One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  The committee’s thirty-eight members ranged from the most conservative to the most liberal representatives in Congress. At the center of this spectrum stood four relatively moderate Republicans and three staunchly right-wing southern Democrats; these seven men were of no one mind. Each article of impeachment might stand or fall on the way they swayed.

  The Constitution says a president may be impeached for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Treason was not at issue. Bribery was a touchy subject; many members of Congress performed unseemly favors for campaign contributors. But high crimes and misdemeanors—now, that was rich terrain. The phrase originated in fourteenth-century proceedings of the British Parliament. The history of Anglo-American jurisprudence showed that acts worthy of impeachment included the abuse of the powers of high office. “Abuse of power” was thus a high crime—and another phrase about to enter American discourse, alongside “expletive deleted.”

  “Obstruction of justice” was by now common parlance, owing to the criminal proceedings against the president’s men. Nixon had been obstructing justice for two years, since the Watergate burglary, and his continuing defiance of the subpoenas was part of that pattern. Obstruction of justice was a felony designed to disguise a felony. And as Nixon had said more than once on tape: It wasn’t the crime. It was the cover-up.

  After six weeks of deliberation, the committee began drafting formal articles of impeachment against the president of the United States at the end of June. In July—after the Supreme Court heard United States v. Nixon—the debate would begin.

  * * *

  During a seven-week stretch, from June 10 to July 29, Richard Nixon spent only seven days in the White House.

  Nixon fled Washington and began an epic voyage, through the Middle East and Europe, then on to Moscow. He was determined to reappear on the global stage as the leader of the free world, the most powerful man on earth.

  The sheer will Nixon showed by undertaking this trip was formidable. He began dictating his diary on tape again, a practice he had dropped for many months. Just before his departure on June 10, he recorded, “The great tragedy is that it seems to be a year and a half almost that is lost.”

  On top of the sadness and the stress, he was not a well man. Nixon suffered from phlebitis, a blood clot in a vein of his left leg that caused swelling and suffering. The danger of the disease is that the clot can break loose, flow into the bloodstream, enter the lungs, and create a potentially fatal embolism. The phlebitis flared up just before he took off, and it pained him.

  The first stop was Salzburg, Austria, a way station intended to let the president reset his body clock before a grueling week in the Middle East. Nixon was housed at Schloss Klessheim, an imperial building inside a gated park, with a soaring salon, cream-and-gold walls, and glittering crystal chandeliers. One among the president’s huge contingent was a State Department official, Alfred Joseph White, who assisted Nixon’s brief chat with the chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky. “He came out to greet Chancellor Kreisky,” White recalled. “The limp was very noticeable. He had a haggard, grey, drawn, exhausted look and seemed in pain. The agony of his situation was plainly evident. He seemed a bent and broken man in those ghastly few minutes. His Presidency was crashing down around him, and it showed.”

  The next stop was Egypt, and the trip was a smashing success for all, owing greatly to dialogues between Kissinger and the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, which had started in November, after the Yom Kippur War, as part of Kissinger’s ceaseless shuttle diplomacy among the Arabs and Israelis.

  Sadat was the son of peasants but behaved as if born to the presidency. He was amenable to reestablishing diplomatic relations with the United States, breaking Egypt’s military reliance on the Soviets, and consolidating the cease-fire with Israel. In January, Sadat had formally invited Nixon for a state visit.

  On June 12, in Cairo, President Sadat awarded Richard Nixon Egypt’s highest civilian decoration, the Collar of the Nile. The route of their motorcade from the airport to the presidential palace was lined with as many as one million cheering Egyptians chanting Nixon’s name at the top of their lungs. The president of the United States was elated. Nixon and Sadat later traveled by train for three hours to the grand palace of Alexandria. They waved from an open coach to millions more who stood along the tracks, and they were greeted at their destination by mounted lancers in splendid regalia.

  By the end of his two-day visit, after viewing the Great Pyramid of Giza and signing an accord with Sadat reestablishing relations, Nixon’s ecstasy at the welcome reception he’d received soothed his throbbing leg and eased his troubled mind.

