The Fall of Richard Nixon

by Tom Brokaw

  Washington has changed in so many ways. Now many members of Congress scoot for their home state when the weekend arrives or use their Capitol Hill office as a bedroom. The vast army of journalists is too busy filing every political utterance, every large or small development, on the endless conveyor belt of digital media.

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  Arriving in Washington, I was not just stepping off the boat onto a new land, so to speak. While based in California I covered the riotous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and the Nixon comeback convention in Miami. Four years later, I was in Miami again for the George McGovern “new” Democratic convention, where the delegates were a much greater mix ethnically, many of them veterans of the unruly antiwar movement. Nixon was renominated as the GOP candidate, also in Miami, in what was essentially a coronation. It was a whiplash experience to go from the counterculture of the Democrats to the country-club GOP. Because of my California experience with Bob Haldeman and my South Dakota connection to Senator McGovern, I had a kind of roaming right in both halls.

  As a newcomer to Washington, I wanted to make the rounds and meet not just press secretaries and other staffers but cabinet officers and senior administration officials. NBC colleagues and other friends were gently discouraging. “You really shouldn’t bother cabinet officers,” they told me. “Just deal with their staff.” Nonetheless, my first experience was a memorable moment: a visit with Elliot Richardson, the Boston Brahmin who had replaced Richard Kleindienst as attorney general. Richardson’s press secretary was surprised by the request but accommodating. Richardson greeted me cordially while continuing his hobby of drawing or doodling as he talked. I had read about his unusual distraction and asked if he hoped to publish a collection. He offered a small smile and said, “No, I just enjoy this.”

  After explaining my newcomer status and hopes for staying in touch, I asked a final question: “Anything coming up to be thinking about?” He stopped doodling for just a moment, smiled, knocked on his desk, and said, “No, don’t think so.”

  Two days later, the word began to leak out that Vice President Spiro “Ted” Agnew was under investigation for taking bribes when he was governor of Maryland. Richardson’s office was fully involved in the investigation. I’d been a political reporter long enough not to be surprised that Richardson hadn’t mentioned anything, but thought my courtesy call still might pay dividends someday.

  The Agnew development was completely unexpected. He had not been part of the Watergate tangle, and, of course, if Nixon didn’t survive, Agnew would become president.

  Agnew decided to fight back against the kickback rumors. He called a news conference at the Old Executive Office Building, commonly known as the EOB. He didn’t duck or weave. Regarding the allegations he said, “I’m denying them outright, and I’m labeling them—and I think a person in my position at a time like this might be permitted this departure from normal language—as damned lies.”

  It turns out his denial was a damned lie, but his performance, especially in the wake of all the ducking, dodging, and weaving of the Watergate principals, received praise from unexpected quarters. The Boston Globe called him “a stand-up guy.” The Washington Post commented on his “skill and some fire…frank bluntness.” Richard Cohen was a Washington Post reporter working on the Agnew investigation, and even he was impressed by the vice president’s performance. “I was fully familiar with the charges against him,” Cohen wrote, “and believed them to be true. Yet the man was such a stalwart defender of himself that I came to conclude he was a genius at lying. It was quite a performance and it made me, for a second, wonder about his guilt.”

  Cohen also believes that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had been aware of Agnew’s guilt earlier and, in Hoover-like fashion, thought the vice president would become president because Nixon would be forced to resign. If that were to happen, Hoover would have Agnew in the crosshairs, just as he’d had John F. Kennedy pinned because of his womanizing before becoming president.

  Hoover died before the Agnew news became public, but Cohen extended his theory to the number two man at the FBI after Hoover’s death, then a little-known FBI lifer named Mark Felt.

  Mark Felt, “my friend” in Bob Woodward’s early description, is now known as Deep Throat, and as Woodward’s important source on Nixon. Felt ultimately went public as Woodward’s invaluable informant, but Cohen’s personal theory is that Felt had wanted to be made FBI director. Instead, at Hoover’s death, Felt was passed over, and he became the shadowy figure familiar from the Robert Redford film on Watergate, meeting Woodward in a D.C. garage and repeatedly saying, “Follow the money,” the memorable phrase made up by screenwriter Bill Goldman.

  The Agnew TV appearances ended with his indictment. As we have learned so often from Washington scandals, an Oscar-worthy performance proclaiming innocence is no match for the hard evidence of guilt. The federal agents on the Agnew case had an airtight case against “Spiggy,” as they referred to him. He had been taking payoffs through his tenure as county executive, governor, and even as vice president. The “damned lies,” as he’d called the original reports, turned out to be damning but not lies.

  In late September, he told a Los Angeles audience, “I will not resign if indicted.” Eleven days later, he stood before a federal judge in a Baltimore courtroom and admitted that he had evaded federal income tax on a payment of $29,500 he’d received as governor of Maryland in 1967. Simultaneously, he sent Secretary of State Henry Kissinger a brief statement under the provisions of the Succession Act: “I hereby resign the office of Vice President of the United States effective immediately.”

