American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  DEAN: No, Sir.

  MONTOYA: Will you state why?

  DEAN: Well, because by that time, he knew the full implications of the case and Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman were certainly still on the staff and there was considerable resistance to their departure from the staff.

  And on July 28, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker asked Dean the question he asked almost every witness—the question of the summer:

  BAKER: What did the President know and when did he know it, about the cover-up?

  DEAN: I would have to start back from personal knowledge, and that would be when I had a meeting on Sept. 15 [1972] when we discussed what was very clear to me in terms of cover-up. We discussed in terms of delaying lawsuits, compliments to me on my efforts to that point. Discussed timing and trials, because we didn’t want them to occur before the election.

  As the White House launched a massive counterattack—it was the word, it argued, of a self-acknowledged leader of the cover-up fighting and bargaining to save his skin against that of the President of the United States— John Dean’s credibility became a chief topic of discussion. During the former counsel’s testimony, a man just outside the caucus room assembled an impromptu jury of twelve fellow spectators to pass judgment on Dean’s veracity and, implicitly, on Nixon’s guilt. The vote was unanimous in Dean’s favor. Two other spectators called out, “Make it fourteen.”

  Day after day that summer, the Ervin committee elicited the damning testimony: that the “enemies list” was designed for the harassment of its targets through the IRS and other means; that an attempt was made to forge State Department cables in order to implicate President Kennedy in the assassination of Vietnamese President Diem; that Nixon had tape-recorded his conversations in the White House and his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building; that Ehrlichman deemed the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist as within the constitutional powers of the President.

  More charges and revelations emerged from the committee and other investigations: that the President had taken fraudulent income-tax deductions; that he had used sizable government funds to improve his estates in Key Biscayne, Florida, and at San Clemente, California; that the financier and manufacturer Howard Hughes had made large secret donations of cash, supposedly for campaign purposes but apparently spent on private expenses by Nixon, his family, and his friends. The plea-bargained resignation in October 1973 of Spiro Agnew—charged with federal income-tax evasion for payoffs from construction company executives he had accepted while governor of Maryland and even as vice president—added to the portrait of a pervasive corruption surpassing even Grant’s and Harding’s Administrations.

  Inch by inch Nixon fell back, fighting all the way, making public explanations that were soon proven false or declared “inoperative” by the White House itself, throwing his closest associates out of his careening sleigh as the wolves relentlessly closed in. Shortly before the Ervin committee began its hearings he shoved Haldeman and Ehrlichman out of the White House with garlands of praise and replaced Kleindienst as Attorney General with Elliot L. Richardson, who chose his old Harvard law professor, Archibald Cox, as special prosecutor. The struggle now was over presidential tapes that were believed relevant to the investigation. When Nixon balked at releasing the tapes either to Cox or to the Ervin committee, both subpoenaed him for this crucial evidence. Ordered by Judge Sirica to turn the tapes over to the court, the President proposed a compromise arrangement so egregiously self-protective that Cox turned it down.

  Then the “Saturday Night Massacre”—Nixon commanded Richardson and then Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus to sack Cox for defying a presidential order to give up his pursuit of the tapes through the courts. Both refused—Richardson resigned, Ruckelshaus was dismissed. Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, of the Yale law faculty, was hurriedly driven to the White House and designated Acting Attorney General, and promptly fired Cox. The outburst of public outrage once again drove Nixon back on the defensive. He agreed to hand the tapes over to Sirica, then reversed his “abolition” of the special prosecutor’s office and chose for Cox’s replacement a man whom Nixon expected to be more pliable, a conservative Texas Democrat, corporate lawyer, and reputed law-and-order man named Leon Jaworski. Nixon aroused more public suspicion when he handed over to Sirica a crucial tape with an eighteen-minute gap, which the court’s panel of experts found had been caused by repeated, probably deliberate erasures.

  Leon Jaworski did indeed turn out to be a law-and-order man. When the President, citing the doctrine of executive privilege, refused to turn over to him additional tapes involving conversations with his aides, Jaworski argued first before Judge Sirica, who upheld him, and then, when Nixon took the case to the Court of Appeals, went to the Supreme Court for “immediate settlement.” On July 24, 1974, the Court rendered its decision in United States of America v. Richard Nixon, President of the United States. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, after reading a brief tribute to his recently deceased predecessor, Earl Warren, summarized the Court’s unanimous finding. The President’s claim to executive privilege, the opinion held, “to withhold evidence that is demonstrably relevant in a criminal trial would cut deeply into the guarantee of due process of law and gravely impair the basic function of the courts.” The privilege could not “prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of justice.” When the news reached Nixon at San Clemente, according to Anthony Lukas, “the President exploded, cursing the man he had named chief justice,” and reserving a few choice expletives for Harry A. Blackmun and Lewis F. Powell, Jr., his other appointees. At first Nixon seriously considered challenging the Court, but he feared adding to the likely impeachment charges, and the Court’s unanimity made it impossible to claim that the decision was insufficiently definitive. In all the months of slow Chinese torture that Nixon suffered, it was probably the news from the High Bench that gave him the most sudden, piercing pain.