  “The Egyptians, as I saw, went all out,” said Arthur A. Houghton III, a senior officer at the American embassy in Cairo, who witnessed it all. “The President of the United States really was an earthquake to them, the most important thing that had happened for years. They went out of their way to make it clear [that] they wanted us to be a partner in the future. Nixon was—I don’t know what Nixon was.… But nevertheless he served the role that he needed to serve. It was a great ceremonial occasion.”

  Nixon’s next stop was far less satisfying. On the evening of June 14 he landed in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and remained for twenty-two hours. King Faisal, then seventy-two years old, had been a principal architect of the recent oil embargo that had crippled the American economy and sent the stock market to a four-year low. The Saudi leader now pledged to be a friend to America—and American oil companies—in days to come. Nixon welcomed the promise of amity and oil. Unfortunately, he made a serious mistake in his toast to the king.

  U.S. ambassador Jim Akins “had asked the President if he wanted any texts or talking points for his speech,” recalled Hume Horan, the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Saudi Arabia. “Nixon replied, ‘No, I write my own.’ So he got up there and began talking about King Faisal, and how wonderful it was that his father had cooperated with Lawrence of Arabia, the great role he had played in the Arab revolt, and how in his early days Faisal had been to France for the Paris Peace Conference with Woodrow Wilson. Excellent. But Nixon was speaking of the wrong Faisal! He was praising the late King of Iraq—not the Saudi Faisal, whose father had driven the Hashemites from Arabia! Jim’s blood ran cold.”

  From there it was on to Syria, where the Hashemites once ruled. But in 1974, Syria was under the iron hand of President Hafiz Assad, the father of the present-day dictator, Bashar Assad, who was then eight years old. Nixon recounted that the young Bashar had seen the June 15 arrival ceremonies in Damascus for the president of the United States on television and had asked his father that night, “Wasn’t that Nixon the same one you have been telling us for years is an evil man who is in complete control of the Zionists and our enemies? How could you welcome him at the airport and shake his hand?”

  Nevertheless, Nixon recorded that he “was very impressed with President Assad,” who had “a lot of charm.” Nixon reestablished American diplomatic relations with the autocratic regime. He was all too often more amenable to dictators than democrats.

  On June 16, Air Force One flew from Damascus to Tel Aviv, where the president and First Lady were met by Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel, and ensconced in the luxurious Suite 429 of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel was a unique landmark in the history of Israel: the headquarters for British military officers and diplomats who governed the land known as Palestine after World War II. In 1946 a terrorist gang called the Irgun blew up a section of the hotel, killing ninety-one people, most of them British overlords.* The British Mandate crumbled before Israel’s foundation in 1948; the King David’s splendor was restored.

  Prime Minister Golda Meir had lost her seat after the military humiliations of the Yom Kippur War, but she still had clout; she was among the toughest of a tough people. Nixon graciously toasted her. But Nixon, the first American president to visit the Jewish state, spent a tense time with the new Israeli leadership during a
long June 17 meeting at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The Israelis were not happy that Nixon and Kissinger were negotiating with Syria and Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Nixon was irritated at the Israelis’ attitude. To be blunt: Nixon didn’t like Jews, as he said time and again on the White House tapes.

  Hal Saunders, Kissinger’s chief aide during the shuttle diplomacy, explained how the secretary of state skillfully smooth-talked and soothed the Israelis—diplomatic duplicity at its finest. “He stopped being the Secretary of State of the United States, who was trying to mediate an agreement,” Saunders said. “He became Doctor Kissinger, an American professor, serving as a consultant to the State of Israel, who, incidentally, had shared the Jewish experience. This metamorphosis was done in a very impressive, subtle and admirable fashion.” Kissinger—whom Nixon had barred from Middle East negotiations before making him secretary of state precisely because he was Jewish—salved the tensions and salvaged Nixon’s visit to Israel.

