Nixon’s resiliency in the face of the Watergate crisis is difficult to measure. Outwardly, he appeared like King Canute, vainly sweeping back the sea. On May 5, 1974, Alexander Haig appeared on ABC’s Issues and Answers and brashly asserted that for the past year, the President “has run this country and its business.… [H]e has done it successfully and I am confident that he will continue to.” The work of the presidency went on, in ironic, but certainly unintended, confirmation of Nixon’s earlier adage that the nation did not need a President for domestic affairs. Melvin Laird admitted that the President was “consumed with this other matter, but we functioned.” Laird and his staff worked on the budget process and domestic legislation. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer thought little was different. The President had always been uninterested and lackadaisical about domestic affairs. In an emergency, however, Moorer thought the President was “decisive.”
Other observers, however, saw a presidency adrift. Henry Kissinger later referred to the “collapse of executive authority due to Watergate.” On a more personal note, he thought that Watergate had so affected the President’s behavior as almost to undermine Kissinger’s diplomatic efforts with Syria. Those efforts, of course, succeeded, making Kissinger’s retrospective view altogether self-enhancing.
As early as April 1973, Kissinger thought that Watergate had grown “into bewilderment and frustration for those seeking to keep the government operating and into panic for those directly involved.” He undoubtedly had a special frustration of his own. At that very time, Nixon had told Haldeman and Ehrlichman that William Rogers’s resignation as Secretary of State must be delayed, despite Kissinger’s eagerness for Rogers’s departure and his own accession to the office. “[T]he hell with Henry on that,” the President said; Kissinger had to be told that “there are bigger things here.”
Kissinger’s memoirs are ambiguous on the question of presidential paralysis during the period. At times, he portrays a president still in full command of his powers, determined to exercise the full range of his authority and expertise in foreign-policy matters. And yet, Kissinger also depicts a president who was bored by the most calamitous or momentous of international events, and who, to Kissinger’s mind, often threatened to upset carefully balanced negotiating postures.34
After the Arabs instituted an oil embargo in late 1973, threatening America’s supply of essential petroleum products, new confusion and distress swept the nation. Garment thought that the latest crisis might present an opportunity for the President to demonstrate leadership. The country needed, Garment told Nixon, “a sense of direction, [to know] that someone is in control, taking care of people’s basic needs in a bewildering, even frightening time.… It’s up to you to give people the feeling that someone’s in charge.” Nixon could not afford the appearance of excessive delegation of power, he declared. But Garment also realized that Watergate handicapped the President, and despite his clarion call for action, the President’s lawyer remained pessimistic: “If you can make it through the next few months, you may be able to weather Watergate. I honestly don’t know.”
Garment urged the President to be “exceptionally tough,” and to establish national priorities for allocation of scarce oil—even if doing so meant offending people by banning Sunday driving. He linked the energy crisis and Watergate by contending that the President’s actions would determine his ultimate fate. If he did not act decisively, Garment warned Nixon, his critics would “say you were brooding over Watergate, paralyzed, unable to control your advisors, when you should have been thinking of the people’s need, planning ahead, acting.” In response to the Arab oil embargo, the President secured a lowered national speed limit and an extension of daylight savings time, traveled to California on a commercial jet, and reduced the number of lights on the national Christmas tree. He also delivered a nationwide address on the oil embargo. At the end of the talk, Nixon reiterated his intention of not resigning. He would, he said, continue to work sixteen to eighteen hours a day and make every effort to erase any doubts as to his integrity.35 But he did little to allay the fears of an energy shortage—or to dissipate the increasing concern that Watergate had sorely crippled his presidency.
Up close, Garment and others saw Nixon as possessing an uncanny ability to compartmentalize, to segregate his responsibilities from his personal turmoil and anxieties over Watergate. Yet the brooding and paralysis that Garment had feared were exactly what some perceived—even such admirers as the new FBI Director, Clarence Kelley. Late in 1973, Kelley received a summons to the White House. It was his first meeting with Nixon since his appointment nearly six months earlier. He noted that the President appeared haggard and tired, but his most vivid impressions were of an empty desk and a small statue of Abraham Lincoln, as if, Kelley noted, to signify Nixon’s identification with the integrity of a great president who, like him, was constantly under attack. Kelley remembered other meetings with Nixon, marked by crisp, concise conversation. Now, Nixon rambled and digressed. Abruptly, at one point, the President mentioned his taping, contending that his predecessors had done it extensively. Kelley was convinced that the President was “breaking down under enormous strain.” Nixon raised the Watergate investigation periodically, but never in any probing way. Finally, the President asked Kelley if he enjoyed his position and then expressed great pleasure with his work. Kelley never understood the purpose of the meeting, their last.36
Mordechai Gazit, the Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, accompanied Israeli Premier Golda Meir to the White House following the Yom Kippur War in the fall of 1973. Nixon reminded them that he had resupplied the Israeli army during the war, sent a new aid request for Israel to Congress, and declared a military alert to keep the Russians out of the Middle East. He then told his visitors that he would not be able to do so again. At first, Gazit thought that Nixon intended to project a toughness to the Israelis in order to stimulate the negotiating process. But Gazit eventually understood that the President simply meant that he no longer had the political power to act so decisively, clearly recognizing his deteriorating situation.37
After mid-1973 the news summaries prepared daily for the President no longer evoked his elaborate annotations. Kissinger noted their absence as well as the lack of comments on memoranda he addressed to the President. Once the President returned a memo with every option box checked, defeating the purpose of the paper.38 Nixon’s presidential papers, so filled with multiple daily memoranda to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, and others from 1969–72, only rarely provide similar documents as the Watergate phenomenon gripped the White House after May 1973. Richard Nixon himself seems to disappear from his presidential papers.