  The Judiciary Committee, Room 2141, Rayburn House Office Building, 7:45 p.m., July 24, 1974. Over a hundred reporters looked on and about 40 million Americans watched on television as Chairman Peter Rodino rapped his gavel on the table. Solemnly he reminded the members of their responsibilities. “Make no mistake about it. This is a turning point, whatever we decide. Our judgment is not concerned with an individual but with a system of constitutional government. It has been the history and the good fortune of the United States, ever since the Founding Fathers, that each generation of citizens and their officials have been, within tolerable limits, faithful custodians of the Constitution and the rule of law.” But the minds of his fellow committee members were very much on one individual—the President of the United States. There had been doubts that this unwieldy committee of thirty-eight members, many of them highly partisan, and polarized between “Democratic Firebrands” and “Republican Diehards,” could handle the tough, risky task of impeachment.

  Impeachment! During much of 1973 few even in the media had dared mention the word; it smacked of the impeachment and trial 105 years earlier of Andrew Johnson, an episode ill regarded in most recent histories. For months the committee and its big staff had been sorting through White House tapes and other records that the President, dragging his feet at every stage, had turned over to the committee or the courts. Day by day the specter of impeachment became more real. The Republican minority on the committee were an especially anguished lot. Many were personally as well as politically loyal to Nixon, who had done them many favors, including trips into their districts to give their campaigns the White House blessing. This was the case with Hamilton Fish, Jr., who to boot was the fourth consecutive Hamilton Fish to serve as a Republican member of Congress. His father, famed as a target of FDR’s jibes at “Martin, Barton, and Fish,” was still active, at eighty-five, in backing Nixon and demanding whether there could be “fair and impartial justice among the left-winged Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee who received large campaign contributions from org
anized labor.”

  But the younger Fish was slowly moving toward impeachment after the Saturday Night Massacre, which had socked him “right in the gut,” and after reading tape transcripts. Some Republicans were outraged by the unending stream of revelations; others held out for “our President,” while Rodino sought to “mass” the committee in order to stave off accusations of blind partisanship. The committee rose to the occasion, with some noble utterances during its deliberations.

  Barbara Jordan, Texas Democrat, woman, black: “Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States. ‘We, the people … ’ It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787 I was not included in that, ‘We, the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.’ Today, I am an inquisitor. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

  M. Caldwell Butler, Virginia Republican: “For years we Republicans have campaigned against corruption and misconduct.… But Watergate is our shame. Those things have happened in our house and it is our responsibility to do what we can to clear it up.” He announced that he was inclining toward impeachment. “But there will be no joy in it for me.”

  On July 27, 1974, the committee voted 27-11 to recommend impeachment on the ground that the President had “engaged personally and through his subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation” of the Watergate burglary. Two days later the committee voted, 28-10, an article charging that Nixon’s conduct had violated the constitutional rights of citizens and impaired the proper administration of justice. The votes reflected a precarious coalition of committee Democrats and Republicans; the majority of Republicans still stood by their President.

  But on August 5, Richard Nixon, in obedience to the Supreme Court decision, released the transcripts of three conversations which showed beyond any doubt that six days after the Watergate break-in—on June 23, 1972—he was at the center of the conspiracy to cover up that crime, obstructing justice by plotting to block the FBI investigation. “I was sick. I was shocked,” a middle-level White House official told a journalist. “He had lied to me, to all of us. I think my first thought, before that sank in, was of those Republicans on the Judiciary Committee … those men who had risked their careers to defend him.”

  Now one of those men—Charles Wiggins—said, “I have reached the painful conclusion that the President of the United States should resign.” If he did not, “I am prepared to conclude that the magnificent career of public service of Richard Nixon must be terminated involuntarily.”

  The White House, August 7-9, 1974. In the final days the two Nixons—the shrewd, confident calculator and the narcissist hovering between dreams of omnipotence and feelings of insecurity—emerged in the Watergate crucible. Even now he was a cold head counter, yet he appeared to be swinging erratically between holding out to the bitter end and throwing it all up. Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes arrived at the White House on August 7 to brief the President on the situation in Congress. After some small talk:

  SCOTT: We’ve asked Barry to be our spokesman.

  NIXON: GO ahead, Barry.

  GOLDWATER: Mr. President, this isn’t pleasant, but you want to know the situation and it isn’t good.

  NIXON: Pretty bad, huh? … How many would you say would be with me—a half dozen?

  GOLDWATER: More than that, maybe sixteen to eighteen.… We’ve discussed the thing a lot and just about all of the guys have spoken up and there aren’t many who would support you if it comes to that.

  I took kind of a nose count today, and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.

  NIXON: John, I know how you feel, what you’ve said, I respect it, but what’s your estimate?

  RHODES: About the same, Mr. President.

