Mitchell pulled away from the green table in rage; stood up, face flushed; and exclaimed: “It’s a great trial being conducted here, isn’t it!”
Senator Ervin pointed out that the Constitution said the president had an obligation, not to win reelection or even carry out a successful second term, but to “faithfully execute the laws.” What about that? For a brief moment Mitchell dropped his amoral front. “I think,” the former attorney general admitted, “that is a reasonable interpretation of the subject matter and, of course, in reflection it is a serious one.”
PERHAPS THE PRESIDENT, IF UNCONSCIOUSLY, agreed. His personal physician claimed he had never been sick while he was president, and recalled only once prescribing him medicine—for a sore throat, in 1959, in Moscow. And then, at 5:30 on the morning of Mitchell’s third day in the hot seat, the president called for his doctor, complaining of discomfort on the right side of his chest. The symptoms receded; then, at midday, he took a call from Senator Ervin informing him of the committee’s unanimous resolution to access every federal government document “relevant to or proving or disproving any matters the committee is authorized to investigate,” specifically every piece of paper prepared or received by John W. Dean.
Shortly thereafter, the symptoms returned.
At the elevator to a suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital the Secret Service set up a command post containing a white telephone with several push-button lines. White House crews moved in half a dozen heavy metal boxes of the sort used to carry papers on presidential trips, and two attaché cases, one black and one brown—the nuclear “football.” At eight thirty that night the president checked in. He’d be there, doctors said, possibly a week. Suspicious circles were not the only ones to suspect the illness was psychosomatic. One constituent from North Carolina wrote to his senator blaming him for “bugging the Pres. of the U.S. until you caused him to get sick.”
FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH, AND THE bad luck was all the president’s. At a closed-door interview with committee staff, a young bureaucrat with a comb-over offered a clue about the curious moment Dean described on April 15 when the president got out of his chair, went to a corner of his office, and uttered unexpected words of contrition. Sitting before the television cameras that Monday, he introduced himself as Alexander Butterfield, “the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration,” explaining his job had once been the “smooth running of the President’s official day.” Sam Dash explained that the reason this witness was appearing voluntarily and without counsel on only three hours’ notice was that “at a staff interview with Mr. Butterfield on Friday some very significant information was elicited.”
Hardly any preliminaries. Fred Thompson, in an officious tone of voice, hurriedly asked him, “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?”
On the TV feed, a reporter who had been nodding off—these colloquies were becoming awfully routine—whipped his head around with a start.
“I was aware of listening devices; yes, sir.”
Another reporter looked up. His mouth was agape. Of an instant the bottom had dropped out of everything anyone thought they knew about Watergate.
The moment was sublime, uncanny. An awe at recording technology, and the suffusing dread it produced in an increasingly paranoid culture, had been a fixture of the political culture long before Butterfield spoke. The Washington Post’s first editorial on the Watergate burglars quoted Mission: Impossible: “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds . . . good luck.” A Time cover in April, 1973, featured Nixon, Dean, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, et al. entangled in audiotape; a New York Times Week in Review graphic a month later featured a man being stabbed in the back while operating a reel-to-reel tape recorder, to illustrate the unlovely tendency of Watergate principals to tape their phone conversations. One day, a boring stretch of hearing was broken when it was revealed that Nixon taped phone calls with his own brother Donald. Senator Lowell Weicker read aloud a transcript of a conversation between Ehrlichman and Richard Kleindienst about how to screw . . . Senator Lowell Weicker. On the funny pages a character in Boner’s Arc swore to keep a piece of gossip in confidence—then grabbed her reel-to-reel to record it. Francis Ford Coppola’s “thriller about privacy,” The Conversation, was in production; it starred Gene Hackman as a surveillance technician consumed by paranoia following his efforts to get to the bottom of a murder he has accidentally recorded with a powerful long-distance microphone. It was as if the zeitgeist could predict what was coming.
