One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  When delivering his speech for the POWs, with members of the press present, Nixon was steely as a drill sergeant. “There was no plan to end the war” when he first came to office, he said. “Many of you were already prisoners of war. You had no hope.”

  Nixon said he had won their release through his strength—and through his secrecy. “I want to be quite blunt,” he said. “Had we not had secrecy, had we not had secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese … you men would still be in Hanoi rather than Washington today. And let me say, I think it is time in this country to quit making national heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspapers.”

  “I am going to meet my responsibility to protect the national security of the United States of America insofar as our secrets are concerned … so we can continue these enormously important initiatives for peace” with the Soviets and the Chinese, Nixon said. “The strength to be the peacemaker in the world—it is all right here. It is in America. It is in that Oval Office.…”

  “Those first four years in that office were not easy ones for me,” he said. “But looking toward the balance of the second four years, let me say I feel better, because out in this room, I think I have got some allies, and I will appreciate your help.”

  That day marked the last time that Nixon talked at length about the war during his presidency. It was striking that he spoke to such an extent about the secrecy and the solitude of his office to hundreds of men who had suffered in silence and isolation for so long.

  * * *

  After midnight, in the wee hours of May 25, Nixon unburdened himself to Haig on the telephone. He sounded exhausted, drunk, or both. The steel was gone. He talked bluntly about resigning: “Wouldn’t it be better for the country, you know, to just check out?” Haig laughed. “No, no, seriously,” Nixon said. “You see, I’m not at my best. I’ve got to be at my best, and that means fighting this damn battle, fighting it all-out. And I can’t fight the damn battle,” not with bad news hammering him hour after hour. “The goddamn thing has gotten to me.… And you get to the point that, well, if you can’t do the goddamn job you better put somebody in there that can.”

  But no one could at that moment—and no one saw that fact more clearly than Nixon.

  He knew (as very few did) that Vice President Agnew might soon face a federal indictment.* Next in the legal line of succession were two Democrats: the Speaker of the House, Carl Albert of Oklahoma, an alcoholic who spent two months in rehab later that year; and the president pro tempore of the Senate, James Eastland of Mississippi, a doddering plantation master and notorious racist. Neither was fit to serve. Fifth in line was the secretary of state. Nixon was about to nominate Kissinger—born in Germany and thus disqualified under the Constitution.

  So Nixon had to fight the damn battle. The summer was going to be swallowed up by the Watergate hearings, though the committee was in a temporary recess and no major witnesses were scheduled for the next three weeks. During this lull, John Dean kept the press well fed, each story cutting away the president’s credibility. Dean was to testify in June; Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman throughout July. The Senate’s inquisition would run into September.

  The number of people privy to the deeper secrets of Watergate grew as Al Haig brought new lawyers and staffers into the Oval Office. Among them were two who learned that Nixon had had the White House wired. Nixon knew what would happen if that secret got out—and if Cox or Congress got their hands on his tapes.

  On June 4, Nixon began listening to his taped conversations with John Dean, taking notes in preparation for Dean’s public testimony, “so that we can strategize whipping this son of a bitch,” as Haig put it. Steve Bull, who had succeeded Alexander Butterfield as the deputy assistant to the president overseeing the taping system, struggled to find the right reels; the tapes never had been catalogued. Nixon spent nine hours that day listening to his talks with Dean from March, telling Haig it was the hardest work he’d ever done in his life. He avoided the “cancer on the presidency conversation,” remembering well that he had said he could raise a million dollars in hush money, recoiling at the prospect of hearing himself say it again.

  Then came a shock. On June 6, one of Nixon’s new in-house counsels, J. Fred Buzhardt, a highly intense lawyer imported from the Pentagon by Haig, had a meeting with Special Prosecutor Cox. Buzhardt returned to report to Nixon that Cox wanted evidence from the White House—specifically, “a tape of a conversation that you had with Dean on the evening of Sunday, April 15.”

  Nixon was flabbergasted.

  How could Cox suspect that this tape existed? As it turned out, he had three sources: one was Henry Petersen, chief of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department; the second was John Dean; and the third was Richard Nixon himself.*

  When Buzhardt raised the subject the next week, Nixon said flatly: “I have no tapes.” It wasn’t the first time he’d lied to Buzhardt, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  In a talk with Rose Mary Woods on the morning of June 12, the president became unglued. Brezhnev was arriving in four days for a weeklong summit meeting. Dean was supposed to take the stand two days after that.†

  Watergate had been a tightening noose for a year. “It’s almost a miracle that I’ve survived this,” Nixon said, “this brutal assault, brutal, brutal, brutal assault, day after day after day.… That impeachment crap. That’s the saddest of all.” Rose Mary Woods, who loved Richard Nixon, said, “You’re killing yourself with the job.”

  “I don’t mind killing myself…,” the president said. “I would expect to kill myself, and I would do it.”