Armand Hammer, a prominent businessman with longstanding ties to Kremlin leaders, met Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow on November 17, 1973. Hammer reported that Brezhnev was concerned about Nixon’s Watergate problems. The Soviet leader could not understand the fuss. “You have your own ways and, speaking confidentially, I must confess I don’t understand them,” Brezhnev said. He told Hammer he was worried about Nixon: “A man can only stand so much and then he’s bound to break down.” Brezhnev sanctimoniously promised not to take advantage of Nixon; he would not “jump on him, as others are.”39
Brezhnev’s admiration for Nixon may or may not have been genuine, but foreign powers, friend and foe alike, prefer a known quantity. The Soviets had found that they could do business with Nixon, in large part operating on the theory that a Republican president had less need to concern himself with right-wing reactions to any overtures to Russia. Now, as a British television report in May 1973 noted, the Soviets and China might welcome a scandal in “capitalism’s high place,” but like Britain, they preferred a strong government in the United States. The Japanese similarly worried that Nixon’s undoing would be “most unfortunate” for the “world at large.” An Austrian commentator saw the growing impasse in the American government as upsetting the world balance of power. Worse, he said, th
e preoccupation with domestic affairs only meant an abandonment of concern for American world responsibilities. The President’s foreign admirers gloomily predicted more “foreign political consequences of [his] dwindling of power.” After the events of October and November, the U.S. Information Service post in London reported to Washington in its “psychological assessment” that Nixon’s credibility had dropped sharply as the Watergate situation “became ever more muddled.”40
The President’s political standing with Congress had eroded to such an extent that the legislative branch now boldly asserted itself in foreign-policy matters. Congress ordered a cutoff of the Cambodian bombing effective in August 1973, and in November passed the War Powers Act. That law obligated the president to notify Congress of armed action within forty-eight hours of its onset, and further required him to withdraw military forces within sixty days unless Congress provided an extension. In Richard Nixon’s version of history, the War Powers Act and the limitation on the Cambodian bombing sent a clear signal to the Vietnamese enemy and directly led to the Communist takeover of Indochina by April 1975. Beyond Vietnam, he complained that the act made it “impossible” for a president to act “swiftly and secretly.” Nixon blamed Congress, the media, and the “peace movement” for harnessing the president to “Marquis of Queensberry rules in a world where good manners are potentially fatal hindrances.”41
Watergate indubitably fostered a favorable legislative climate for longtime critics of the Vietnam war and of broad presidential military powers. The House approved the War Powers resolution just one day after Nixon again claimed executive privilege for his tapes. Two days later, the Senate concurred, on the heels of Nixon’s statement that he would not “wallow in Watergate.” Nixon promptly vetoed the bill, charging that Congress had wiped out nearly two hundred years of precedents justifying presidential initiatives. Between the first House vote on October 12, and the veto override on November 7, thirty-three members switched their votes. The Saturday Night Massacre was very much on their minds. House Democratic floor leader Clement Zablocki (D–WI) said that the “time was ripe,” and he pointedly acknowledged the influence of the Cox firing and the tapes question. Zablocki also offered a powerful defense of the War Powers Act’s constitutionality. Senator John Tower (R–TX) underlined the same point, when he recognized that Congress found itself swept up “in the hysteria of Watergate and desire to punish … this President.” Tower warned Congress not to “make the power of the President … a victim of our emotions on Watergate.”42 Tower’s distinction between “this” President and “the” President was an interesting one. Richard Nixon repeatedly tried—without success—to save himself through the same distinction.
The inability of Henry Kissinger and many foreign observers to make the linkage between domestic confidence in the President and the strength of American foreign policy is striking. Nearly a century earlier, Lord Bryce had made the connection. Americans needed to know, he said, the worst as well as the best of themselves—and it was important that all the world should know. Bryce perceived the enormous confidence Americans had in their ability to deal openly with their flaws. He recognized that Americans believed in such procedures to the extent that they thought it would be impossible ever to mistake their own true interests; to believe otherwise, he noted, “seems to them a sort of blasphemy against the human intelligence and its Creator.”
