The Fall of Richard Nixon

by Tom Brokaw

  Wearing the cloak of the presidency, President Nixon got a pharaoh’s welcome in Egypt as millions lined the route.

  RICHARD NIXON’S CAMPAIGN-LIKE STOPS didn’t keep the world from closing in on him later in May 1974.

  The Chicago Tribune had long been considered a bulwark of conservative journalism. (This was the newspaper so eager to see Harry Truman defeated in his run for president in 1948 that it went to press early and mistakenly with the headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN—a copy of which was held aloft by a smiling Harry Truman.) In early May, this venerable voice of midwestern conservatism urged Nixon to leave office for the good of “the Presidency, the country, and the free world.”

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  In the same month it was disclosed that in 1971, top leaders in the dairy industry had tried to raise $300,000 for the president shortly after he agreed to support a rise in milk prices. On May 15 his faithful former appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, was sentenced to ten months in prison for lying to a Watergate grand jury.

  Jeb Magruder, a collegiate tennis star and successful businessman before he moved to California and got involved in GOP politics, was sentenced to a prison term of ten months to four years for his role in organizing the Watergate break-in. When he was released from prison, Magruder would become an ordained minister and at one point implicate President Nixon as an active organizer of the break-in. However, in later articles he would back off from placing Nixon in the original plans.

  Also in May, Richard Kleindienst, the former attorney general, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for lying in an antitrust case.

  For his part, Nixon stuck to his strategy of wearing the cloak of the presidency wherever he went. He planned two epic trips, one to the Middle East and one to the Soviet Union, to prove he was still a working president.

  During a visit to the Soviet Union, President Nixon hoped for a breakthrough on nukes with Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev at the resort town of Oreanda.

  THE MIDDLE EASTERN TRIP became an extravagant showcase for Nixon, but it did him little good. He made a high-profile entry in Egypt for meetings with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, but the news from home was bleak. For the first time, a majority of the American people in the latest Harris Poll favored his impeachment and removal from office.

  In Egypt, Nixon was receiving a welcome fit for a pharaoh. However, he had developed and kept secret a severe case of phlebitis, a dangerous and uncomfortable clot in his calf. If it had broken loose and raced to his heart, it could have killed him.

  Nonetheless, he pushed on. On a slow train ride to Alexandria from Cairo, Nixon and Egyptian president Sadat might as well have been sun kings from Egypt’s golden age. Millions of people lined the route, many of them openly expressing their gratitude for Nixon’s role as a peacemaker in the war with Israel. Ironically, that role had involved giving Israel the military means to defeat Egypt and bring the war to a halt. One more example of the enigmatic, often baffling way of the Middle East.

  After stops in Tel Aviv, Jordan, and Syria, the president turned for home energized by his receptions in the Middle East, but there were no adoring crowds lining his route to the White House. His standing in national polls continued to sink as the House Judiciary Committee was moving steadily toward formal impeachment hearings.

  One of our Woodley Road neighbors, Paul Nitze, the quintessential intellectual public servant—wealthy, highly educated, and fiercely private—announced that he was resigning from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union because of what he called the depressing reality of Watergate, which made the prospects of slowing the arms race unlikely.

  But the president was already packing his bags for another international trip, this one to Moscow, where he hoped to strike a new arms control deal with Leonid Brezhnev, who, the year before, had seemed open to the idea. However, Nitze’s pessimistic analysis would soon come to define the new round of talks.

  As the president prepared to leave for Moscow, one of his favorite political hit men, Charles Colson, was sentenced for his role in organizing dirty tricks out of his White House office. He had been Nixon’s favorite “tough guy” during the 1972 campaign, but when he was caught deliberately trying to destroy Daniel Ellsberg’s reputation, Colson was sentenced to prison; there he had a spiritual rebirth as a Christian evangelist, concentrating on prison inmates.

  Colson devoted the rest of his life to criminal justice reform with a Christian underpinning. It was by all accounts a genuine conversion and a worthy cause. Colson had a lot to atone for. He was an all-purpose hatchet man who compiled the White House “enemies list,” a collection of journalists, politicians, and activists he thought of as threats to the Nixon presidency. He zeroed in on Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine who as a Pentagon planner put together a devastating critique of the Vietnam War—and leaked it to The New York Times and The Washington Post. Colson orchestrated a campaign to discredit Ellsberg and was eventually convicted of obstruction of justice. Colson’s prison experience led him to a religious awakening and he spent the rest of his life as a spiritual counselor and advocate for the underclass. So as the president departed for what he hoped would be a triumphant trip to Moscow, his favorite hatchet man was reporting for his life-changing stint in prison.

  The president had high hopes for a new nuclear arms reduction that would demonstrate his powers as an indispensable international statesman, but while his party was en route to Moscow, Secretary Kissinger warned him that the signals on that count were not encouraging. Nonetheless, Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev treated the president as an old friend, praising his help in improving economic relations between the two countries.