The facts, Butterfield explained, were these: In 1970 the president installed listening devices in the Oval Office, his Old Executive Office Building “hideaway” office, and the White House Cabinet Room—“of course for historical purposes,” he meekly clarified, as if to shield himself from the awful burden of having just changed the course of history himself. The system was voice activated, and operated continuously. It was sensitive to the point of a whisper. Besides Butterfield, two other of Nixon’s lowly personal aides, and three Secret Service agents, no other official except Bob Haldeman knew about the system. (“No kidding,” the former attorney general Richard Kleindienst exhaled in astonishment upon hearing the news on a business trip in London.)
Sam Dash teased out implications. Did the president ever turn off this silent witness to his every utterance? “No, sir. As a matter of fact, the President seemed to be totally, really oblivious, or certainly uninhibited by this fact.”
“The tapes you mentioned were stored, are they stored by a particular date?”
“Yes, sir, they are.”
For anyone for whom it was not yet clear, Dash clarified the awesome import:
“If either Mr. Dean, Mr. Haldeman, Mr. Ehrlichman, or Mr. Colson had particular meetings in the Oval Office with the President on any particular dates that have been testified before this committee, there would be a tape recording with the President of that full conversation, would there not?”
There would be indeed. Dash had only one more question—the only one now that mattered: “What would be the best way to reconstruct those conversations, Mr. Butterfield, in the President’s Oval Office?”
“Well, in the obvious manner,” Butterfield responded: “to obtain the tape and play it.”
That meant it would not just be Dean’s word against the president’s—if only the committee could subpoena those tapes.
THE FIRST SCENE IN THAT thriller unfolded at the White House West Gate, where two young staffers of the special prosecutor’s office arrived with a subpoena for tapes of nine key conversations—the first subpoena of a president since Aaron Burr’s treason trial in 1805.
The president, amazed that anyone as close to him as Butterfield would not have understood that the correct answer to questions he’d been asked was “executive privilege,” from his hospital bed, addressed a letter to Judge Sirica, who would be deciding this Watergate case, too: “With the utmost respect for the court of which you are chief judge, and for the branch of government of which it is a part, I must decline to obey the command of that subpoena. In doing so I follow the example of a long line of my predecessors as President of the United States who have consistently adhered to the position that the President is not subject to compulsory process from the courts.” Two other letters he addressed to the Watergate committee concerning their own subpoena. In one, the president asserted that the “special nature of tape recordings of private conversations” made them even more privileged than paper documents, because they “contain comments that persons with different perspectives would inevitably interpret in different ways.” The other letter indicated he refused to meet to discuss the matter.
Ervin read both letters aloud in the caucus room, drawling out a response in indubitably Ervinian fashion: The president was not “immune from all the duties and responsibilities which devolve upon all the other mortals who dwell in this land.” He said the crisis was worse than the Civil War—was, in fact, “the greatest tra
gedy this country has ever suffered.” And, live on national TV, his committee voted unanimously to sue the President of the United States. That was unprecedented, too.
Judge Sirica set arguments for August 7. President Nixon announced he would listen only to the opinion of the Supreme Court—four of whose nine members, cynics pointed out, he had appointed. A showdown between the Constitution’s three branches was set. It would un-spool for months—while the TV melodrama rolled on, audiences more riveted than ever.
Herbert Kalmbach sat down at the great green table after Butterfield was dismissed. He described his consternation with the “James Bond scenario” he had been drafted into: passing wads of hundred-dollar bills in hotel rooms to a man he knew only under aliases. The man was Anthony Ulasewicz, the Runyonesque former New York City cop on call whenever the White House needed a man in the shadows. Kalmbach had barreled into John Ehrlichman’s office in July 1972, imploring reassurance: “John, I am looking right into your eyes,” he recollected saying. “I know Jeanne and your family, you know Barbara and my family. You know that my family and my reputation mean everything to me, and it is just absolutely necessary, John, that you tell me, first that John Dean has the authority to direct me in this assignment”—in other words, that John Dean was not acting on his own but that he had the approval of a higher-up—“that it is a proper assignment, and that I am to go forward with it.”