But there were limits to what Bryce labeled the “peculiar buoyancy” and “airy hopefulness” of Americans. The conflict surrounding the President began to resemble a civil war. While ordinary citizens were not on the verge of marching to Bull Run, powerful institutions—the presidency, Congress, the courts, the media—fought like scorpions in a bottle. But the combatants settled on one adversary. Events in the late fall of 1973 unleashed powerful tides against the President. When Time called for Nixon’s resignation on November 12, the effect was startling. Henry Luce, the founder of Time, had regarded Nixon as his special protégé, his hope for the vibrant leader so desperately needed by the Republican Party. The magazine’s editors now thought that Nixon and the nation had “passed a tragic point of no return.” Alexander Haig complained that the Time editorial was like “being hit in the face with a cold fish.”43
The real danger for the President came not from self-appointed public spokesmen, however, but from the nation’s elected representatives. For the second time in the republic’s history, Congress prepared for the impeachment of a sitting president. A curious consensus for action began to emerge. Vice President Ford had told reporters on December 12 that if the House failed to vote impeachment by the end of April, then clearly the move to impeach the President was “partisan.” Laird announced his White House resignation on December 19. He urged a House vote by March 15—it “would be a healthy thing,” he said—in order to clear the way for the fall elections. Ford and Laird, ever the party loyalists, had their own cause; they didn’t want congressional Republicans running for election to be in the shadow of Watergate. The senior members of the House Judiciary Committee in both parties had a similar understanding of political needs, as they announced plans for reporting the results of their inquiry to the full House in April.44
Doubtless, an early decision by the committee served a variety of political purposes. But the existence of the tapes generated an external influence that neither side could ignore. The case for or against the President in the arena of public opinion hinged on what the tapes could show he did or did not say. In that sense, the House Committee had no control over the calendar of Nixon’s ultimate fate.
When the House launched its impeachment inquiry against Andrew Johnson in 1868, it appointed a select committee to consider the matter. In 1973 the Democratic leadership left the matter to the Judiciary Committee. A variety of explanations have been offered, but the most consistent seems to have been a reluctance to circumvent the normal lines of jurisdiction—in other words, entrenched interests. The most simple reason was that Speaker Carl Albert was in a bind. He could not afford to appoint a special committee that might have made him the beneficiary of its deliberations, since Albert, as Speaker of the House, was in the line of presidential succession, and the nation at the time was without a Vice President.
In truth, the House Judiciary Committee was not highly regarded by the Democratic leadership. For years it had been the fiefdom of its longtime Chairman, Emanuel Celler (D–NY). Celler had a reputation—extending from Democratic leader Thomas O’Neill to the Justice Department’s Henry Petersen—of being excessively cautious, even obstructionist. According to Petersen, Celler consistently had been an obstacle to needed legislative reforms. Peter Rodino, his successor, may have been even less respected. Rodino had first been elected in 1948, and his primary legislative achievement had been to establish Columbus Day as a national holiday. Although chairman of a major committee, Rodino was not an insider among House leaders; furthermore, he never developed the influence or power of Celler. At the outset of the committee’s hearings, according to O’Neill, Rodino “needed prodding, and on more than one occasion I had to light a fire under his seat.”45 Ironically, Rodino’s innate caution created a drift and inertia in the committee’s proceedings which prevented the early decision sought by others. That development undoubtedly was unintended; nevertheless, the passage of time beyond the intended spring vote, and the introduction of decisive evidence, made for a case that eventually proved irresistible.
In the beginning, the regular Judiciary Committee staff assumed the burden of organizing and preparing materials for the inquiry. Soon, however, new people were added to work exclusively on the impeachment project. In early November, Rodino solicited law schools for suggestions for additional staff. Richard Cates, a former prosecutor then teaching part-time at the University of Wisconsin Law School and highly regarded as a trial lawyer, responded, and through Robert Kastenmeier (D–WI) received an interview with the committee’s Chief Counsel and then with Rodino. He was hired in late November. Cates’s role was
to “evaluate the evidence,” as Rodino wished, and determine whether a case could be made for impeachment. Within several weeks, working largely from the findings of the Senate Select Committee, Cates had focused the questions regarding the President’s alleged “high crimes and misdemeanors” and reported that a case could be made. A onetime legislator himself, Cates impressed the members and the regular staff of the Rodino Committee with his integrity and his lawyering skill. He eventually captured the respect and esteem of most members of the committee, cutting across party and ideological lines. But he lacked national stature, and at the outset he had been identified with the committee’s liberal wing.
When President Nixon twice selected a Special Prosecutor, he found it imperative to appoint Democrats, whether the liberal Cox or the more conservative Jaworski. Appearances, as well as substance, dictated those choices. Rodino found himself in a similar position. On December 19 he announced the selection of John M. Doar as Chief Counsel for the committee’s majority. Doar, a Republican originally from Wisconsin but then practicing in New York, had served in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. He seemed ideal: a Republican who had worked with Democrats in nonpartisan causes. Typically, Rodino procrastinated on the appointment, finally yielding to O’Neill’s “order” to act before Christmas.46
The President’s lawyers, already besieged by numerous subpoenas and hampered by the inadequacy of their support staff—to say nothing of their uncooperative client—had little time or inclination to consider the prospect of impeachment, which seemed at that juncture politically and constitutionally remote. Their “real world” centered on court orders, briefs, and relations with the new Special Prosecutor. But one important quarter of the government began to think seriously about the unthinkable.
The Wars of Watergate Page 65
