that the foot pedal was not at fault. Haig suggested to Sirica that an unseen sinister force had erased the tape. The judge suspected that Nixon was the force in question. But there the mystery ended, unsolved.


  And in truth what was not on the tapes was immaterial. What mattered was what was on the tapes.

  By December, under orders from Judge Sirica, the special prosecutor, his investigators, and the grand jury had custody of three tapes. And the first they heard, dated March 21, 1973, was the conversation about the cancer on the presidency, highlighted by Nixon’s assertion that he could get a million dollars in hush money.

  “I for the first time realized that President Nixon was involved and culpably involved,” Jaworski recalled in an oral history. What he could never grasp was why anyone—in particular, the president of the United States—would preserve such vividly self-incriminating evidence on tape.

  Nixon now reversed his earlier private pledge to congressional leaders that he would transcribe selected tapes and make the texts public. He consulted his White House lawyers, some of whom had started to suspect that they had a crook for a client. He saw how deeply they doubted he could weather the rough passages the transcripts would reveal. But he also knew that, one way or another, through the courts or through Congress, his words on tape might soon be inscribed in counts of an indictment or articles of impeachment.

  Alone in his study at San Clemente at 1:15 a.m. on January 1, 1974, the president took out a yellow legal pad and began to put his thoughts on paper. “Do I fight all out or do I now begin the long process to prepare for a change, meaning, in effect, resignation?”

  He paused to reflect. He picked up his pen.

  “The answer—fight.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  United States v. Richard Milhous Nixon

  RICHARD NIXON’S seventh crisis lasted seven months. The president’s final battle to save himself began on January 3, 1974, hours after Congress reconvened. That day, White House lawyers rejected the Senate Watergate Committee’s request for more than five hundred tapes and documents.

  Still sleepless in San Clemente, the president made another note in his diary at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 5: “Above all else: Dignity, command, head high, no fear, build a new spirit, drive, act like a President, act like a winner,” Nixon wrote. “Opponents are savage destroyers, haters. Time to use full power of the President to fight overwhelming forces arrayed against us.”

  When he delivered his State of the Union speech on January 30, he addressed “the so-called Watergate affair.” He said, “I have provided to the Special Prosecutor … all the material that he needs to conclude his investigations and to proceed to prosecute the guilty and to clear the innocent. I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.”

  The special prosecutor quickly issued a stern correction: the president had not delivered a long list of requested tapes, documents, and memos. The White House lawyers immediately responded that they would not comply with the demands.

  On February 6, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to begin impeachment proceedings against the president. The grueling process began in the House Judiciary Committee, which had substantial subpoena powers. The committee received a copy of Jaworski’s list of crucial evidence on February 22.

  Nixon wrote, “The biggest danger I saw in the year ahead was that both the Special Prosecutor and the House Judiciary committee would begin requesting more and more tapes—always with the disclaimer that each request would be the last. But there would never be an end,” he feared, “until all 5,000 hours of tapes had been requested and surrendered.”

  He vowed not to surrender. He believed that if he were driven from office America would be undermined. But he lacked the strength to fight and lose. His beloved daughter Tricia later showed him a note from her own diary, written that winter.

  Something Daddy said makes me feel absolutely hopeless.… He has cautioned us that there is nothing damaging on the tapes; he has cautioned us that he might be impeached because of their content. Because he has said the latter, knowing Daddy, the latter is the way he really feels.

  Her poignant note is the most powerful evidence of what Nixon knew and when he knew it.

  * * *

  On March 1, the Watergate grand jury handed Judge Sirica a staggering indictment.* Seven men stood charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, including the former attorney general John Mitchell, the former White House chieftains Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and Nixon’s amoral adviser Chuck Colson. The charges included lying to the Senate, the FBI, and the grand jury itself.

  Richard Nixon was named as an unindicted coconspirator by a unanimous vote of the nineteen-member grand jury. (It was actually a 38–0 decision; each grand juror had raised both hands in unison when polled.) This astonishing fact was kept secret, under judicial seal, at the special prosecutor’s request. Jaworski had political considerations to weigh, no less than Congress’s politicians had legal burdens to bear. He thought it best for the country that a president’s guilt or innocence be established by impeachment and conviction by Congress under the Constitution, not by indictment inside a courthouse.

