After the Fall

by Kasey S. Pipes

  Chapter Six

  Interviews and Apologies

  “I’m a pretty fair poker player myself.”

  As 1977 began, Nixon was thinking about television, of all things. It was time to get ready for his first television appearance since August 9, 1974.

  Journalist David Frost had contacted Nixon back in the summer of 1975 about the possibility of doing television interviews. Frost was well-known for his wide-ranging interviews. In Nixon, he saw the chance of a lifetime—the first television interview with the only president to resign from office.

  The president had already been toying with the idea of going on television and telling his side of the story. Plus, Nixon knew Frost. Frost had interviewed him earlier in his career. And Frost was shrewdly working through an intermediary—former Nixon aide Herb Klein, who eventually convinced his former boss to at least consider the interview request.

  One of the most compelling reasons for Nixon to do the interview was to help solve his primary problem—money. Previously, many media outlets had balked at the thought of paying huge sums of money to Nixon. But Frost proved more than willing. Frost’s production company, David Paradine Productions, offered to pay Nixon significant money for the interviews. It was an opportunity the former president couldn’t pass up.

  The deal came together after Swifty Lazar entered the negotiations. NBC, the other significant bidder, had offered as much as three hundred thousand dollars, but Lazar was now seeking more. When he and Frost spoke, he offered four one-hour shows in exchange for $750,000. Frost countered at five hundred thousand dollars. Lazar let NBC know about Frost’s offer, and the network quickly raised its price from three hundred thousand dollars to four hundred thousand dollars. When informed of this, Frost offered to pay even more than his last offer of five hundred thousand dollars, but he wanted editorial control of the interview, and he wanted assurances that no other networks would interview Nixon before he did.1

  In the end, they reached a deal: Frost would pay six hundred thousand dollars and get a piece of the profits. For his part, Nixon agreed to give no other interviews and gave control of the interview exclusively to Frost.

  An ominous note was struck when Frost pointed out that the contract gave him control of the interview. Nixon brushed aside the warning.

  “I’m a pretty fair poker player, myself,” he said to Frost. “During the war, I won a helluva pot with less of a hand than you’re holding.”2

  It was a remarkable exchange that foreshadowed what was to come in the interviews. Nixon seemed absolutely convinced he could handle any question thrown his way; Frost was equally convinced that he could destroy Nixon.

  According to Frost, as he got out the check to make a down payment on the interview, Swifty Lazar interjected, “Can I have the check please?”

  Nixon seemed shocked. Perhaps the constant worry over his financial challenges had caused him to want the money at that very moment. But Lazar, as his representative, would handle the money. Frost remembered that Nixon looked like a kid who had not been permitted to eat a “cookie” he had “just swiped from the jar.”

  The men shook hands and the deal was finalized. Later in the fall of 1976, Nixon had conducted his second negotiation with Frost over the interviews. This time the issue centered around timing. The former president wanted to do the interviews in August of 1977. Frost wanted to move much more quickly than that.

  “As I recall,” Nixon said when Frost objected to the late summer date, “we got a helluva rating [on] August 9, 1974.”

  Frost was unimpressed. He agreed that the ratings from the resignation had been huge, but he asked the former president, “What do you do for an encore?”3

  Eventually they reached a compromise and Nixon agreed to conduct the interviews in March of 1977. Frost arrived again for another meeting in Nixon’s San Clemente office in February. With the date of the showdown swiftly approaching, the two men abandoned the mostly cordial tone of past meetings for much more guarded postures.

  When Nixon shook hands with Frost that day, he called him the “Grand Inquisitor.” Frost answered that he was merely a “friendly neighborhood confidant.” The new tone of subtle hostility would continue through the meeting and into subsequent conversations Frost had with the Nixon team in the runup to the March interviews.

  “How do we know that you aren’t going to screw us in the editing?” Colonel Brennan sharply asked Frost just days before the first interview.

  “How do we know that you aren’t going to screw us with stonewalling?” Frost shot back.4

  Brennan had always opposed the interview. Like any staffer who fears his boss may be asked questions that don’t have good answers, Brennan worried that Nixon was walking into a losing battle. And his frustration showed that day with Frost.

  “Sixty percent of what this guy did in office was right,” he said, raising his voice. “And 30 percent may have been wrong, but he thought it was right at the time. If you screw us on the 60 percent, I’m going to ruin you if it takes the rest of my life.”

  “If you screw me on the ten percent I’m going to ruin you if it take the rest of my life,” Frost answered.

  On March 23, 1977, at seven thirty in the morning, Frost met his team of researchers at the Beverly Hilton and then loaded them into his Mercedes Benz. Then he drove them an hour and a half to meet Nixon at the mansion of industrialist Nixon supporter H. L. Smith in Monarch Bay. In the living room of the house, Frost’s team set up a makeshift television studio. The Nixon team helped by bringing some of Nixon’s own souvenirs from San Clemente and placing them on the bookshelves to add to the set in the background of the interview.