  * * *

  He won a brief respite—very brief—when the leaders of the Senate announced that John Dean’s testimony would be postponed in deference to diplomacy. General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev arrived in the United States on June 16 for his weeklong summit meeting with President Nixon. They held six talks, in Washington, at Camp David, and in San Clemente. In a one-on-one conversation with Brezhnev, taped in the Oval Office on June 18, Nixon said, “We must recognize, the two of us, that I for 3½ more years in this office and the General Secretary, I hope, for that long or longer, we head the two most powerful nations.… And the key really is in the relationship between Mr. Brezhnev and myself. If we decide to work together, we can change the world.”

  But they could not work together that week. Compared with its predecessors in Moscow and Beijing, the summit was a bust. Though the two leaders signed agreements on trade and other issues, the proclamation of the prevention of nuclear war was pabulum, and they made no progress on the strategic arms limitation treaty. The reality of arms control under Nixon was best expressed years later by James Schlesinger, who served as both defense secretary and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, in charge of building America’s nuclear arsenal: “I think that I still have the record for producing the most nuclear weapons in one year, that would have been 1972, of anyone in history.”

  Nixon and Brezhnev found no common ground on the pursuit of peace in the Middle East, which the Soviets thought was the most urgent issue of the time. At 10:30 p.m. on June 23 in San Clemente, Brezhnev woke Nixon out of bed with an urgent demand for an unscheduled talk—an argument about the imminence of an Arab-Israeli war. For two hours, well past midnight, Brezhnev tried to bully Nixon into signing a joint statement for peace negotiations. The United States and the Soviet Union were as contentious over the basic issues as the Israelis and the Arabs; such a pact seemed a pipe dream. Nixon thought Moscow was angling for the advantage of its allies in Egypt and Syria. The president was unmoved.

  There was no talk of “the spirit of San Clemente” at the summit’s end. Nixon stayed secluded at the Western White House while John Dean took the stand for a week in Washington.

  * * *

  Dean looked very young—he was thirty-four—and very respectable as he took the stand. He spent a full day reading a 245-page prepared statement and spent four days answering questions. Al
l three major networks covered every minute of his testimony, and public television rebroadcast it every night. As many as eighty million Americans watched at least part of Dean’s command performance.

  He methodically shredded Nixon’s white paper, point by point. He meticulously reconstructed their March 21, 1973, conversation about the metastasizing cancer in the Oval Office. He described in detail a corrupt administration committing crimes under the cover of national security. This portrait was composed by a man who confessed to coordinating the cover-up for the president.

  Nixon realized, too late, that “we would never recover” from this portrayal. “It no longer made any difference that not all of Dean’s testimony was accurate,” the president wrote in his memoirs. “It only mattered if any of his testimony was accurate. And Dean’s account of the crucial March 21 meeting was more accurate than my own.”

  Senator Baker, as the ranking Republican on the Watergate Committee, said that the outcome of the investigation rested on one question: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Dean pointed to his talk with the president on September 15, 1972—the day of the Watergate burglars’ indictments—as the moment the cover-up began. Since Nixon had denied meeting Dean before 1973, this seemed a definitive point. And Dean hammered it in by disclosing that the president himself had offered prosecutors “a tape of a conversation” with Dean recorded on that April night before Dean became a government witness. If there were tapes, Baker’s question could be answered in full.

  At 5:30 a.m. on July 12, two days after he returned to the White House from San Clemente, Nixon awoke in excruciating pain, every breath a stabbing knife in his chest. The diagnosis was viral pneumonia. The president spent the next week at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, outside Washington.

  The following afternoon, Friday the thirteenth, two Watergate staff investigators, Scott Armstrong, who worked for the Democrats, and Don Sanders, who worked for the Republicans, conducted a preliminary interview with a potential witness: Alexander Butterfield, the deputy assistant to the president during Nixon’s first term, the gatekeeper to the Oval Office. Butterfield, recently appointed as head of the Federal Aviation Administration, was one of seven people who knew about the tapes at the time, outside of the Secret Service technicians who handled the recording system. Butterfield had resolved that if he were asked a direct question about the tapes, he would answer truthfully.

  They sat in a cluttered basement room of the Senate’s offices. Sanders had a document that Nixon’s counsel Fred Buzhardt had given to the Republican staff as a means of cross-examining John Dean. It was a single sheet of paper, a verbatim transcript, with a P for “president” and a D for “Dean.” The investigators slid the document across the table and asked Butterfield what he made of it. That wasn’t a direct question.

  “I thought to myself that this had to come from the tapes—the very thing I’m worrying so much about,” Butterfield remembered. “So I just hemmed and hawed.”

  Then Sanders, a former FBI agent, took over. “You had mentioned the Dictabelt,” he said. Nixon dictated letters and memoranda on the device, and Rose Mary Woods typed them up. “Apart from the Dictabelt, was there ever any other listening device in the Oval Office?” That was a direct question.

  During a 2012 symposium with Dean and Armstrong, Butterfield recalled:

  I knew it would be the end of my career, certainly in Washington. I just knew that. Nixon was so set on this thing being an absolute secret—and it was an absolute secret for all that time. We know that from what’s on the tapes. So, I said, “I’m sorry you asked that question. Yes, there was, and that’s where this document had to have come from.” And then we spent forty-five minutes describing the system. I felt reasonably sure that they had not heard that from any previous witness. That secret of Nixon’s was too closely held.

