March 13, 1974
He [Haig] started off by being fairly tough and firm with me, telling me that it was getting down to the wire, that if the President was going to survive there had to be an all-out offense, that they were preparing papers and they wanted me to give it full range support. I asked what it was . . . he wanted me to say that I would support it. I thought for a minute—low keyed it and said that in my opinion the President was entitled to advocacy and that if in good conscience I couldn’t support what it was that he was talking about then I would resign. I said I felt I probably could but I didn’t want to say without seeing in advance what it was.
The White House was putting Dad in a very difficult position, and Dad began to sense an us-versus-them mentality in this discussion with Haig:
There was too much, for my thinking, of the feeling that everyone that wasn’t supportive was totally against, in other words—turning against the whole Judiciary Committee, the House, we don’t have any friends on the Hill—nobody is standing up for us. This went through the whole theme . . . I did get the feeling that Haig goes through a lot of inner turmoil in his own mind. He must have some difficult times with the President though he would never say this to me . . .
Dad concluded this entry with a statement about the political pressure he was experiencing, in terms of agreeing to the administration’s public relations offensive:
At this moment I haven’t even seen the papers that [speechwriter] Pat Buchanan is putting together—his talking points. They are talking about an all-out offensive—whatever the hell that means. I have called them as I see them so far. Bending, stretching a little here or there, insisting that things that I don’t want to put my name on have the White House name on them, not mine. And I am not going to change that, I’m simply not going to do it.
There were several principles at stake in Dad’s mind throughout this time. First, of course, was his integrity and his wanting to do the right thing in this difficult, complicated, and unprecedented time. Second, there was his extreme loyalty—his aversion to “piling on.” Third, there was his essential optimism that Watergate would resolve itself and the Nixon presidency would survive. For example, a month later—on April 18, 1974—he wrote of being “heartsick” and of things being “massively fouled up,” but then he added that he’s “still believing that the evidence on the tapes will vindicate the President but not totally, not clearly, not to get this whole matter behind us. Resignation seems wrong to me still; impeachment, though possible, does not even seem likely right now . . .”
Within a few weeks, he realized he supported resignation, mostly in defense of the presidency as an institution—another principle that was very important to him then, and certainly after he himself went on to serve in the Oval Office. On the night before the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings began, Dad wrote:
May 8, 1974
My own gut reactions are really mixed up. I believe this thing about resignation being bad for the system; and yet for the first time it seems like it might be the only answer. I am not talking about short term politics. I am talking about the Presidency and what has happened to it because of these ugly revelations. Probably they went on before but that no longer seems to be the point.
That summer, in a letter dated July 23, 1974, Dad wrote to my brothers (he thought I was too young to be included) and shared his private thoughts about Watergate as it was nearing its inevitable conclusion. He talked about what a great country America is and how lucky they were to be citizens—but that Watergate was the worst of times, that it reflected “abysmal amorality.” He went on for many pages talking about the president and the men who worked in the White House. But it is in the final page of the letter that he draws lessons from Watergate:
Listen to your conscience. Don’t be afraid not to join the mob—if you feel inside it’s wrong. Don’t confuse being “soft” with seeing the other guy’s point of view. In judging your President give him the enormous credit he’s due for substantive achievements. Try to understand the “why” of the National Security concern; but understand too that the power accompanied by arrogance is very dangerous. It’s particularly dangerous when men with no real experience have it—for they can abuse our great institutions. Avoid self-righteously turning on a friend, but have your friendship mean enough that you would be willing to share with your friend your judgment. Don’t assign away your judgment to achieve power.
As RNC chairman, Dad was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Charged with promoting and supporting the Republican Party, he found himself being forced to defend a situation that he eventually found to be sickening. Toward the end of the letter to my brothers, he expressed the toll it had taken on him:
These have been a tough 18 months. I feel battered and disillusioned. I feel betrayed in a sense by those who did wrong and tracked corruption and institutional subversion into that beautiful White House. In trying to build the Party, I feel like the guy in charge of the Titanic boiler room—one damn shock after another.
The same day he wrote to my brothers, Dad reflected on Watergate’s effects on the Republican Party. He wrote in his diary:
July 23, 1974
These are complicated times. I can’t imagine a set of circumstances in terms of Party that are more complicated. I feel frustrated that our programs and our philosophy and the President’s magnificent record on war and peace would normally have us riding high even in spite of the problems of inflation. This Watergate thing dominates all the news. It doesn’t dominate the concern of the voters. The concern of the voters is still on inflation where of course we have a tremendous problem.
Dad had a difficult job outside of Washington as well, traveling to state party events and having to deal with irate Republicans. Arthur Fletcher, who had been a delegate to the United Nations and then a consultant to the RNC, remembers, “That was not a tenderfoot’s assignment, holding the Republican Party together. But George did not apologize, did not back off from the assignment, and I thought he stood the test superbly well. I know of no other national chairman that had to ride out the tide the way he did. And in spite of it—to still get out and raise money, go across the country and talk to a lot of mad, bitter, disgruntled Republicans, and face a hostile press that was asking him some very tough questions—through it all he handled himself very well.”
