The Fall of Richard Nixon

by Tom Brokaw

  Get a second source, he said.

  I hung up and had an idea.

  Barry Goldwater, Jr., was a congressman from California. I called his office, and when he came on the line I said, “Hey, Barry, this is really something, isn’t it? Your dad coming to the White House to give the president the bad news.”

  Barry said, “Yeah, how about that?”

  That counted as a second source!

  As it turns out, the president knew his time was up. He told his visitors he would address the nation the following night.

  At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the next day, there were two separate worlds, with no common DNA. In Lafayette Square, directly across from the White House, a younger crowd in a celebratory mood had gathered, not hostile but plainly not sorry to see the president go. Some had driven through the night from New York and other liberal bastions, veterans of the anti-Nixon movement from the angry days of Vietnam, to be in front of the White House to see if Nixon would resign.

  In the downstairs working rooms of the White House, the women who staffed the press operation were typically cheerful and efficient as we all awaited the president’s speech to the nation. There was an air of expectancy and, frankly, relief after the pressures of the last year.

  One always ebullient White House staffer rushed to the bulletin board with a notice “about the president” and then burst into tears.

  “I’m not sure which president,” she said.

  Upstairs, Richard Nixon was still the president, and word trickled down that he was spending his time with his family: Pat, his wife of thirty-four years, who had been through so much; daughters Tricia and Julie; and their husbands, Eddie and David. The president rarely played the role of paterfamilias, but today he did, organizing family photographs, with instructions to be cheerful.

  Before long it was time for him to address the nation for the last time as president. It was a defensive combination: he gave the reason for the speech, but only fleetingly, and then a review of what he had accomplished and the hopes he had for the future. Those looking for an apology might still be there in Lafayette Square.

  He opened his remarks that night, as he often did, by recounting the number of Oval Office speeches he had given—this one was the thirty-seventh—without saying, “This is the last one.” Instead he said, “Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort.”

  Going on, he continued to emphasize that he was preserving the political expectations of the office, noting specifically that the support of Congress in very difficult decisions is necessary. Then came the very Nixonian line, “I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.” And then a familiar Nixon turn: “But as president, I must put the interests of America first.”

  As close as he would come to an apology, an unequivocal expression of remorse, surfaced as he went on:

  “I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong—and some were wrong—they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interests of the nation.”

  He concluded his remarks with his hope that his time in office would mean that all of our children would “have a better chance than before of living in peace rather than dying in war.”

  Apart from that one fleeting reference to some wrong judgments, the president did not apologize for decisions he made that catapulted the nation into a great crisis of the presidency and trust in government. He did not look the American people in the eye and say, “I selfishly put you through a terrible ordeal that threatened the very underpinning of our way of governing—the rule of law. I am deeply sorry.”

  Instead, we had his self-serving comments, inadequate and deeply disappointing.

  On the air from Lafayette Square that night I commented that as difficult as the president said it was for him to be a quitter, it was just as difficult for him to acknowledge any kind of wrongdoing. He said he had lost his “political base,” as if this were a caucus gone awry. He had missed a historic opportunity to heal the wounds of the last year.

  The peaceful transfer of power in action: Ford caused an uproar with his pardon of Nixon, but the country moved on.

  THE NEXT MORNING I handed off the NBC site for live broadcasts in Lafayette Square to my colleague John Cochran. I wanted to be in the East Room for the president’s farewell to his staff, to witness in person this historic moment. We know now that the president thought he had uncharacteristically overslept that morning when he discovered that his watch had stopped, just as his presidency was about to come to a halt as well. The ever-attentive Al Haig gave the soon-to-be-ex-president a single sheet of paper, saying, “We forgot to do this. Would you sign it now?” The message was one line and historic.

  “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.”

  Nixon signed the paper; the proud, complicated man was now the only American president to resign the office.

  The East Room of the White House was crowded with staff members assembled to hear the personal farewell from the now former president they had served. It was a mix of melancholy and relief after almost two tense years of defiance and uncertainty.

  At the back of the room, my colleague from ABC News, Tom Jarriel, arrived with a god-awful haircut, explaining that he’d been on vacation and had gone to a new barber. Just then Ron Ziegler walked in, took one look at Tom, and broke out laughing. “Jarriel,” he said, “that’s the worst haircut I’ve ever seen!” I suppose that on the worst day in the life of the man he had served so loyally, Ziegler deserved the opportunity to find some distraction.

  In his speech to the gathered staff, the president was plainly emotionally bereft, staring off to the side as he invoked his mother—“a saint”—and his long journey from that small house in Yorba Linda, California. He continued his resistance to finally, candidly acknowledging his role in the scandal, saying instead, “As I pointed out last night, sure, we have done some things wrong in this administration. And the top man always takes the responsibility and I have never ducked it.”