  For those of us making our first visits to Moscow, it was a head-shaking experience. The ancient capital was a dreary, joyless city with a permanent overlay of foul air and cheerless citizens hurrying through the streets with their heads down. When I stepped into Red Square to do a report for our cameras, a young man paused to watch and was immediately sent away by a burly traffic cop waving a menacing wood baton.

  The Intourist Hotel for visiting foreigners was more like a worn army barracks with cheap beds and thin blankets. A house mother was stationed on every floor to keep track of us. My colleague Richard Valeriani gathered meal chits from the rest of us and demanded caviar for breakfast.

  “Nyet!”

  Richard would not give up, and so finally a sizable saucer of caviar arrived and we all shared his bounty.

  In the press quarters, a bar was set up with an ample supply of vodka, but since we were working it was of little use except to our Soviet minders, who we assumed were low-level Moscow cops. By noon each day they were staggering drunks, asleep at their posts or stumbling out onto the Moscow streets.

  After filing reports from Moscow’s central television headquarters, another dusty building with cracked windows and floors caked with dirt, we found the ride back into the city center instructive. This historic capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was bathed in a dim light to save on electrical generation. For most of the White House press corps, this was a first visit to America’s great adversary. We had a common reaction: This is the great bogeyman, the symbol of Lenin’s dream of a workers’ paradise?

  We began to get word that the Nixon-Brezhnev negotiations were not going well. Brezhnev and Nixon had reached agreement on a new trade relationship, but the president was pushing for a dramatic breakthrough on nukes. The big issue was a cap on MIRVs, the nuclear missiles with more than one warhead. They were especially difficult to defend against, and the president hoped for an agreement he could take back to the United States as an example of his grasp of the most important challenges in the nuclear age.

  Brezhnev may have been fond of Nixon, but he wasn’t eager to do a historic arms deal with a president who might be headed to jail. So the two retreated to Brezhnev’s da
cha on the Black Sea, a favorite vacation spot for Russian officials and Soviet workers in the vicinity.

  We were effectively in Yalta, the Black Sea resort where Joseph Stalin met with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill near the end of World War II and created the postwar Soviet empire, including control over Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and smaller but important East European states. American critics of the deal blamed the ailing Roosevelt for conceding far too much to Stalin, and so “Yalta” had a deeply negative standing as a place for a modern summit. Instead we were quartered nearby at Oreanda.

  Whatever the name, it was not exactly Malibu.

  The beaches were uneven stretches of rocks rather than sand, so lumpy that sunbathers had to lie on wooden platforms instead of towels to enjoy what passed for comfort. The tourists started claiming their territory around six A.M., and so by nine the beach was covered with the large white bodies of Soviet workers and their wives and offspring. Latecomers were forced to stand on an uneven levee and spread their arms to catch the sun’s rays.

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  While Nixon and Brezhnev were still talking and dining together, Pat Buchanan, the president’s faithful speechwriter, joined Haig’s military aide, George Joulwan, for a Black Sea cruise with a few of their hard-core KGB counterparts. Lieutenant Colonel Joulwan had just been promoted to colonel, so a few toasts were in order. As Pat told me later, the celebratory drinking led to more drinking and a spirited exchange on the merits of the two systems, Soviet and American.

  By the time they returned to shore, Buchanan and Joulwan were in a militant frame of mind, so they decided to make an assault on Brezhnev’s dacha, which sat atop a steep cliff. Not surprisingly, they didn’t get far before Brezhnev’s security detail intercepted them and summoned Al Haig. They escaped a gulag and skulked sheepishly back to the White House staff quarters. Joulwan went on to become the commanding general of the United States European Command and supreme allied commander Europe in 1993.

  Pat and George became good friends during our White House days, but they never gave up much information about the backstage machinations of Watergate. I later realized that maybe what I needed was a speedboat on the Potomac and a case of vodka.

  While we were hanging out on the Black Sea, an amusing minidrama was unfolding back at the Kremlin, in Moscow. Ron Ziegler had stayed behind and decided to show some friends his accommodations in the Kremlin. Ron had the proper security clearances, but his friends did not, and the Russian KGB blew up. They threw out Ziegler’s visitors and summoned Homer Luther, the über–White House advance man for the trip.

  Homer recalls that he was joined by an American Secret Service agent for an urgent meeting with the senior KGB agent, who then refused to talk to Homer. Homer, laughing, told me, “The Russian said, ‘I will only talk to your security agent.’ ” So the Soviet agent would give Homer hell through the American agent, who would then turn to Homer and repeat the dressing-down. Homer was forced to become a bystander at his own punishment. The KGB man then instructed the American agent to tell Homer to tell Ziegler that he would never be allowed in the Soviet Union again.

  That anecdote is a snapshot of how the Soviets operated at every level and a small but telling indication of one of the many reasons the system could not be sustained.