Dad told me he had two stacks of mail. One said, “Why do you keep the party close to Nixon when you know the party per se had nothing to do with Watergate?” The other stack said, “Why are you not doing more to help President Nixon?” Dad continued, “In my speeches to the Republican faithful, I made the point over and over again that the party was in no way involved in the Watergate scandal, but that we should not pull away from Nixon without concrete evidence of wrong-doing.”
On July 24, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Nixon must turn over the Watergate tapes to the special prosecutor. Over the next several days, the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve articles of impeachment. Dad had a “big picture” conversation with Al Haig, in which he conveyed his concerns as party chairman:
July 31, 1974
Haig stopped short of being critical of me, although I will readily concede the White House probably feels I have not done enough to partisanize it . . . I told him the adverse effects on the Party in terms of money, morale, deterioration of support, of real strong support. I told him that I did not love the President, I respected his achievements . . .
Dad’s diary entry on Monday night, August 5, 1974, strikes me as increasingly emotional:
As I dictate this memo at 10:10 p.m. on August 5 I do not feel the President can survive . . . I have decided not to issue a statement, to simply sit and let the storms swirl around, although give some leadership to the committee by telling them not to get too far out front. I am torn between wanting to express my own agony and my own emotion, and get out front and cry resignation and this is too much . . .
Dad also wrote o
f a conversation with Al Haig, who made a sweeping prediction: “He [Haig] predicted the President would not survive, but that we would look back when were both 80 and say he had been one of the great presidents of our time . . .”
Now that Dad is over eighty years old, it’s time to address whether General Haig’s prediction was on the mark. I asked Dad how he felt about Nixon and his presidency in retrospect. Here’s what he said:
“I got to know him pretty well, and I admired much of what he was doing and went on to accomplish as a two-term president. I felt he was very, very smart, but he had a lot of hang-ups. One was that his disdain for ‘Ivy Leaguers’ came through loud and clear. He would single out Ivy Leaguers at cabinet meetings and one could look around the room and see several Ivy Leaguers at the cabinet table. As the tapes revealed, he had a rather ugly side in which he was hypercritical of some groups.”
He had a few things to say about the president’s men as well:
“I liked Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and I think it was reciprocal. [Charles] Colson back then was a tough guy. He has gone on to really do wonderful things in his prison ministry. I respect him, but back then did not feel very close.
“John Dean always struck me as an arrogant little creep. He became a big shot. He turned on Nixon, and, of course, much to the delight of the Nixon-haters, he put a negative spin on a lot of things about Nixon. He became a hero when he testified before Congress. He was as guilty as Nixon ever was, but somehow managed to escape a lot of the public disapproval.” Then, after further reflection, he added, “Perhaps some of this visceral anti-Dean feeling I have is because of the way he has attacked your brother.”
And as for how he thinks Nixon felt about him:
“I always felt Nixon thought I wasn’t tough enough. I lacked the kind of bulldoze-’em approach that some of his lieutenants had. Nixon liked the tough guy. He encouraged toughness and not taking any guff.”
My take: Dad stuck to his principles and refused to use his position at the RNC as a bully pulpit to defend and excuse a corrupt president—if Nixon interpreted that as weakness, so be it. We’ll leave it up to history to decide whose perception is more accurate.
Dad was very fond of Nixon’s family, particularly his daughter Julie, and to this day, the sadness he felt about their suffering is still evident.
“I recall Julie Nixon coming to see me at the RNC headquarters. I was chairman at the time. Julie was desperately trying to rally support for her dad. She asked me if I couldn’t help more. At that time, Nixon was sinking fast. Julie obviously felt we could do more. She was very, very nice and she had been terribly hurt by the attacks on her dad, not from the RNC but from the press and many political people, some in our own party. I respected Julie then. I could see she was hurting badly. I ached for her, but there was nothing we could do. I had gone around the country encouraging support for Nixon until it became clear he was going down because of his own false statements.”
The toll that political scandals take on family members, particularly the children, is immeasurable. A strange image I remember from that time is of Ann Haldeman, a teenage schoolmate of mine whose dad, H. R. Haldeman, was on the White House staff. I remember her opening her jacket and having all kinds of Nixon-Agnew buttons on the inside of her blazer.
As I look back on it, that incident makes me sad. I can understand how Ann wanted to support her dad. Whatever you might think about President Nixon and his inner circle, the children should be unassailable—yet, in some ways, they bore the same brunt of the pain and the shame as did their parents.
When Dad spoke with Al Haig on August 5, Haig had just returned from a weekend at Camp David with the president, along with his speechwriters Pat Buchanan and Ray Price and White House press secretary Ron Ziegler. The Supreme Court had just ordered President Nixon to turn over the White House tapes, and so Nixon had played the tapes for them over the weekend. At the Monday morning staff meeting afterward, Haig asked Pat Buchanan to brief Dean Burch, who was political director at the White House—and, therefore, liaison to the RNC—as to what was on the tapes. “That was about 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning and we just heard it and almost unanimously—nobody really thought much about it, we just went to the bar—and opened up the bar and had a drink and toasted the president and that’s it, you know, we fold her up now, it’s over,” said Dean Burch.