  As it often did with Nixon, it came down to money. Speaking of his administration, he said, “No man or no woman ever profited at the public expense or the public till….Mistakes, yes, but for personal gain, never.” Then, on this darkest day of his life, he turned to his financial condition: “I only wish I were a wealthy man—at the present time, I have got to find a way to pay my taxes—and if I were, I would like to recompense you for the sacrifices all of you have made to serve in government.”

  In his tribute to his mother, he recalled how she cared for his two brothers dying of tuberculosis and nursed four other patients at an Arizona tuberculosis center to help pay for the treatments. “Nobody will ever write a book, probably, about my mother….But she was a saint.”

  Then came the Nixon advice that was at once for his audience and, in his often bewildering way, self-directed:

  “Never get discouraged. Never be petty.

  “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them.

  “And then you destroy yourself.”

  Given all he had left behind on tape recordings, and the testimony of aides and others about Nixon’s often vengeful behavior, it is the summary line about this man’s complex psyche.

  Then it was time to go.

  Nixon and the ever-faithful Pat were accompanied to the presidential helicopter by the incoming president, Gerald Ford, and his wife, Betty. That melancholy moment took a Nixon turn when he paused
at the top of the helicopter entry, turned, and raised both arms in that triumphant pose he had used so often. Here it was a kind of caricature and not the victory salute that had served him well in the past.

  Richard Moore, an affable presidential aide friendly to reporters, turned to me and said, “I think I’ll go fishing.” Maybe not the stuff of history, but given the circumstances, I thought it made sense.

  At the NBC News headquarters in Northwest Washington, I was met by David Brinkley.

  “What did you think?” he asked, referring to the president in the East Room.

  What do you mean? I responded

  David said, in his Brinkley style, “I thought he was going to pull out a derringer and shoot himself on television.”

  What?

  David took me to a control room to look at the television images of the president’s East Room farewell. The isolated close-ups were starkly different from my impressions in the room at the time. Nixon’s emotions on the screen were raw and unsettling, as if he were speaking to an unseen audience, trying to explain how it had come to this. It was an enduring lesson in the different characteristics of a television image and an in-person view.

  At work on that night’s report for NBC Nightly News, anchored by John Chancellor, I resolved that the conclusion would be Nixon’s own words. Here is the account of the day and the final paragraph, drawn from Nixon’s earlier reflections on his life as a lonely child in a small house on the California coastline.

  The Nightly News report opened with the consolidation of the past and the present:

  As president, Richard Nixon has drawn crowds to the vast ellipse south of the White House before, but those were triumphs.

  This was not.

  These people were witnesses to the saddest day in the life of Richard Nixon.

  These were his last hours as president of the United States.

  Then came the melancholy scene in the East Room with his family at his side, the final walk to the helicopter accompanied by the new president, Gerald Ford, and Mrs. Ford, and then the defiant salute. For the last line I paraphrased that evocative passage from his autobiography describing his childhood in a small home forty miles inland from the Pacific Ocean in Southern California: “I listened to train whistles in the night and dreamed of far-off places.”

  * * *

  —

  When Citizen Nixon arrived in California he was met by a large, cheering crowd at El Toro, the Marine Air Base in Orange County, a fleeting moment reflecting his past, not his future. Accompanied by Pat, their daughter Tricia, and her husband, Edward, the now ex-president was driven to La Casa Pacifica, the oceanside estate that no longer would be eligible for the perks of being the Western White House. The security detail was sharply reduced and general maintenance was now the responsibility of the Nixon family.

  Once again his friends Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp, the engineer who invented the improved aerosol spray mechanism, came to his rescue, purchasing La Casa Pacifica in a deal that gave them control of nearby oceanfront acreage and allowed the Nixon family to retain control of the historic house.

  The former president’s troubles went well beyond real estate, however. He resigned the presidency but he was not tried on the serious charges that would have been the foundation of his impeachment. In effect, he was a defendant-in-waiting on a series of violations of significant federal statutes.

  While the nation prepared for autumn after one of the most emotionally disruptive summers in American history, the new president, Gerald R. Ford, was faced with the consequential decision of what to do with Richard Nixon.

  The evidence was clear: Nixon had violated several federal laws and he was no longer protected by his favorite defense, executive privilege. Should he go to trial?

  President Ford listened to his old friend Phil Buchen, a well-regarded lawyer from their hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and General Haig, still in place as White House chief of staff. When Buchen was told by Leon Jaworski, the Watergate special prosecutor, that it could take as long as nine months before the ex-president could be brought to trial, the new president decided time and circumstances demanded a swift and dramatic resolution of Richard Nixon’s fate.

