The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  In the watches of that dangerous night, faced with what appeared to be a deliberate Soviet provocation, Nixon’s closest advisers had wondered if the crisis would have occurred at all had he been a “functioning” president.

  _____

  The year ended miserably and in humiliation. In November, at an Associated Press managing editors’ meeting in Orlando, Florida, Nixon made gaffe after gaffe as he responded to a volley of sharp questions: on missing tapes; on the tiny income taxes he had paid; on the rumors that Rebozo kept a secret trust fund for him.

  The locale was Disney World, and it was there that he notoriously delivered the line “I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

  On the short flight back to Key Biscayne afterward, Nixon had several stiff drinks. As he left the plane, he confided to the captain of Air Force One, Colonel Albertazzie, that he had had “a couple of good belts.” At the foot of the aircraft steps, where a general was waiting to greet him, the president bowed—in Albertazzie’s words—“from the waist, grandly, magnificently, with great flourish.” He was very obviously drunk.

  The parlous state of the man was increasingly obvious to visitors to the White House. At a cabinet meeting Robert Bork saw the president’s hands trembling and observed the difficulty he had controlling his voice. The new FBI director, Clarence Kelley, heard Nixon’s rambling speech and concluded he was “breaking down.” Treasury Deputy Secretary William Simon was reminded of a “wind-up doll, mechanically making gestures with no thought as to their meaning.”

  In December, Senator Barry Goldwater was one of a group of nine invited to dine at the White House. “The President entered after we were assembled,” he recalled. “He was quite animated, even garrulous. . . . Unexpectedly, his mind seemed to halt abruptly and wander aimlessly away. . . . I became concerned. I had never seen Nixon talk so much, yet so erratically—as if he were a tape with unexpected blank sections.”

  As the president jabbered on, Goldwater felt he was witnessing “a slow-motion collapse of Nixon’s mental balance.” “I drove home,” the senator recalled, “and dictated these words for my files: ‘I have reason to suspect that all might not be well mentally in the White House. This is the only copy that will ever be made of this; it will be locked in my safe. . . .’ ”16

  The following week, at a routine conference with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Nixon ignored the subject of the meeting, the defense budget, and launched, as Admiral Zumwalt recalled, into “a big rambling monologue, which at times almost seemed to be a stream of consciousness, about the virtues of his domestic and foreign policy. He repeatedly expressed the thought that the Eastern liberal establishment was out to do us all in and that we should beware. . . . It was clear that he perceived himself as a fighter for all that was right in the United States, involved in mortal battle with the forces of evil.”

  The next part of the Nixon diatribe, however, shocked the admiral. “ ‘We gentlemen here,’ he told them, ‘are the last hope, the last chance to resist . . .’ I got the impression he was sort of testing the water with us, to see whether there would be support—any nodding of heads—at some of these things. One could well have come to the conclusion that here was the Commander-in-Chief trying to see what the reaction of the Chiefs might be if he did something unconstitutional. . . . He was trying to find out whether in a crunch there was support to keep him in power. . . .”

  Stunned by what he had heard, Zumwalt consulted afterward with General Creighton Abrams, who had been his superior officer and close colleague in Vietnam. The general said he had decided to act as though the episode had never happened. Zumwalt, for his part, wrote a record of the conversation and deposited it in Pentagon archives. It will remain classified, he told the author before his death in 2000, for twenty years.

  Nixon spent Christmas Day at the White House with his family, which was by now in increasingly low spirits. Tricia and Julie both had suffered on their father’s behalf that year. When Tricia and her husband had visited Yankee Stadium, a barrage of boos had broken out when the scoreboard flashed the greeting “Welcome Tricia Nixon.”

  Julie had made 150 public appearances over the past months, speaking out for her father often. “Anyone thinking that Nixon deserved a better fate from Watergate,” George Will was to write, “should remember his silence as his brave daughter Julie crisscrossed the country defending him against charges he knew to be true.”

  After the holiday Nixon and Pat headed for San Clemente, where they remained for seventeen days. He had so far spent only four of the forty-four weekends of his second term in Washington. To outsiders, Pat had seemed to be withstanding the turmoil better than her husband. “Amazing,” a visiting African diplomat had observed. “I could see his hands shaking, and he looks gray. But she has such control.”

  The control had been less evident behind the scenes. According to Ehrlichman, Pat had also been drinking too much during the long crisis and once had to be rescued by the Secret Service from an overflowing bathtub.17 On another night, according to an Executive Protection Service officer, agents had been obliged to rush to Pat’s aid for another reason. As he allegedly had years earlier, after the 1962 defeat in California, Nixon had struck her.

  _____

  Bebe Rebozo joined the Nixons during the stay at San Clemente, and when they were alone together on New Year’s Eve, the president asked if he should resign. “No,” Rebozo responded, “you have to fight.”

  “Do I fight all out,” Nixon wrote on his bedside notepad in the early hours of New Year’s morning, “or do I now begin the long process to prepare for a change, meaning in effect, resignation?” Then he wrote the answer: “Fight.”