  Nixon dressed as he often did in a dark blue suit and a blue tie. He had studied for weeks with his research team back at La Casa Pacifica. “The only issue where there was a disagreement was on what to say about Watergate,” Khachigian remembered. “Gannon, Sawyer, and Brennan wanted him to put it behind him and acknowledge some sort of wrongdoing. I told him not to give an inch.” In fact, as Nixon prepared to meet with Frost for the tapings, he and Sawyer were only beginning the Watergate section of his memoirs. As the interviews started, no one on the Nixon team knew what he would say when pressed about Watergate.5

  Inside the Smith mansion, Nixon used the master bedroom as his green room to prepare. The Nixon staffers used the den area as their gathering spot. As the two men entered the makeshift set in the mansion’s living room, one of Frost’s researchers, James Reston Jr., was surprised at how tall Nixon was. “He looked fit and healthy, well-tanned with an orangey hue,” he recalled.

  As Nixon and Frost sat down and the camera crew prepared to film, small talk ensued. Nixon spoke of the groundswell of support for Pat after her stroke. Frost, dressed in a crisp dark jacket and a striped grey shirt accented with a white collar, looked down at his notes before joking that the camera crew spoke only Turkish.

  Frost was prepared. His team, led by Reston, had left no stone unturned in the research; they had even looked through the files of the Watergate prosecutors. And Frost had even gone through practice sessions with Bob Zelnick portraying a defensive Richard Nixon.

  Frost's plan was to put Nixon on defense as soon as possible without being overtly hostile. The Frost team eventually wanted to set up a showdown over what had happened to the missing minutes on the tape and to trap Nixon into admitting he had played a role in the coverup. And they had what they believed was an ace in the hole. Frost team researcher Reston had interviewed former Nixon counselor Charles Colson. In the midst of the conversation, Colson had casually mentioned that there were tapes of conversations he had conducted with Nixon about Watergate. Reston had never heard any tapes that included Colson. Indeed, no one had. So Reston went to the federal courthouse and searched through the record of the Haldeman trial. And in the exhibits, he found five different conversations between Colson and Nixon. In one of them, the word “stonewalling” had been used. Nixon had no memory of these conversations, and he certain
ly had no knowledge that the tapes existed. Only Reston and Frost did. And they intended to use it. A memo prepared by Reston for Frost before the first taping said, “This is a trap for Nixon and should be sprung deftly.”6 Indeed, years later, Reston would refer to the videotaping sessions not as interviews, but as an “ambush.”7

  Once the cameras were rolling, Frost lost little time getting into the heart of the matter.

  “Why didn’t you burn the tapes?” he asked the former president. Nixon responded in longform with a treatise that ultimately suggested Haldeman was to blame.

  Later in the first interview, Frost showed Nixon a tape of the resignation speech, which the former president claimed he hadn’t seen before. Nixon offered some commentary on the performance—and a bit of humor. His advisors had told him that he “shouldn’t gesture so much because your hands get in front of your face. Well, maybe that’s good. Maybe the hands are better looking than the face.”

  But Frost was not laughing. He pushed Nixon to say how he thought history would remember his administration.

  Nixon with David Frost. (Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Foundation)

  After several hours of taping, the first day’s session ended. Nixon returned to La Casa Pacifica; Frost returned to his hotel in Beverly Hills. Some on the Frost team worried that the interviewer hadn’t laid a glove on Nixon yet. They urged Frost to get tougher in the coming interviews and to try and stop Nixon when he filibustered.

  A few days later, Frost celebrated a birthday. Celebrities came to the party, including Neil Diamond. But it was Sammy Cahn who brought down the house. Cahn changed the words of the song “Love and Marriage” to:

  Frost and Nixon, Frost and Nixon,

  Now, there’s an act that’s gonna take some fixin’.8

  The interviewing continued, but Nixon more than held his own. The Frost team pushed the interviewer to get even tougher. As the two combatants settled into their places for another round on April 13, Nixon joked that an overhead plane that could be heard outside was CBS checking up on Frost. Frost didn’t seem amused.

  Frost’s strategy was to open with a “litmus” question that was overly broad and then to work back toward specific elements of the question. On this day, he asked, “With the perspective of three years now, do you feel that you ever obstructed justice or were part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice?”

  Nixon responded with an attempt to make the topic even broader than Frost had: “Watergate means all of the charges that were thrown at me during the period before I left the presidency.”

  Frost objected and tried to narrow the scope of the question again, suggesting that he wanted to know about “Watergate, the cover-up, and the events that sprang from that.”

  Then, laying his trap, Frost asked a series of questions about the Haldeman meeting on June 20, 1972, when Watergate had been discussed and then eighteen-and-a-half minutes of the audiotape of the conversation had been destroyed. Nixon answered that he had had nothing to do with the tape’s erasure and didn’t know how it had happened. He described the conversations with Haldeman as nothing out of the ordinary: there had been no talk of a cover-up.

  Frost pounced. He began reading excerpts from the transcripts of the Colson tapes. The excerpts included the word “stonewalling” and also this phrase: “The president’s losses gotta get cut on the cover-up deal.”

  Nixon, in an apparent attempt to deflect attention from the evidence suggesting that he had played a role in the coverup, expressed confusion about what exactly Frost was quoting from.

  “It hasn’t been published yet, you say?” he asked.