  On Sunday morning, September 8, the White House announced on short notice the president would make an announcement from the Oval Office. Meredith and I were at a Sunday brunch at the home of Rod and Carla Hills. Suddenly someone said the President was about to make an important announcement from the White House.

  At 11:04 A.M., President Ford walked into the Oval Office, where a small band of journalists had been assembled, looked into the television cameras, and said, “To procrastinate, to agonize, and to wait for a more favorable turn of events that may never come…is a weak and potentially dangerous course for a President to follow.” As for Nixon and his family, “Theirs is an American tragedy in which we have all played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”

  Before the new president signed the proclamation granting the pardon, he read aloud, “Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in.” It had been worked out in advance that Nixon, in California, would acknowledge his wrongdoing, which he did with his own statement, saying he could now see he “was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.”

  This unexpected Sunday morning announcement shattered the early autumn calm that had begun to settle over the nation. Networks interrupted programming to carry the details and offer analyses; talk radio was all pardon, all day and night; newspapers prepared special editions. In bars and coffee shops, on campuses and in churches, in synagogues and football stadia, Richard Nixon was back in the news.

  President Ford’s pardon of Nixon immediately led to speculation he had been conned by Al Haig, who remained in the White House as chief of staff, with his reputation as a cunning operator intact. For his part, the new president had his own reasons for the pardon. He knew that he faced difficult problems, with inflation still running high and cutting into every family’s budget. And Vietnam was coming to a chaotic end, with the North taking over the entire country, setting off an evacuation of the South by whatever means possible. American helicopters were shoved into the sea to make room for refugees on U.S. aircraft carriers. An American contractor was forced to slug refugees attempting to board his cargo plane, which was already overloaded. South Vietnamese families went to sea in fragile sampans, hoping to be picked up by friendly ships. American troops with access to helicopters and cargo planes smuggled aboard South Vietnamese families who had been indispensable aides in and around American bases. It was an ugly end to an ugly war.

  Very soon after those dramatic days, it was on to covering the administration of Gerald Ford as he toured America, in effect introducing himself as the new president. At home and abroad, America was rocked by unprecedented twin catastrophes—a president forced to resign and a war lost. In some ways, sturdy Jerry Ford was perfectly cast as a reliable symbol of America’s resilience. He had friends on both sides of the congressional aisle. He was conservative but not an ideologue. My working-class father, a hard-hat Democrat, liked the news that in the morning the new president fixed his own English muffin.

  Henry Kissinger stayed on as secretary of state and organized a global “meet our new president” tour so allies and enemies alike could meet this middle American and his vivacious wife, Betty, a former model and dancer. They went to South Korea, Japan, Russia, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Finland. To Spain and an audience wit
h Francisco Franco, who was by then a shriveled little man with one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest regimes, as he had supported Nazi Germany. Franco took President Ford on a ride through the streets of Madrid in an open convertible surrounded by enormous stallions guided by tall horsemen with long lances. It was more than a show, as the horses were sheathed in blankets of silver or steel, which hid the tiny dictator on his public outing.

  In Yugoslavia we continued our strongman tour with an appearance by Marshal Tito, the husky Communist who held that fractious area together during WWII. Tito was a supporter of Palestinians in the Israeli neighborhood and lectured the Americans on the importance of giving them autonomy. Tito also gave President Ford a subtle lesson in command protocol. When Ford was asked a question, he had to lean forward to reach a microphone. When Tito was asked a question, his henchmen moved the microphone to him.

  Tito and Franco may have been two of the commanding dictators of the twentieth century, but they were not in the company of Mao Zedong, who was still alive when we went to China, a country still behind the bamboo curtain. Beijing was stuck in the 1920s and 1930s, with aging hotels, many more bikes than cars, horse-drawn wagons in the main squares, and air so thick with dust the White House physician warned me not to jog again when I returned with soot caking my nostrils. All the Chinese were dressed in padded blue uniforms and carried out their duties with blank expressions. When I thanked one guide he looked at me sternly and said, “I did not do this for you; I did it for my chairman, Mao Zedong.”

  We didn’t see Mao—he had a private meeting with President Ford and Secretary Kissinger—but I did have exposure to the diminutive Deng Xiaoping, who would become China’s most important leader when it began a transition to a new economy, away from Communist dogma. When the American press began to complain about no substance on the trip, just tourism, Beijing rolled out Deng for a meeting with the president. In a small room with only a simple wooden desk, Deng had a stoic expression as he awaited President Ford.