From there, Burch took the transcripts of the tape with him to brief Dad and John Rhodes, the House minority leader. Rhodes recalled afterward: “Etched on my memory until I die will be that morning—it was the Monday before Nixon resigned—when George Bush and Dean Burch and [White House counsel] Fred Buzhardt came out to my house. I had a bad case of laryngitis and wasn’t going to the office that day. So they came out to the house to brief me on the contents of the June 23 tape, the one in which the president told Bob Haldeman to make sure that the CIA told the FBI to call off the Watergate investigation for national security reasons. And George Bush hadn’t been briefed either on that, so we were briefed together. And we both came to the same conclusion, that this was a smoking gun, a clear case of an impeachable offense. Not only an impeachable offense, but an offense so grave that you almost had to impeach. So we came to the conclusion that the end of the road had been reached for Mr. Nixon at exactly the same time.” (John Rhodes died in 2003.)
The next day, Tuesday, August 6, 1974, was “a traumatic day,” Dad wrote, as he sat in on a “grueling” cabinet meeting just two days before Nixon announced he would resign from office:
The President sat there, strong, determined, announcing his decision to remain in office and yet unreality prevailed. Jerry Ford reiterated his position that because of his peculiar situation he was not going to involve himself in the President’s defense . . . It kind of cast a pall over the meeting. Haig later told me he thought it was wrong, the President was clearly shook up. Ford later told me that he wondered if it had offended the President and how it had gone over. I told him I thought that he had done the right thing and that I had told Haig, which I did, that Ford was simply reiterating a position he expressed the day before, so that the President would be sure to know it. Because the President indeed at that meeting was saying we should go all out, be together, be unified, go forward, etc. . . . His explanation of this awful lie was not convincing. It simply was unreal, but everybody just sat there.
Later on in the same meeting, Dad felt pulled in two directions, as he thought of the evidence on the president’s tape:
The President looked uncomfortable, once he smiled over to me and with his lips said, “George,” smiled and looked warm and my heart went totally out to him even though I felt deeply betrayed by his lie of the day before. The man is amoral. He has a different sense than the rest of the people. He came up the hard way. He hung tough. He hunkered down, he stonewalled. He became President of the United States and a damn good one in many ways, but now it had all caught up with him. All the people he hated—Ivy League, press, establishment, Democrats, privileged—all of this ended up biting him and bringing him down.
In the same entry—they got longer as resignation neared—he wrote that he’d made it clear to the president (through Haig) that Nixon must resign. “This era of tawdry, shabby lack of morality has got to end,” he wrote, and called Vice President Ford a “latter-day Eisenhower”:
He is an Ike without the heroics but he has that decency the country is crying out for right now. I will take Ford’s decency over Nixon’s toughness because what we need at this juncture in our history is a certain sense of morality and a certain sense of decency. Nixon can no longer present it. My own views are that the President should get out and get out now . . .
Dad also lashed out at the press and the Washington “meat-grinder”:
The incivility of the press had been a paralyzing kind of thing over the last few months. And now it continues, that blood lust, the talons are sharpened and clutched, ready to charge in there and grab the carrion of this President. I am sick at heart. Sic
k about the President’s betrayal and sick about the fact that the major Nixon enemies can now gloat because they have proved he is what they said he is. No credit, no compassion, no healing, simply the meat-grinder at work. I suppose when it is written one can establish that perhaps I should have done more, but I am not made up to walk on the body of a man whom I don’t love but whom I respect for his accomplishments.
He closed this entry wondering about Rose Mary Woods, the president’s secretary:
I have not seen Rose Woods and I wonder how she feels. The gloom in the White House is unimaginable, difficult to describe. It is brought dramatically home that this President is a liar, a total liar and we cannot face up to it in fairness, in the nation’s interest, in any other way . . .
Dad’s close friend Dean Burch was also in that final cabinet meeting, which he said had to be the most “surrealistic” cabinet meeting he’d ever seen:
The whole goddamn world was crashing in on us. The White House was collapsing. And President Nixon came in and just had a regular cabinet meeting. He was saying we were going to do this and we’re going to strike that program, we’re going to do something else. George had a letter addressed to President Nixon in which he said he felt that he had to resign. And he wanted to bring it up at the cabinet meeting. I felt that he should bring it up, but I didn’t think he should bring it up at the cabinet meeting. I just didn’t think that was an appropriate place to face a man down and say, I want to read a letter demanding your resignation.
I’ve never seen such an unhappy man as George was during this period, because now all of us had come to the conclusion that we’d all been lied to for many, many months . . . But George then went in to see the president after that meeting and gave him the letter. He told him that there just wasn’t anything left, wasn’t any support left, and that he, George, as chairman of the party, sided with those who felt the president had to go.
My Father, My President Page 11
