One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  Thursday, April 26: Mark Felt was certain he would be chosen to lead the FBI after Gray’s fall: a grave miscalculation. He served as acting director for three hours. Instead, Nixon named William D. Ruckelshaus, the administrator of the new Environmental Protection Agency, as the acting director of the Bureau.* The mild-mannered Ruckelshaus was thunderstruck at Nixon’s ferocity that day. “I had never seen the President so agitated,” he remembered. “I was worried about his stability.… He was extremely bitter.”

  Nixon feared the legal perils he faced. “I don’t think it should ever get out that we taped this office,” he told Haldeman, who spent five hours that day trying to transcribe the “cancer on the presidency” conversation at Nixon’s request, looking for exculpatory evidence. The president worried that “this blackmail stuff” could surface. They recalled raising the matter of hush money—“the Pappas thing”—on that March 21 tape. But Haldeman told the president that the snippet with the strongest shock was when Dean warned Nixon that “people may go to jail.… And that really jarred you.”

  * * *

  Friday, April 27: Nixon fled Washington for Camp David, where he stayed for the final days of his cruel April.

  Camp David is a lovely compound of wood-and-stone lodges on the Catoctin Mountain of Maryland, sixty-two miles north by northwest of the White House, deep in a forest divided by a narrow road. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had it built by government-paid laborers for the Works Progress Administration, an exemplar of the New Deal programs Nixon hated. FDR called it Shangri-La. President Eisenhower renovated it and renamed it after his grandson, David, who married Richard Nixon’s daughter Julie in December 1968. Its buildings, transport links, armed security, and encrypted communications were maintained by the navy and the CIA.

  In late April, the fields below Camp David fill with apple and cherry blossoms, the rising road glistens with burgeoning aspens and birches, the campgrounds bloom with daffodils and tulips. Nixon hadn’t come to smell the flowers. He had come to fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman. For good measure, he decided to dismiss his attorney general, accept John Dean’s resignation, and create a new palace guard.

  Saturday, April 28: The president called his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, at 8:21 a.m. “That’s quite a collection of headlines this morning, isn’t it?” Nixon said.

  The front page of the New York Times was covered with four big stories above the fold. One said Pat Gray had resigned as acting FBI director. “Haldeman and Ehrlichman Reported Fighting Ouster,” read another. A third said: “Dean Is Reported Asking Immunity” from federal prosecution. But the double-decker headline atop page one was the shocker: “A JUSTICE DEPT. MEMO SAYS LIDDY AND HUNT RAIDED OFFICE OF ELLSBERG’S PSYCHIATRIST.”

  Watergate prosecutors had uncovered the raid. As Nixon now knew, Ehrlichman had signed off on the break-in. The law required the prosecutors to disclose the crime to the trial judge in the Pentagon Papers case. A dismissal of the charges on grounds of government misconduct looked inevitable.

  “What the hell. We’ve just begun to fight, haven’t we?” Nixon said to Ziegler. “After all, a hell of a lot of other crap is going to hit.”

  “That’s right,” Ziegler said.

  “This is a time for strong men, Ron,” the president reassured his spokesman. “Our day is going to come.”

  Nixon called Haldeman twenty minutes later. The president wanted Bill Rogers as his consigliere in his hour of calamity. What did Haldeman think of that? “There is a crisis here of enormous proportions,” the ever loyal Haldeman told the president. “The way for him to finish his service to the nation is by moving and cleaning this up.” Twenty minutes after that, Nixon called Rogers.

  Nixon said to Rogers that “John and Bob are going to make their move … and then I’m going to move on Dean” and dismiss Kleindienst. On Monday he would address the nation on Watergate—“not for the purpose of saying everything that happened, but because I just want the country to know that I’m in charge, that we’re getting to the bottom of it.” He wanted Rogers to guide his hand and steel his nerves.

  “What time would you like me up there, Mr. President?” Rogers asked.

  “Frankly, the sooner the better,” Nixon said. “I want to get it done, get it done, done.”