  But Frost wasn’t giving an inch. “I think it’s available to anyone who consults the record.”

  Nixon then offered some context for the content of the transcripts, saying, “I didn’t know if anybody at that point—nobody on the White House staff, not John Mitchell, anybody else that I believed was involved” was involved “criminally.”

  This was the basic Nixon response to the Frost charges: yes, he may have talked about damage control on the tapes, but he didn’t know that the damage he was seeking to control was a criminal enterprise.

  Frost, seeking to exploit the moment, continued quoting from the transcripts.

  Nixon listened nervously. Then he interjected, “You’re doing something here which I am not doing and I will not do throughout these broadcasts. You have . . . you were reading there . . . out of context, out of order. . . .”

  The interview ended. Frost had finally prevailed in one of the exchanges thanks to a massive advantage he possessed—his team had searched far and wide for every scrap of information they could find on Watergate, while Nixon had yet to get to the Watergate section of his memoirs. He simply didn’t know as much about Watergate as Frost did. Indeed, the researcher handling the Watergate section of the book for Nixon, Diane Sawyer, did not possess the Colson transcripts either. Armed with exclusive information, Frost had set the trap and executed it perfectly.9

  If Nixon didn’t realize the calamity that had fallen on him, his team did.

  “The president of the United States made himself look like a criminal defendant with David as the prosecutor,” Ken Khachigian bemoaned.

  Sawyer, perhaps feeling bad about the level of Watergate detail that Frost possessed, added, “He hasn’t written the Watergate part of his book yet. So none of us knew what he was going to say.”

  Nixon had said quite a bit in the interview. His explanation was not a bad one—that he hadn’t seen the material and that any comments he made at the time of the tapes were made unaware that the coverup was a coverup of criminal activity. But in television, as in politics, a person explaining is a person losing. And on that day and in that taping, it was hard to escape the conclusion that Nixon had lost and Frost had won.

  The sparring partners met up again at the Smith mansion a few days later. Frost continued to try to home in on Nixon. The former president, for his part, seemed a bit more introspective in this interview.

  To him, the coverup had come about because he was fighting for his team.

  “I knew their families,” he said in explaining why it was hard to simply fire people on his staff accused of wrongdoing. Then, quoting British prime minister William Gladstone, Nixon said that a leader has to be “a good butcher. Well, I think that the great story, as far as the summary of Watergate is concerned . . . I was not a good butcher.”

  This was as close as Nixon had come in the interviews to expressing remorse. Still arguing that he had not known of any criminal wrongdoing at the time, he conceded that he hadn’t done enough to hold his staff accountable.

  But that wasn’t enough for Frost. He wanted more. Frost’s staff had been telling him for weeks that this wasn’t an interview—it was a prosecution. Reston, in particular, wanted to see Nixon “confess” to the crimes.

  Frost, no doubt with all his staff’s promptings in his mind, pressed the issue.

  “There are three things,” he told Nixon, “that I would like to hear you say, and I think the American people would like to hear you say.” Looking down at the table that sat between the two men as he read from his notes, Frost said that the first item he would like Nixon to address was that “there was probably more than mistakes, there was wrongdoing. . . . Whether it was a crime or not.” Nixon sat uncomfortably as Frost continued with the words he thought people wanted to hear from Nixon: “I did abuse the power I had as president. . . .” He ended with a third request for a Nixon admission: “I put the American people through two years of needless agony, and I apologize for that.” Nixon sat watching impassively as Frost made his requests. The former president’s head was tilted at an angle, and his eyes watched Frost closely. He occasionally looked off to the side as he processed the demands coming at him from the interviewer.

  After Frost made his charges, Nixon began to speak, but Frost interjected again. “And I know how difficult it is for anyone and most of all you,”
he said about making an apology. “But I think people need to hear it. And I think unless you say it you’re going to be haunted for the rest of your life.”

  As Nixon began to respond, he continued to look off in the distance, seemingly unsure of himself. When Frost interjected yet again, Colonel Brennan jumped into action. He furiously wrote out the words “Let him talk” on a piece of paper and held it up off camera where only Frost could see it. Frost misread the sign and thought it said “Let’s talk.” As a result, the interview came to a halt.

  Frost and Brennan stepped away from the makeshift set for a brief but tense conversation.

  “You’ve gotta let him do it his own way,” Brennan said.

  When one of Frost's producers demanded that Nixon make a full confession, Brennan pushed back again—then asked for time.

  “Let me talk to him,” he said and left for Nixon’s holding room.

  But while Brennan had been talking to Frost, Khachigian had been talking to Nixon. The old speechwriter had been through so many battles with his boss over the years and Nixon had always admired his ability to give tough, honest advice. Now the time had come for Khachigian to give the toughest advice of all.

  “He wants me to say I’m guilty and I’m not going to do it,” fumed the former president.

  Khachigian, realizing how enraged Nixon was, decided to respond with questions rather than answers: “What do you want to say?”

  As Nixon paced around the bedroom, he thought for a moment before responding. “Look, I’m not trying to blame anyone,” he finally said. “I regret it. But if they want me to get down on the floor and grovel, never.”