  Federal Judge Walter Hoffman sentenced Agnew to three years’ probation and a fine of $10,000 in an arrangement worked out with the Justice Department. Judge Hoffman wanted to send Agnew to prison, but Attorney General Richardson intervened, saying, “Leniency is justified.” Agnew and President Nixon had an awkward exchange of letters, with the president—who addressed his VP as “Dear Ted”—praising his patriotism and dedication but concluding that Agnew’s decision to resign was advisable.

  For the first time, the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution kicked in, requiring the president to find a successor as vice president who would be acceptable to the Senate and the House of Representatives. Both chambers were controlled by Democrats, so the choice could not be overtly ideological. Ten months into Richard Nixon’s second term, less than a year after his landslide victory, his closest aides were either standing by for their sentencing or about to be found guilty. Now that his vice president was leaving in disgrace, it was important for the president to make a safe, solid, and squeaky-clean choice for a replacement. His criteria were that it had to be a Republican, share his views on foreign policy, and be able to work with both parties in Congress.

  The guessing game began immediately. Likely candidates seemed to be Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York (who would get his turn as vice president with Gerald Ford); John Connally, a former Democrat and governor of Texas, said to be a Nixon favorite; George H. W. Bush, chair of the Republican National Committee; and Congresswoman Margaret Heckler of Massachusetts. John Wayne wrote the president recommending California governor Ronald Reagan, arguing that he was “the most untarnished and honorable American leader in politics.”

  The president asked House minority leader Gerald Ford of Michigan to canvass his Republican colleagues for recommendations. By October 11, the president had an enormous stack of suggestions. He retreated to Camp David to make his choice. Gerald Ford, the party stalwart, was one of the top three choices of more than a hundred Republicans in the House and Senate—a safe, reliable, and scandal-free candidate.

  The president returned to the White House the next morning, and shortly thereafter David Broder, the political reporter for The Washington Post, learned that Jerry Ford, as he was widely known, was the president’s choice. (Broder’s reputation w
as so impeccable that other reporters knew they could safely say, “I’ve been able to independently confirm Congressman Ford will be nominated for vice president.”)

  Nixon and Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir, met in the Oval Office following the Yom Kippur War, which might have been fatal to Israel’s survival had President Nixon not stepped in with Operation Nickel Grass. Meir called Nixon “my president.”

  WATERGATE AND SPECULATION about the president’s future continued to permeate Washington. The 1973 summer hearings and Woodward and Bernstein’s almost daily chronicle of new developments, the Agnew resignation, and the president’s defensive crouch gave an otherwise beautiful autumn an air of uncertainty and foreboding.

  The president, his family, and his aides were constantly engaged in efforts to demonstrate that Watergate was an obsession of the Washington press and Nixon’s enemies. In early October, the NBC news office called to say that the president and Mrs. Nixon were dining at Trader Vic’s, the faux-Polynesian restaurant just across Lafayette Square from the White House. They were joined by daughter Julie, son-in-law David Eisenhower, and friends Cynthia and Robert Milligan.

  The president was in a jolly temperament as he exited. It was an open secret in political circles that Nixon didn’t handle alcohol well. It seemed he may have had too many of Trader Vic’s signature rum drinks with the tiny umbrellas as decoration. He looked as gregarious as I had ever seen him as he chatted with the Saudi ambassador to the United States and a party of Italian tourists, confiding to them that he planned a trip to Europe in the spring. Plainly he was trying to convey a “What, me worry?” persona to anyone watching.

  October, the month of Halloween, was day after day, week after week, thirty-one days of triumph and trial for the president, an unrelenting challenge to his reputation as a global statesman, as well as his determination to hold off impeachment and keep his chair in the Oval Office. Of all the months of his presidency, October 1973 was his greatest test on so many levels.

  It began with the Russian-backed surprise attack on Israel by Syrian and Egyptian forces on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The news was particularly startling because Israel had uncharacteristically been caught completely off guard. The coordinated pincer attack by Syria and Egypt was so effective in its early stages that the unthinkable was now possible: Israel could be seriously, maybe fatally damaged. What is now largely overlooked in any recounting of that time is that Nixon was operating in the arena he loved most: the great game of international power moves.

  The Soviets obviously thought this was a time to exploit America’s preoccupation with Watergate by backing the war on Israel. The Israelis needed help, fast. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were now in their element. This was not about burglaries and bribes. This was a showdown with Moscow over the survival of America’s most important friend in the always volatile Middle East.

  Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister, sent an SOS to the White House for immediate military and diplomatic help. Nixon and Kissinger recognized an opportunity to shut the Soviets out of the Middle East if Israel, with American help, could prevail. They organized a massive airlift of a wide range of military supplies to Israel, intending to start with commercial air carriers, followed by military aircraft. When, initially, there was some confusion in the U.S. Defense Department about how to organize the airlift Nixon had ordered, he cut to the chase, barking, “Goddam it, use every [plane] we have. Tell them to send everything that can fly.”

  The rearmament effort was called Operation Nickel Grass, and it quickly evolved into a massive American military operation, because U.S. commercial carriers didn’t want to become part of a war. Most European nations wanted no part of the hastily arranged mission either, so the administration made a deal with Portugal to use one of its bases on the Azores Islands. Almost overnight, more than thirty American military flights a day began landing there and refueling for the next hop into Israel, carrying tanks, artillery, ammunition, and other supplies. For the last leg, the dangerous flights into Israel, U.S. and Israeli fighter escorts flew precise patterns so that other nations would not become aroused. In all, the United States launched 567 air-supply missions to Israel.