  Armstrong ran to see the chief counsel, Sam Dash: “I blurted out, ‘Sam, Nixon taped all of his conversations.’” Butterfield testified to that on Monday. It was the biggest bulletin of the year. “NIXON BUGGED HIMSELF” was the tabloid headline in the New York Post.

  Sleepless in his hospital room before dawn on July 19, Nixon scrawled a note on his bedside pad: “Should have destroyed the tapes.” But he had not. Instead, he decided, in a state of self-delusion, that “the tapes were my best insurance against an unforeseeable future.”

  In retrospect, Nixon wrote, “from the time of the disclosure of the tapes and my decision not to destroy them, my presidency had little chance of surviving to the end of its term.”

  * * *

  On July 23, Senator Ervin and Special Prosecutor Cox subpoenaed a handful of tapes. Ervin wanted five for the Senate committee; Cox demanded nine for the Watergate grand jury. The president refused, citing executive privilege.

  The battle was joined in Judge Sirica’s court. Looking to the Constitution for guidance on executive privilege, and finding none—the Framers had rejected the idea that one branch of the government had dominion over another—the judge began to draft an order. Sirica said he would rule by the end of August on whether the president had to obey the subpoenas.

  Awaiting a decision, Nixon addressed the nation on August 15. Though defiantly defending himself, he appeared to promise to regard the rule of law. “The time has come to turn Watergate over to the courts,” he said. That did not mean he would turn over his tapes.

  While sticking by every word of his white paper, Nixon conceded that Watergate was “not just a burglary and bugging of party headquarters but a whole series of acts that either represent or appear to represent an abuse of trust.”

  But, he continued, Watergate also involved “a number of national security matters,” including “my efforts to stop massive leaks of vital diplomatic and military secrets.”

  “Many have urged that in order to help prove the truth of what I have said, I should turn over to the Special Prosecutor and the Senate committee recordings of conversations that I held in my office or on my telephone. However, a much more important principle is involved,” the president insisted. “This principle of confidentiality of Presidential conversations is at stake in the question of these tapes. I must and I shall oppose any efforts to destroy this principle, which is so vital to the conduct of this great office.”

  That same day, after years of struggle, by order of Congress, and over Nixon’s veto, the United States ceased the bombing of Cambodia. By law, the legislature was cutting off funds for the war in Vietnam. The passage of the War Powers Act was imminent. For the first time in history, the elected representatives of the people of the United States were forcing the president to sheath his terrible swift sword.

  Richard Nixon, having failed to end the Vietnam War on his terms, now faced his final crisis.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “The same enemies”

  “LET OTHERS wallow in Watergate,” said Richard Nixon. He fled the miasma of midsummer Washington and spent almost all the rest of August in Key Biscayne and San Clemente.

  Before the White House taping system was revealed—and immediately removed on orders from General Haig—Nixon had talked a brave game. Some of the last tapes caught his fighting words.

  He vowed to eviscerate Sam Ervin and the Senate Watergate Committee. “I’m going to hit them and destroy them and they’ll be destroyed … absolutely destroyed,” he told Haig in a late-night telephone call. “They don’t realize what they’re up against—this stupid Ervin, drinking too much, and pointing his finger. Ha!”

  Calling Kissinger from Camp David, he said, “We’ve been at this for four years, four-and-a-half- years.… [I]t’s virtually the same enemies, isn’t it?”

  “The same enemies and now trying to do legally what they tried with riots earlier,” Kissinger replied.

  “And in an election too,” Nixon said. “They failed at their riots, they failed in the election, now they’re trying to do it” with the Watergate investigation.

  And he told Haldeman before his fired a
ide appeared before the Senate committee, “As you are well aware Bob, they’re really not after you.”

  “Oh, hell, no,” Haldeman responded with bravura.

  “They’re after the President,” Nixon said.

  But Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell had done themselves and the president no favors in their testimony before the Senate committee. Haldeman, having heard the “you could get a million dollars” tape of March 21, swore that the president had immediately followed that statement by saying, “But it would be wrong.” That was perjury. What was wrong, Nixon had said many minutes later, was granting executive clemency under extortion.

  Ehrlichman, who had presided over the Plumbers, was snarling and imperious. He defended the president’s national security powers, even when it came to burglary, to protect state secrets. He confronted the courtly country lawyer Herman Talmadge, a Georgia Democrat, who reminded him of the Magna Carta, the thirteenth-century foundation of Anglo-American law, and its ideal that a man’s home was his castle, and that his castle could be defended against a king.

  Q: 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?

  A: I am afraid that has been considerably eroded over the years, has it not?

  Q: Down in my country we still think it is a pretty legitimate principle of law.

  The Senate gallery applauded. Ehrlichman’s jutting jaw dropped. At that moment, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles was preparing a sealed indictment against him for the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, a Plumbers operation he had approved in writing.