“And did he look you in the eyes?” Sam Dash asked.
“Yes, he did.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He said, ‘Herb, John Dean does have the authority, it is proper, and you are to go forward.’ ”
THE REVELATION OF TAPES RAISED anticipation that the sluice gates of truth might finally open. Then John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman testified for eight days between them through early August, and dashed those hopes. Ehrlichman, who claimed “no recollection” of any such conversation with Kalmbach, was supposed to be the nice guy of the team. Not this week. Senator Ervin sanctimoniously recited the parable of the Good Samaritan. Ehrlichman snapped back, “I read the Bible, I don’t quote it.” He used mocking nicknames for the principals; Sam Dash was “the Professor”; John Dean was “the star witness”—and Watergate’s true villain. Which didn’t make sense, considering that Ehrlichman didn’t seem to consider any of the actions the Watergate committee was looking into villainous. The president, he insisted, was only fighting for peace on earth and goodwill toward all men. The people opposing him (who were “favorable to the North Vietnamese and their allies”) were enemies of same. He couldn’t find anything “seriously embarrassing” in operations like the burglarization of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist—an operation he himself had approved “if it is not traceable,” according to a August 1971 memo the committee offered into evidence. It was, he insisted, “a vital national security inquiry,” “well within the President’s inherent Constitutional powers.”
Senator Talmadge: “If the President could authorize a covert break-in, [and] you don’t know exactly where that power would be limited, you don’t think it could include murder or other crimes beyond covert break-in, do you?”
Coolly, with an accent that made him sound like a working-class white ethnic from Milwaukee, the bald witness responded: “I don’t know where that line is, Senator.”
The Georgian pressed.
“Do you remember when we were in law school, we studied a famous principle of law that came from England and also is well known in this country, that no matter how humble a man’s cottage is, that even the King of England cannot enter without his consent?”
The witness set his jaw and furrowed his brow. “I am afraid,” he said, “that has been considerably eroded over the years.”
No pause from Talmadge: “Down in my country we still think it a pretty legitimate principle of law.”
The chamber exploded in cheers. You could read the shock on the bald man’s face.
IT WAS THE MOST INTENSE outburst from the galleries since a man named Gordon Strachan, a Haldeman aide, preceded him on the stand. Strachan was one of those sad young White House men the hearings had thrown up in such profusion. Senator Joseph Montoya of New Mexico, who liked to give each witness a chance to expiate his sins, asked him, “Because of Watergate, many young people are writing to us expressing great consternation about our country and also saying that public service is not as attractive as before Watergate. . . . What advice do you have for those people?”
An innocent-looking blond young man, twenty-nine years old, his face still pockmarked by acne like a teenager’s, his lip trembling, sitting next to a lawyer in pinstripes, replied: “My advice would be to stay away.” The hearing room erupted in laughter.
But nervous laughter. The kind that bespeaks a radical discomfort—like when you really want to cry. The moment immediately became one of Watergate’s great conversation pieces. And when it was his turn to make his closing statement, that was what Ehrlichman chose to address.
“Your gallery laughed,” he noted. “But I don’t think many Americans laughed. Nor do I agree with Gordon’s advice. . . . Our government and our politics are only as idealistic as the people in those buildings.”
Ehrlichman was arguing that he was one of those idealists. “If you go to work for the President and the executive branch there are very few in Congress or the media that are going to throw rosebuds at you. . . .
“You will encounter a local culture which scoffs at family life and morality just as it adulates the opposite and you will find some people who have fallen for that line.
“But you will also find in politics and government many great people who know that a pearl of great price is not had for the asking and who feel that this country and its heritage are worth the work, the abuse, the struggle, and the sacrifices. Don’t stay away. Come and join them and do it better.”