  On March 6, Nixon held a press conference and took a very pointed question. One of the perjury counts against Haldeman claimed he had lied to the Senate by averring that Nixon had said “it would be wrong” to raise a million dollars in hush money. The grand jury had heard the tape. What was the truth?

  “I meant that the whole transaction was wrong, the transaction for the purpose of keeping this whole matter covered up,” the president replied. “I directed that Mr. Haldeman, Mr. Ehrlichman, Mr. Dean, and Mr. Mitchell [meet] so that we could find what would be the best way to get the whole story out.” These were two sentences with two bold lies. Fortunately for Nixon, he was not under oath.

  Then Jaworski sought sixty-four additional tapes as evidence in the trial of United States v. Mitchell et al. On April 18, Judge Sirica subpoenaed them. That set up a confrontation potentially fatal to Richard Nixon’s presidency.

  Among these tapes was the hottest smoking gun of all: the conversation about using the CIA to block the Watergate investigation.

  Nixon sought a political solution to his legal crisis. He chose the edited-tape gambit—the same strategy that had created the Saturday Night Massacre. Of all Nixon’s many self-inflicted wounds, this was among the worst, confirming an observation Haldeman had made to the president a year before: “It is almost like we have a death wish.”*

  * * *

  On April 29, Richard Nixon spoke for thirty-five minutes on national television, seated next to a table stacked with binders full of expurgated tape transcripts. He said the binders contained “all the additional evidence needed to get Watergate behind us and get it behind us now.” They would leave “no questions remaining about the fact that the President has nothing to hide.”

  The 1,308-page “Blue Book” was published by the Government Printing Office the next day. Long excerpts immediately appeared in newspapers and magazines. The transcripts left the American citizenry amazed and amused and appalled.

  The transcripts had been carefully edited to conceal both foul play and foul language. Some of the censored parts were still as compelling as the content. For instance, Dean discussing Howard Hunt’s demands for money with the president on March 21, 1973.

  D: You have no choice but to come up with the $120,000 …

  P: Would you agree that that’s the prime thing that you damn well better get done…?

  D: Obviously.…

  P: [Expletive deleted].

  “Expletive deleted” entered the American lexicon. By May 1, publishers were printing three million paperback copies of the “Blue Book.” The transcripts read like FBI wiretaps of gangsters plotting a heist, except that these men were sitting in the White House, not a warehouse. Here was the president of the United States talking, in that same conversation.

  P: How much money do you need?

  D: I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years.

  P: You could get a million dollars. Yo
u could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.… Who would handle it? Any ideas on that?

  He did not say it would be wrong. The revulsion of some Republicans in Congress—the people who could protect Nixon from impeachment and conviction—was intense. “Deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral,” said the Senate minority leader, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania.

  The White House now drew the line. Nixon would provide nothing more to the special prosecutor than the Blue Book. His lawyers moved to quash Sirica’s subpoena for the sixty-four tapes Jaworski sought. The judge struck back, ordering the White House to produce the tapes forthwith. Nixon defied him. The U.S. Supreme Court, responding to Jaworski’s direct appeal, agreed to take the case on an emergency basis. The High Court agreed that in July it would hear oral arguments in United States v. Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States.

  The House committee’s members knew the Blue Book transcripts had been falsified. The committee’s chief counsel, John Doar, had six of the relevant tapes in hand. The White House had supplied them to the federal grand jury under Judge Sirica’s orders; they had served as essential evidence against Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. Sirica took the tapes and conveyed them to the impeachment committee, a perfectly legal if completely secret procedure.

  John Doar, who called himself a “Lincoln Republican,” had fought bravely for civil rights as a Justice Department official in the 1960s. As chief counsel, he had been studying the constitutional standards and the legislative history of impeachment since December.* His committee’s able and aggressive staff included a recent Yale Law School graduate named Hillary Rodham.

  On May 9, Doar convened the first of eighteen executive sessions of the impeachment committee, presenting a lengthy “statement of information” that could form a template for a bill of impeachment. The committee heard witnesses ranging from John Dean to Leon Jaworski to White House lawyer James D. St. Clair. Considerable political conflict flared within the closed chambers.