  A few nights later, at 5:00 A.M., he composed another note: “Dignity, command, faith . . . act like a winner. Opponents are savage destroyers, haters. Time to use full power of the President. . . .”

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  I suppose it was inevitable that a time would come when this constant accumulation of power would have to be checked, in a manner clearly understood not only by the President in office at that particular moment in history, but by presidents yet to come.

  —Representative Jerome Waldie, House Judiciary Committee, in his “impeachment journal,” on the eve of Nixon’s resignation

  There is little likelihood that during his 1974 New Year’s vacation the president of the United States looked up the meaning of the word “power” in Webster’s Dictionary. Had he done so, he would have read that it means “possession of control, authority, or influence over others” and would hardly have quibbled with the definition. That surely was the very essence Nixon meant to use to the full, as his January diary note suggested.

  The long Watergate crisis inspired the writer Jimmy Breslin to propose an alternative definition for the word. Power, Breslin suggested, was really no more than “mirrors and blue smoke. If somebody tells you how to look, there can be seen in the smoke great magnificent shapes, castles and kingdoms. . . . Power is an illusion.” Part of the illusion is that power exists only so long as others believe you have it. Once they stop believing, it rapidly disappears.

  Early that year, a passage in his memoirs suggests, Nixon figured that if he could just find a way to realign the mirrors, to make the smoke swirl in the right formations again, the public would go on believing, and he would survive as president. “I convinced myself,” he wrote, “that although the case was badly flawed . . . the cause was noble and important.”

  The cause, for Nixon, was preserving “the nature of leadership in American politics . . . if I could be hounded from office because of a political scandal like Watergate, the whole American system of government would be undermined and changed. I never for a moment believed that any of the charges against me were legally impeachable. . . .”

  At the end of January, Pat at his side, the president made his way to Congress to deliver his fourth State of
the Union address. He spoke of the matters of which presidents speak—of world peace and the economy, of health care and welfare reform—and he was well enough received. After twenty-two thousand words he finally turned to the topic about which everyone in the hushed chamber was really thinking: Watergate.

  It was time to move on, Nixon urged, on and away from the scandal to the real issues. He had, he claimed, provided the special prosecutor with “all the material that he needs to conclude his investigations. . . . I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.”

  Yet far from coming to an end, the investigations were gathering momentum. Cox’s replacement as special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, had not turned out, as some had feared and Nixon loyalists had hoped, to be amenable to manipulation. On the contrary, the evidence he had examined so far merely made him determined to press for more.

  Nixon had by now reluctantly surrendered a few White House tapes, and Jaworski was stunned by the tenor of the conversations he heard on them. They left him, he told aides, with the impression that Nixon was a man who “wanted psychopaths around him . . .,” that there was “something missing in his make-up.” The tapes also convinced the prosecutor, for the first time, that the president had been “culpably involved.” Informed that White House attorneys believed there was no criminal case against Nixon, Jaworski disagreed. He told Alexander Haig that the president should “get the finest criminal lawyers he could find.”

  The Senate committee, now assembling its massive thirty-volume report, was preparing the ground for the process Nixon had most to fear. Impeachment had ceased to be a talking point and was now being actively pursued. The House Judiciary Committee had funds and a special staff—among whom was an attorney in her mid-twenties named Hillary Rodham1—and would shortly have full powers, voted by a massive majority, to investigate whether “grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States of America.”

  All this had been under way well before Nixon left for his New Year’s vacation. Yet in public and in private, like some King Canute of old hoping the tide would fail to come in if so commanded, he acted as though it would all go away. At Alice Longworth’s ninetieth birthday party in February, the president’s show of confidence was disquieting. “I found myself asking him how he stood up under all the pressure,” CBS’s Nancy Dickerson recalled. “He gave a broad sweep of his hand, indicating that it was water off a duck’s back. At first he was convincing, but then I realized that he was speaking as if about some other person rather than about himself. He was totally detached from the realities, and it was eerie.”

  But by now the realities—realities personal, political, and judicial—continued to come rushing unabated at Nixon. Most of the old guard had left or were on the way out. Haldeman and Ehrlichman were facing trial on multiple charges. Herb Klein and Melvin Laird, honorable men, had both departed. Bryce Harlow, who had been Nixon’s first political appointee as president, was about to step down.

  The longest-serving retainer of them all, Murray Chotiner, had died in the hospital at the turn of the year, aged sixty-four, following a car crash. One of the vehicles involved in the collision had been driven, by odd coincidence, by a man named McGovern. The accident had occurred, moreover, outside the home of Edward Kennedy, and the senator himself had summoned the paramedics. Nixon went to the funeral, mourning his “ally in political battles, trusted colleague . . . friend.”

  With his staff decimated, Harlow recalled, Nixon was “almost incommunicado. He dealt with General Haig, Ron Ziegler, Rose Woods, his counsel. . . stopped seeing anyone else.” In part this was because few could now bear to spend time with him, so distracted was his manner. Even Ziegler, the eager young press aide, reportedly often tried to avoid Nixon’s phone calls.