  They flew the short hop from Tel Aviv to Amman on the afternoon of June 17. King Hussein of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan had for years been a rare friend to the United States in the Middle East. Suave and politically astute, King Hussein survived through the turmoil of his time by making alliances with anyone amenable, especially the United States. America trained and equipped his air force and shared intelligence on how best to survive in a rough neighborhood rife with the fathers and grandfathers of today’s terrorists.

  Nixon’s arrival in the wake of the Yom Kippur War was a serious security issue for the king. “This being the first visit of an American president in the Middle East with an extremely unpopular U.S.–Middle East policy in the Arab world, the Jordanians were afraid he was going to get killed,” said Roscoe S. Suddarth, U.S. ambassador to Jordan under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush and a senior political counsel at the American embassy when Nixon came to Amman. “Who was going to be in the flatbed truck following the Nixon car and motorcade? The Nixon advance team wanted to put all photographers and the Jordanians wanted to put all soldiers with submachine guns.”

  This part of the trip was dispiriting. Nixon was exhausted: he turned down a palace lunch with King Hussein. He was anxious: the news that he had been named as an unindicted coconspirator in United States v. Mitchell had leaked, and the Senate Watergate Committee was about to release its final report. Nixon looked “like a waxen Madame Tussaud effigy,” Ambassador Suddarth said. “He just wanted to be alone and worry about Watergate.”

  What Nixon really wanted right then was a long rest at Camp David, away from it all in the peace and quiet of his mountaintop retreat. He flew back to America over a two-day trip, stopping in the Azores, an Atlantic Ocean archipelago about 850 miles west of Portugal, where the United States had a well-equipped air force base. The dictatorial leader of Portugal, António de Spínola, flew out to greet him after his eight-hour flight, and following some diplomatic niceties Nixon was abed by nine. Flying home across the ocean, greeted on the White House Lawn by Vice President Ford in the late afternoon of June 19, he then made brief televised remarks to the American people. Borrowing a phrase from Eisenhower, he said that waging peace was harder than waging war.

  The next day, he took his helicopter to Camp David for a three-day vacation. A hard week lay ahead, including a summit with the Soviets that held few hopes for ushering in a more peaceful world.

  * * *

  First, Nixon flew to Brussels to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed after World War II, at the dawn of the Cold War, as a military and diplomatic alliance of the United States and Western Europe against the Soviet Union and its satellite states. The great leaders of that era (Eisenhower, Churchill, de Gaulle) all had died in the past decade. Their successors were by comparison second-rate.

  Donald Rumsfeld had risen to become the American ambassador to NATO. Rumsfeld’s counselor for political affairs, James E. Goodby, received the president at the Brussels airport. Nixon had “a face carved out of wood—no expression,” Goodby said. “It was quite a shocking experience to see a president of the United States looking like that.”

  Nixon, in his formal address to the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s decision-making body, said that he and Brezhnev had put an end to the Cold War—the struggle that was the sole rationale of NATO’s existence. This bald assertion shocked leaders such as Helmut Schmidt, chancellor of West Germany, who had Communist troops garrisoned on his nation’s eastern border and tens of thousands of American soldiers stationed in his country.

  And then Nixon returned to Moscow, where Brezhnev jovially escorted him to a lively welcoming festival and a state dinner at the Kremlin. A year before, in a telephone call to his daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Nixon had described an animated conversation with the Soviet leader while riding on the Sequoia in Washington. “My god, he really thinks I’m the greatest friend he’s ever had,” Nixon said. “The thing is with all this wallowing in Watergate, my god, Brezhnev and I are deciding the future of the world. These bastards have got to understand that.”