  NIXON: Well, that’s about the way I thought it was. I’ve got a very difficult decision to make, but I want you to know I’m going to make it for the best interests of the country.… I’m not interested in pensions. I’m not interested in pardons or amnesty. I’m going to make this decision for the best interests of the country.

  SCOTT: Mr. President, we are all very saddened, but we have to tell you the facts. NIXON: Never mind. There’ll be no tears. I haven’t cried since Eisenhower died. My family has been fine. I’m going to be all right.… Do I have any other options?

  There were no options. After a bit more small talk his visitors left. The next night the President addressed the nation on television. He was calm, restrained. “As we look to the future, the first essential is to begin healing the wounds of this Nation, to put the bitterness and divisions of the recent past behind us and to rediscover those shared ideals that lie at the heart of our strength and unity as a great and as a free people.” There was no admission of guilt, no word about the lies he had told or the laws he had broken or the trust he had violated; he would say only that “some of my judgments were wrong”—but he announced his resignation, effective the next day, August 9, at noon.

  In the last hours the President vacillated between mourning and brief bouts of euphoria, between weeping and laughter. In his departing speech to cabinet and staff on the morning of August 9, he talked about the White House—“this house has a great heart”—and about his father, “a streetcar motorman first”—and about his mother—“my mother was a saint.” Then an admonition from this man whose great hatreds had contributed to his fall: “… always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

  Finally the scene, etched on the memory of America, of Nixon and his wife and daughters, their eyes brimming, walking out to the waiting helicopter. There in the door he turned to the crowd, and waved, a contorted smile on his face. From Andrews Air Force Base he and Mrs. Nixon flew west on the Spirit of ’76 to their home in San Clemente. Somewhere over central Missouri the presidency of Richard Nixon came to its end.

  What did the President know? When did he know it? And when would the American people know what and when the President knew? These continued to be the critical questions facing Americans during most of the months of Watergate. The stunning answer came on August 5, 1974, when Nixon released the three damning tapes of June 23, 1972. At last the “smoking gun” lay before the people.

  Knowing what had happened evoked the more compelling and intractable questions: Why? How could it have happened? Was Watergate due to one man, Richard Nixon, and his flaws of character? If so, why had he been joined in criminal and immoral acts by another thirty or forty men, not all of whom were close to him? Was Watergate, then, a product of the political institutions in which these men operated—of the “imperial presidency,” a hostile and biased media, the whole political and constitutional system? But what had shaped these institutions—psychological forces within the political elite, a corruption of the American national character, economic and social tendencies inherent in an individualistic, dog-eat-dog culture?

  Nixon’s apologists defended him as a victim rather than a villain—as the legatee of dishonorable precedents set by previous Presidents, as the butt of a vindictive press, as simply acquiescing, in son-in-law David Eisenhower’s words, “in the non-prosecution of aides who covered up a little operation into the opposition’s political headquarters,” a long-established practice “that no one took that seriously.” John Kenneth Galbraith had predicted at the time of Nixon’s resignation that someone would also advance the argument that “there’s a
little bit of Richard Nixon in all of us.” Galbraith added, “I say the hell there is!”

  A more persuasive explanation of Watergate put the whole episode in a political and institutional context. The “swelling of the presidency,” wrote presidential scholar Thomas E. Cronin, had produced around the President a coterie of dozens of assistants, hundreds of presidential advisers, and “thousands of members of an institutional amalgam called the Executive Office of the President.” This presidential establishment had become a “powerful inner sanctum of government, isolated from traditional, constitutional checks and balances.” George E. Reedy, former press secretary to LBJ, saw beneath the President “a mass of intrigue, posturing, strutting, cringing, and pious ‘commitment’ to irrelevant windbaggery”—a “perfect setting for the conspiracy of mediocrity.” John Dean remembered the “blind ambition” that had infected him and others in the White House.

  Jeb Magruder wrote that the President’s mounting insecurities and passions over Vietnam and the antiwar protests led to Watergate, for Presidents set the tone of their Administrations. But, Magruder continued, it was not enough to blame the atmosphere Nixon created. “No one forced me or the others to break the law,” he said. “We could have objected to what was happening or resigned in protest. Instead, we convinced ourselves that wrong was right, and plunged ahead.”

  It was the sting of the media that drove Nixon to dangerous and desperate retaliatory tactics, some of his supporters contended. In fact, each side—all sides—exaggerated the extent to which the media supported their adversaries and, even more, the actual influence wielded by the media. The Watergate “battle of public opinion” was more like a vast guerrilla war in which a variety of political and media generals and colonels fought for advantage in the murk. Nixon repeatedly used television to reach the viewers over the heads of the press, but his credibility was suspect. Investigative reporters burrowed away, looking for fame as well as facts. Polls were used to influence public opinion as well as to test it. A polling organization friendly to the White House asked its sample: “Which action do you yourself feel is the more morally reprehensible— which is worse—the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick or the bugging of the Democratic National Committee?”