  Many of those who had served him were already being brought to justice. Krogh, sentenced for his role in the burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, had been first to go to jail. Nixon’s attorney, Kalmbach, would be next, convicted on a corrupt practices charge of offering an ambassadorship in return for an election contribution. Nixon aides high and low were facing terms in jail: Colson, for obstruction of justice; Magruder, for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to intercept wire communications unlawfully; Mitchell, for conspiracy to obstruct and perjury; Chapin, for lying to the grand jury; Dean, for conspiracy to obstruct justice; Haldeman and Ehrlichman, for conspiracy to obstruct and perjury. By the end fourteen associates were to serve time behind bars.

  The day Nixon delivered his State of the Union address, the federal grand jury probing the Watergate cover-up wrote asking him to testify. He refused, citing the independence of his office and the pressure of work. The jurors, though, were not overawed by the fact that they were dealing with the presidency. Several of them revealed later that even on the basis of the evidence available at that early stage, they had wanted to indict the president along with the other defendants. The straw vote they held on the issue was so conclusive as to be hilarious. “We all raised our hands about wanting an indictment, all of us,” recalled former juror Elayne Edlund. “Some of us raised both hands.” A four-count indictment was duly prepared.

  Prosecutor Jaworski opposed taking this course, evoking passionate dissent from some of his own attorneys. “The facts described to you,” four of them told him in a twenty-one-page memorandum, “constitute clear and prima facie evidence of the President’s participation in a conspiracy to obstruct justice . . . it is essential that this simple primary truth emerge from the action we and the grand jury take: that but for the fact that he is President, Richard Nixon would have been indicted.”

  A compromise was eventually reached: When indictments were presented against Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and company, Nixon’s name was joined to the list of the accused as an “unindicted coconspirator.”2 The documentation handed to the district court, which included White House tapes, filled two bulky locked briefcases.

  Few Americans knew then that the grand jury had wanted to send their president to trial for bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and obstruction of a criminal investigation. That fact was kept secret and, when finally reported in the press in midsummer, was lost in the onrush of events. The jurors and the prosecution force, however, had ensured that their work would not be wasted. The evidence in the two briefcases was to be passed, as the jury had requested, to the real arbiter of Nixon’s fate, the House Judiciary Committee. It was to form the core of the evidence for the impeachment of the president.

  On March 6 a reporter dared ask Nixon if he considered that the crimes alleged against the indicted defendants, if applied to himself, were impeachable offenses. “Well,” he responded, taken unawares, “I have also quit beating my wife.”

  For Pat and the girls, maintaining their composure was getting harder with every week that passed. Julie insisted early in the year that her father “hasn’t done anything wrong.” By the spring, though, the strain was obvious. “She seemed emaciated, bewildered, grasping at straws,” the president’s fervent supporter Rabbi Korff wrote in a note to himself after seeing her at lunch. “I turned from Julie, unable to look at her sans breaking down in pity and sorrow for what this fragile creature must endure.”

  “We do believe in Daddy as ever,” Tricia told an interviewer in April. “He has never lied. . . . He is the most honest man we know.”

  Pat, for her part, on occasion betrayed obvious distress. “Nixon came out with some Secret Servicemen,” a neighbor recalled of a visit to Key Biscayne. “He was heading back to Washington, and Pat was standing there. A tear came down her cheek, and she kind of shook her head. Nixon looked like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. He was slumping, shuffling along.”

  Observed close up on a trip to Latin America, Pat seemed suffused with pain and rage. Asked how she was coping, she declined to reply. A happy moment, however, seemed at hand when—in Nashville
en route home—she had a public reunion with her husband at the opening of the Grand Old Opry.

  It was Pat’s sixty-second birthday, and her face glowed as Nixon took to the piano to play “Happy Birthday.” “At the last chord,” her assistant Helen McCain Smith remembered, “Pat rose from her chair and moved toward her husband . . . he rose, turned, stepped brusquely to center stage—and ignored Pat’s outstretched arms. I shall never forget the expression on her face.”

  At the White House one day, Pat and her daughters ate alone while Nixon lunched with Norman Vincent Peale and his family, Rose Woods, and former Eisenhower aide Robert Keith Gray. “He never ate a thing, just stared at his food,” Gray recalled. “The Peales talked to me and to Rose, and Nixon never said a word. He was obviously too much in agony to have company, yet also too much in agony to be alone.”

  It was the tapes that were to prove the coup de grâce, and the president knew it. “Any more tapes,” he noted just before midnight on April 20, “will destroy the office.” More tapes, though, were precisely what the special prosecutor and the Judiciary Committee insisted on having. “The people have been patient for a long, long time,” committee chairman Peter Rodino said that month. “But the patience of this committee is wearing thin.” He now imposed a deadline for their production.

  Nixon’s response was to make a show of compliance. White House stenographers typed up the dialogue on the subpoenaed tapes, and the Government Printing Office produced a thousand-page volume of transcripts. Then the president appeared on television against a backdrop of gold-embossed binders—not the official Printing Office version—which made the material he was releasing look more substantial than it really was.