  Rogers was remarkable for making the trip at all. Nixon, after scorning and humiliating his secretary of state for four years, now craved his counsel—exactly as he had in 1952, when Rogers saved Nixon’s reputation. That episode formed chapter two of Six Crises.

  Rogers, later Eisenhower’s attorney general, had taken charge when Nixon’s vice presidential nomination was threatened by allegations of a political slush fund. Rogers audited the fund and found it clean, and he helped Nixon fight serious-minded newspaper editorials calling for him to withdraw his nomination. When General Eisenhower himself considered dumping Nixon, Rogers stood steadfast in support. Nixon gave Rogers a draft of a speech he had written in his defense, and Rogers gave him the courage to go on national television and read it.

  Vowing that he had never made personal use of political funds, listing his meager assets, including his wife Pat’s “respectable Republican cloth coat,” Nixon then admitted in all candor to accepting one campaign gift—just one. A man had heard on the radio that little Julie and Tricia Nixon would love to have a puppy. A black-and-white spotted cocker spaniel arrived in a crate from Texas. The girls loved the dog and named it Checkers. “And I just want to say this right now,” Nixon declared, “regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.” The Checkers speech was among the greatest moments in the early days of television.

  Rogers had helped to salvage Nixon’s reputation; the president returned the debt of gratitude by treating him like a pariah for four years. And yet Rogers returned to do one last favor for Richard Nixon before accepting, after a decent interval, his dismissal as secretary of state.

  Now, on that Saturday afternoon in April, after the morning fog had burned off, Nixon and Rogers spent five hours walking the grounds of Camp David and talking about the president’s political future. Nixon thought out loud about another reshuffling of his Cabinet and his staff; this quickly became a grim game of musical chairs, for he would need a new secretary of state, a new secretary of defense, a new attorney general, new FBI and CIA directors, and a new White House chief of staff—all in a matter of weeks.

  Rogers returned the president’s attention to the immediate crisis. He strongly agreed that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had to resign, but he balked when Nixon asked him to deliver the blow. The president pleaded for one more favor: to help him draft the speech he planned to deliver on Monday. The secretary of state felt he could not refuse this last request. The words would be far more painful to write than the Checkers speech. But both talks had the same purpose: saving Richard Nixon from himself.

  * * *

  Sunday, April 29, was execution day. A few weeks before, for reasons only he knew, Nixon had removed the tape recording system from his study at Camp David’s Aspen Lodge, the room where he carried out his sentences against Haldeman and Ehrlichman. But their memories of that afternoon are all of a piece.

  Ehrlichman wrote: “He looked small and drawn. It was impossible for me to remain composed as he told me he hoped and prayed he might die during the night. ‘It is like cutting off my arm,’ he began, and he could not continue. He began crying uncontrollably.… The Camp was in full spring bloom out there, I noticed. All the bulbs were up and out.”

  Haldeman recorded: “The P was in terrible shape. Shook hands with me, which is the first time he’s ever done that.… We were looking at the tulips from the Aspen porch, talking about the beauty and all, and as we started back in, he said, well, I have to enjoy it, because I may not be alive much longer.… Then he went through his whole pitch about how he’s really the guilty one. He said he’s thought it all through, and that he was the one who started Colson on his projects, he was the one who told Dean to cover up, he was the one who mad
e Mitchell Attorney General, and later his campaign manager, and so on. And … that he too probably will have to resign.”

  Nixon—as he would do again on a far more fateful day—invoked the sainted memory of his pious mother. “I followed my mother’s custom of getting down on my knees every night and praying silently,” he said to Haldeman. “When I went to bed last night I had hoped, and almost prayed, that I wouldn’t wake up this morning.”

  Monday, April 30: Nixon awoke alone, ate breakfast alone, and apart from a brief talk with his tireless secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and a long session with his talented speechwriter Ray Price, he spent the day alone, working on his address to the nation on Watergate. The speech, as Nixon wrote years later, was the start of “an increasingly desperate search for ways to limit the damage to my friends, to my administration, and to myself.”