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  We returned to Washington via Minsk and the largest display I’d ever seen of caviar at the Minsk press reception. Caviar for the White House press corps, but a major disappointment for Richard Nixon, who arrived back in the States without a new arms deal, facing a vote on impeachment on August 23 organized by the House Democratic leadership.

  Back in Washington, I went to a small dinner for John Rhodes, the House Republican leader. It was an off-the-record evening because Rhodes had been invited to a White House dinner that night and decided not to attend.

  His decision to skip a presidential invitation was all I needed to know.

  The Nixon family was all smiles in pictures from the White House residence following his decision to resign. But it’s hard not to notice President Nixon’s clenched fists.

  NIXON’S POLL NUMBERS were in free fall—his approval rating in July’s Gallup poll was just 24 percent.

  On July 24, the blockbuster decision from the U.S. Supreme Court: it ruled unanimously that Nixon had to turn over to the House Judiciary Committee the tape recordings he had hoped to protect with executive privilege. The end was in sight.

  Even so, the pervasive uncertainty that had hovered over Washington for a year did not disappear entirely. The White House team persisted in its efforts to demonstrate that the president was still on the job.

  A summit on the economy was organized, with the administration’s top financial teams flown to Los Angeles for a series of meetings and proclamations zeroing in on inflation. Roy Ash, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, was a taciturn recruit from the private sector, where he had earned a fortune as a hard-edged management genius. Dressed in his CEO uniform of suit and tie, with the hot lights of cameras heating up the Southern California afternoon even more, Ash, true to his reputation, remained stoic and uncomplaining as reporters went through the motions of grilling him on the economy.

  Finally, Helen Thomas could stand it no longer. She said, “Mr. Ash do you think the president should resign and leave office?”

  He stared at her for a moment, his expression unchanged, then turned and walked away without another word. The president’s stock of defenders was running dry.

  When the president returned to Washington, as we learned later in Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days, it was chaos behind the scenes in the White House and within the Nixon family. A review of the June 23, 1972, tape recording laid bare the president’s involvement in the cover-up. He could be heard ordering Haldeman to organize a phony scenario: the CIA would tell the FBI to back off the Watergate investigation because it involved sensitive national security issues.

  When Pat Buchanan and others close to the president heard that, they knew it was game over. He must resign. But Nixon and his family members believed he could survive by personally standing up to the impeachment trial and the Senate. Eventually he realized the disclosure of the tape’s contents was driving away what supporters he had left.

  At the same time, Gerald Ford’s team was privately scrambling to prepare for his presidency, a tricky procedure because it could not appear to be a mutiny. The vice president’s advisers had quietly pulled distinguished Republicans into the capital to help. I learned that when by chance I encountered Mary Scranton crossing Pennsylvania Avenue. Her husband, former Pennsylvania governor Bill Scranton, was a widely admired GOP senior statesman. I had come to know them socially through mutual friends.

  “Mary,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

  She paused, looked around, and then confided, “Bill has been called in to help the vice president prepare for whatever is next, but I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  On NBC I was able to work that important development into the news of the day without compromising Mary. Later, she laughed and said, “Tom, I was so surprised to see you I let down my guard.”

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  Washington shifted into another gear: preparing for the inevitable. The Nixon presidency was coming to an end. The city was abuzz with speculation and anticipation as everyone wondered how the final act would play out.

  On July 31, Ehrlichman was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the attempted Watergate cover-up. Two days later, John Dean was sentenced to one to four years. By August 4, the Harris Poll showed two-thirds of the American people believed the president should be impeached. The nation’s capital was awash in rumors generated by the prospect that a president was about to be thrown out.

  California senator Alan Cranston
called to check on a rumor going around: that Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger had issued a command instructing American armed forces not to automatically obey an order from the commander in chief to launch a nuclear strike. I told the senator I’d heard the same rumor but had been unable to verify it.

  For his part, Schlesinger later acknowledged that he had warned that if President Nixon issued a nuclear launch order, military commanders should check with him or with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing it. Schlesinger, a pipe-smoking iconoclast, was not a Nixon man, and his order struck Nixon loyalists as absurd.

  The president was spending his time with his melancholy family in the White House living quarters and preparing for his farewell speech to the nation.

  On August 7 I had a call from the Republican senator Robert Griffin of Michigan, who said, “Mr. Brokaw, you’ve been very patient with me. I want you to know Senator Goldwater, Senator Hugh Scott, and Congressman John Rhodes are headed to the White House to tell the president he cannot survive the impeachment.”

  Griffin earlier had agonized over what to write the president, as impeachment seemed inevitable. Finally, he had warned that if the House decided to impeach, the Senate would vote on guilt or innocence. And if the president continued to resist handing over the tapes, Griffin said, he would vote to convict.

  I placed a quick call to Nightly News in New York, where an uptight editor said, “You’ve got to get a second source.”

  Are you kidding? This is the number two Republican in the Senate and I’ve developed a personal relationship with him.