  And it worked.

  Israel went on the offensive, and when the Israeli forces counterattacked Egyptian troops in the Sinai Desert, the gateway to greater Egypt, and successfully held off Syrian gains in the Golan Heights, the tide turned.

  The war was not a minor skirmish. It went on for nearly three weeks. More than two thousand Israeli soldiers were killed and more than seven thousand Egyptians and three thousand Syrians. Without the massive and timely aid from America, Israel would have suffered much larger losses in lives and standing. Golda Meir later called Nixon “my president.”

  The Soviets effectively abandoned that part of the Middle East, and the Egyptians turned to the United States, eventually making a deal with Israel during the Jimmy Carter administration.

  By then Nixon was gone.

  While the bold and imaginative rescue was underway, it was not adequately appreciated by America’s political and press culture, consumed as we were by Watergate.

  Nixon was subjected to an even greater slight when Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnam emissary to the Vietnam War peace talks, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for initiating the agreement, eventually leading to the end of that heinous war. The president issued a gracious statement of congratulations, but it is not idle conjecture to imagine that he was wounded, and not hard to imagine him thinking that this was just one more in a lifetime of perceived slights. He comes to the aid of Israel, he is shut out of the Nobel Peace Prize, and all he has left at the end of the day are more demands from special prosecutor Archibald Cox for the June 1972 Watergate tapes, tapes that he knows are toxic for his future.

  During October 1973, The New York Times was publishing big banner headlines almost daily: ARABS AND ISRAELIS BATTLE ON TWO FRONTS; ISRAEL REPORTS SUEZ SETBACK, GOLAN GAIN; AGNEW QUITS VICE PRESIDENCY; GERALD FORD NAMED BY NIXON; NIXON TO KEEP TAPES DESPITE RULING; NIXON AGREES TO GIVE TAPES TO SIRICA; NIXON DISCHARGES COX FOR DEFIANCE, ABOLISHES WATERGATE TASK FORCE; U.S. FORCES PUT ON WORLDWIDE ALERT LEST SOVIET SEND TROOPS TO MIDEAST.

  As I was reviewing these front pages of The New York Times, an item below the fold on Tuesday, October 16, 1973, caught my eye.

  MAJOR LANDLORD ACCUSED OF ANTIBLACK BIAS IN CITY

  The Department of Justice, charging discrimination against blacks in apartment rentals, brought suit in Federal Court…yesterday against the Trump Management Corporation, a major owner and manager of real estate here.

  The corporation, which owns and rents more than 14,000 apartments,…was accused of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968….

  Donald Trump [yes, that Donald Trump], president [of the family real estate business], denied the charges….

  “We have never discriminated,” he said, “and we never would….We proved in court that we did not discriminate.”

  The article noted that Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was the principal stockholder and chairman of the Trump Management Corporation. The son was just beginning to make his reputation as a flamboyant playboy with outsize ambitions; he was moving from the outer boroughs into Manhattan. His future as a president of the United States was as unlikely as his claim that his father’s company didn’t discriminate against black tenants.

  Stanley Pottinger, the assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, recalled that Trump had turned to his friend Roy Cohn for help. Cohn had been the notorious counsel for Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who insisted the federal government was in the grips of a Communist takeover. McCarthy was eventually disgraced, but Roy Cohn moved to New York and set up shop as a full-service hatchet man. He met Trump on the social circuit and agreed to handle the housing discrimination char
ges. Pottinger remembers that Cohn was a blowhard but not much of a lawyer, and the Trump organization eventually signed the consent decree, which promised an end to discriminatory practices without admitting guilt.

  Forty-five years later, Trump had other lawyers and a different set of problems. In 1973, however, the Trump company was small change in the news of the day.

  The war in the Middle East was an Israeli victory, but it had immediate consequences for the United States. Saudi Arabia was threatening an oil boycott as punishment for America’s support of Israel, a threat that became a reality and a major disruption for the American economy and day-to-day way of life.

  Meanwhile, Watergate was the preoccupation of the political, judicial, and press communities in Washington. Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, continued to demand tape recordings of Oval Office conversations. So did federal judge John Sirica, the diminutive jurist with a big reputation for legal combat, who was presiding over Watergate issues on the federal bench in the D.C. courthouse.

  In the White House, the president was spending more time alone in the living quarters. Later we learned that he would sit alone in an easy chair well past midnight, contemplating how he could manage this crisis, this turn from a landslide electoral victory to a web of staff criminal activity, plus the legal and political pursuit of his role in all of it.

  Through friends I met an administration arms analyst on the national security team who unexpectedly provided some insight into the president’s state of mind. He shared an experience with a recent memo from the Oval Office.

  He said the president’s signature was so cramped it was almost illegible, and he’d wondered if it was authentic. He had taken it to secure files that contained other presidential signatures and compared them. He had finally decided that the latest one was real but the work of someone under a lot of stress.