  He took his helicopter back to the White House, went to his barber, and walked into the Oval Office at 8:58 p.m., two minutes before he went on the air.

  Richard Nixon, one of the most talented and tenacious presidents of the twentieth century, had the rare gift of blarney, a cajoling tongue capable of telling falsehoods with unblushing effrontery. He got off some good lines in his speech that night, such as “There can be no whitewash at the White House.” But he also told seventeen palpable lies about Watergate—concerning his role in the case, his fictitious in-house investigation of the crimes, and his commitment to uncovering the full story. He wrapped up his speech and then got rip-roaring drunk, as evidenced by his increasingly incoherent telephone calls, between 10:00 p.m. and midnight, to Haldeman, Rogers, Colson, the Reverend Billy Graham, and his new nominee for attorney general, Elliot Richardson. “Goddamn it,” he told Haldeman, “I’m never going to discuss the son-of-a-bitching Watergate thing again—never, never, never, never.” He had the gall to say to Rogers, whose forced resignation as secretary of state was imminent, “You’re the Cabinet now, boy,” and then laughed. “No bullshit.”

  Rogers advised him: “Get some sleep now.”

  * * *

  While Nixon was anguishing in the White House, the peace accords Kissinger had struck were failing in Vietnam. “Still no cease-fire and no visible movement toward a political settlement” after ninety days, Ambassador Bunker reported from Saigon.

  An especially harsh series of B-52 attacks struck Cambodia that spring. These bombings, like so many before, were covert and counterproductive. They killed civilians and they drove the surviving Communist troops eastward, closer to Saigon.

  These secret bombings were uncovered by an intrepid twenty-eight-year-old freelance reporter named Sylvana Foa and two Senate staff investigators, Dick Moose and Jim Lowenstein. Moose and Lowenstein were in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, checking out a tip that the American embassy was coordinating the B-52 raids with the Pentagon. They had no proof until Foa struck up a conversation with Lowenstein.

  “Listen,” she said. “Do you want to hear something interesting?” She turned on her five-dollar pocket radio and tuned it to an open frequency. “There were American pilots talking to an American air controller,” Lowenstein recalled. The embassy was vectoring the bombers to their targets, a blatant violation of the peace accords. On April 27 the staffers reported their findings to Sen. Stuart Symington, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

  “Symington went to the Secretary of Defense and didn’t get any place; went to the Secretary of State and didn’t get any place,” Lowenstein said. “And, as I recall, he finally went to the President and said, ‘This is what these guys say. This is what the law says. This is what this Committee is considering in terms of legislation.’”

  Congress started drafting legislation to cut off funding for the war—regardless of the president’s powers as commander in chief—by requiring congressional approval for any combat-related spending in Indochina. In the words of William Stearman, the NSC’s senior Hanoi analyst, “The Presidency had been so weakened by Watergate that the American public, and certainly the Congress, would not continue our support for the Vietnamese forces much longer.”

  * * *

  The mercurial Al Haig, promoted from colonel to four-star general by Nixon, was the new Haldeman and Ehrlichman—the president’s chief of staff and palace guard. He was the only man Nixon could depend upon in his time of crisis. The Senate Watergate Hearings were set to begin in seventeen days—and the president had no counsel, no one in official command at the FBI or the Justice Department, and only Haig to trust.

  Then another general—Vernon Walters, the president’s handpicked deputy director of central intelligence, a man of impeccable discretion who had worked with Nixon since 1958—delivered a set of documents to Haig. Copies would soon be in the hands of senators and Watergate investigators.

  These scrupulously maintained memoranda of conversations, memcons for short, detailed the meetings among Walters, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman during the days immediately after the Watergate break-in. They described the orders from the White House to use the CIA to turn off the FBI’s investigation with a spurious assertion of national security.

  May 11 became judgment day at the White House. First Haig read the memcons. They were devastating. One passage said: “It was the President’s wish that Walters call on Acting FBI Director Gray and … suggest that the investigation not be pushed further.”