He meant “better than his inquisitors on the Ervin Committee.” The editors of the conservative Chicago Tribune found that peroration so moving they printed it in full. It was a profoundly Nixonian moment. Staging the rhetorical distinction between the uprightly patriotic and the degenerate aliens who sought to subvert patriotism was what Nixonism was all about. The masterpiece had been his speech of November 3, 1969: two million Americans had just protested his failure to end the Vietnam War, a veritable outpouring from Middle America, and Nixon managed to turn them into loud-mouthed hippies calling for “the first defeat in our nation’s history.” He had continued: “It might not be fashionable to speak of our national destiny these days.” But he would do so nonetheless—coining the phrase the “great silent majority” to identify those who supported him in Vietnam, because they were patriots. The approval rating of his handling of the war had gone up from 58 to 77 percent overnight after that speech.
On July 24, Ehrlichman’s crew-cut right-hand man, Bob Haldeman, began testifying. He was uncharacteristically accommodating—until Senator Weicker pulled out a memo to Haldeman dated October 14, 1971, and Haldeman exposed the other side of the Silent Majority rhetorical coin: it welcomed division. It welcomed hate. For if the world was divided between good and evil, hating evil was the appropriate response. And what violations of procedural nicety weren’t permissible in order to vanquish evil?
The memo consisted of advance instructions for a presidential appearance in Charlotte, North Carolina, with the Reverend Billy Graham. Demonstrators would be “violent,” it explained. “They will have extremely obscene signs.” The senator held up the document and pointed to the margin: “Is that your writing there where it says, ‘good’?”
Haldeman acknowledged it was.
The senator continued reading: “It will not only be directed toward the President, but also toward Billy Graham.” He pointed out that, also in Haldeman’s handwriting, the words “also toward Billy Graham” had been underlined, and beside them had been penciled in “great.” The administration welcomed violence and obscenity directed at the president and a beloved di
vine.
Once more the hearing room erupted in that odd nervous laughter.
Weicker had revealed something ugly and untoward about how the White House thought and worked. The attitude showed up in the writings of Watergate conspirators. E. Howard Hunt wrote pseudonymous thrillers as a hobby. They were being brought back into print under his own name by opportunistic publishers. In one of them one of his heroes intoned, “We became lawless in a struggle for the rule of law—semi-outlaws who risk their lives to put down the savagery of others.” And G. Gordon Liddy wrote in his memoir, “To permit the thought, spirit, life-style of the ’60s movement to achieve power . . . was a thought as offensive to me as was the thought of surrender to a career Japanese soldier in 1945.”
It was precisely such reaction to the insurgencies of the 1960s that led to Nixon’s reelection in 1972, with an unprecedented forty-nine-state landslide. Not in spite of the paranoia and dread that was its unseemly underside—the same paranoia and dread that helped produce Watergate—but in some sense because of it. It was Richard Nixon’s unique contribution to all the conservative Republican electoral successes to come over the next few decades. But it had rarely been articulated, held up to the light, as Senator Weicker did now.
There had always been another political consequence of the “thought, spirit, life-style of the ’60s” that the Liddys and Hunts and Haldemans didn’t quite grasp. It was a new vision of patriotism produced in the 1960s—a perfect passion for the rule of law, of the fairest possible proceduralism, a longing for political innocence that pundits referred to as the “New Politics.” It was Sam Ervin’s sort of patriotism. It was the patriotism confronted by George McGovern in his acceptance speech at the 1972 Democratic convention: “We reject the view of those who say, ‘America—love it or leave it.’ We reply, ‘Let us change it so we may love it the more.’ ” It was the spirit that helped explain why law school applications were increasing by almost 50 percent among young people: young idealists wanted to be like Sam Dash—or like the staff assistants who lurked in the background of the TV shots, whose hair and sideburns were frequently as long as any hippie’s. (The real threats to law and order—the hearing witnesses—wore crew cuts.)
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 22