  The fortunes of the world were unaffected by the summit. Nixon and Brezhnev still spoke of their friendship, but their nations were now at odds on nuclear arms. SALT had stalled, and they could go nowhere on arms control until the treaty was resolved. “SALT—this is the most difficult of all,” Nixon said to Brezhnev on July 28. “In terms of an overriding runaway nuclear arms race, agreement on offensive arms is crucial.”*

  Nixon continued: “If we are unable to reach agreement or to make progress in reaching agreement in the future, inevitably the reaction will be, on our side, to go forward with our offensive nuclear weapons program; and, of course, the Soviet Union will do likewise; it is inevitable. So the question we have is whether to control the nuclear arms race before it controls us. I wish I had the solution.”

  On June 29, Brezhnev took Nixon and Kissinger to his dacha on the Crimean Sea, still hoping to solve the problem of MIRVs undermining arms control. “We suggest that the U.S. be limited to 1100 MIRVs and 1000 for the Soviet side,” Brezhnev said the next day. “This means 100 MIRV missiles more for the American side.”

  Kissinger responded that “this was impossible.” He continued: “We will have to stop our MIRV programs next year, but the Soviets will continue for four more years at their maximum capacity. This will be represented in the U.S. as our freezing while permitting the Soviets to catch up.”

  Nixon saw they were getting nowhere. He proposed a ride on Brezhnev’s boat. “I agree,” Brezhnev said. “It is time to go out on the water.” The voyage was less joyous than the sail on the Sequoia. Nixon returned to Moscow downcast.

  “Sophisticates in the press and political world [will] zero in on the fact we were unable to get an agreement on further limitation of strategic arms,” he told Brezhnev on July 2 at their last formal talk. “Some of the critics, we have to recognize, will jump on this and say this summit was a flop.” Nixon in fact thought that the summit, the fanfare notwithstanding, had been in large part a failure.

  Air Force One took him to Loring Air Force Base in Caribou, Maine, the easternmost military outpost in the United States, and then directly to Key Biscayne for the July 4 holiday. As much as he loved his role as world leader, he longed for another respite. When he returned to the Oval Office on Monday, July 8, he knew his judgment was at hand.

  * * *

  That was the day the Supreme Court heard United States v. Richard Milhous Nixon. Leon Jaworski and James St. Clair were granted three hours for oral argument, thrice the Court’s standard—but this was no ordinary case. Eight of the nine justices were present. William Rehnquist, having served in the Nixon administration, recused himself.

  The sole issue before the Court was Nixon’s claim of executive privilege to shield his tapes from the special prosecutor. The president did not argue that he was protecting secrets of state (a stance that could have carried considerable strength), but rather that the
sanctuary of the Oval Office kept presidential conversations confidential.* Congress and the courts had no right to hear them.

  Jaworski’s argument to the justices went directly to the High Court’s earliest ruling on the separation of powers under the Constitution, the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison, which stated that the duty of American judges was “to say what the law is.” The president had placed himself above the law by defying the subpoena for the tapes. St. Clair, by contrast, said that the Constitution commanded that only by impeachment could a president submit to the power of another branch of government; the secrecy of the tapes was a political controversy beyond the reach of the Supreme Court.

  Justice Lewis Powell, appointed by President Nixon in 1972, cut to the heart of that argument. “Mr. St. Clair,” he asked, “what public interest is there in preserving secrecy with respect to a criminal conspiracy?”

  St. Clair’s reply was straight out of Alice in Wonderland: “The answer, sir, is that a criminal conspiracy is criminal only after it’s proven to be criminal.”

  But the subpoenaed tapes were at the center of the criminal case against Mitchell and his codefendants—in which the president was an unindicted coconspirator. On one of the tapes, Henry Petersen, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, discussing the legal problems that might face Haldeman and Ehrlichman, had presciently and precisely explained where the president now stood: “For example, I am indicted. You’re an unindicted co-conspirator. You are just as guilty as I am.”

  St. Clair stood by his guns. Impeachment by the House and conviction in the Senate was the only recourse—and even then, executive privilege could protect discussions of presidential conduct on the tapes. Justice Thurgood Marshall, appointed by President Johnson in 1967, thought this ludicrous.* “How are you going to impeach him if you don’t know” what was on the tapes? Marshall asked. “You lose me someplace.”