  Haig immediately called Nixon at Camp David. “It will be very embarrassing,” Nixon said. “It’ll indicate that we tried to cover up with the CIA.” In a second telephone call, the president put it more bluntly: “If you read the cold print it looks terrible.… I just don’t want him to go in and say look, they called us in and tried to fix the case and we wouldn’t do it.” Nixon wrote in his memoirs: “One of the things that made the memcons so troublesome was that Walters was one of my old friends; he would not have contrived them to hurt me. In addition, his photographic memory was renowned, and he was universally respected as a scrupulous and honest man.”

  That same morning, page-one stories described the White House wiretaps Nixon and Kissinger had placed on presidential aides and prominent reporters starting in 1969. Kissinger, who was expecting to be appointed secretary of state, brazenly denied that he had chosen the wiretap targets among his NSC staff and national security reporters; he implied he was only following orders. Nixon shouted: “Henry ordered the whole goddamn thing.… He read every one of those taps … he reveled in it, he groveled it, he wallowed in it.”

  That same day’s newspapers reported that the federal judge presiding over the espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case had dismissed the charges on grounds of government misconduct. Belatedly, the Justice Department, as required under law, had disclosed the misconduct—a warrantless White House wiretap recording Ellsberg, and the Plumbers’ break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.

  The Pentagon Papers case was a total loss for the president: Ellsberg went free and the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize. Nixon was embittered.

  “Doesn’t the President of the United States have the responsibility to conduct an investigation with regard to leaks in the goddamn place?” Nixon argued to Haig on May 11, regarding the wiretaps. “I got to go to the court to ask them? Screw the court.” The court begged to differ.*

  John Mitchell publicly denied signing the wiretap authorizations. Nixon had a one-word response to that: “Bullshit.” He was right about that. But that same afternoon, FBI agents had wrung a modicum of truth from Mitchell.

  He confessed that the taps were part of “a dangerous game we were playing.” He also told them where transcripts of the wiretaps might be found: in the White House safe of John Ehrlichman. The acting FBI director William Ruckelshaus recalled: “An FBI agent, sent by me to the White House to guard those records and others in Ehrlichman’s office, was badly shaken when the President of the United States seized his lapels and asked him what he was doing there.” He was upholding the law of the land—and helping to make a case
against the president of the United States.

  Nixon saw no alternative but to fight to keep these documents secret. “Good god, if we were going to stonewall executive privilege and a lot of other things we can sure as hell stonewall this,” he told Haig on May 12.

  How they were going to stonewall the Huston Plan was another question. Nixon had endorsed every kind of government spying on Americans—opening their mail, bugging their phones, breaking into their homes and offices—until J. Edgar Hoover himself killed the program. John Dean had placed a copy of the incendiary plan in a safe-deposit box and given the key to Judge Sirica. He intended to turn the copy over to the Senate Watergate Committee.

  Nixon’s constant refrain had been contempt for court rulings on wiretapping, break-ins, any aspect of “the national security thing.” Nixon insisted: “I’m going to defend the bugging. I’m going to defend the Plumbers [and] fight right through to the finish on the son of a bitch.” But when he thought about people actually reading the patently illegal Huston Plan, he changed his tune. “The bad thing is that the president approved burglaries,” Nixon said on May 17; he could be perceived as “a repressive fascist.”

  The tension at the White House was unbearable. With the Watergate hearings days away, Nixon screamed at his underlings as he schemed to save his presidency. Ziegler cautioned him to stay calm: “If we allow ourselves to be consumed by this—”

  “—We’ll destroy ourselves,” the president said.

  Rose Mary Woods tried to console him. She said that Dr. Hutschnecker, Nixon’s psychoanalyst, had just called her: “He’s thinking of you all the time and if there’s anything on God’s earth that he can do.…”

  “They may kill me in the press, but they will never kill me in my mind,” Nixon said. “I’m going to fight these bastards to the end.”