One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  St. Clair had lost more than one member of the Court. After Justice Powell’s death, his private papers on the Court’s deliberations in United States v. Nixon were placed in the archives of the Washington and Lee University School of Law in Virginia. They show how the Court achieved consensus in the case.

  Chief Justice Warren Burger was Nixon’s confidant and the Court’s most conservative member (along with the recused Rehnquist). He sometimes met in private with the president, which was injudicious. The chief justice wanted an acknowledgment that executive privilege existed. He also wanted to write the opinion of the Court in his name.

  The Court’s liberal justices crafted a compromise in two weeks. They convinced the chief and his conservative colleagues such as Powell that the president could not use executive privilege to usurp the Court’s duty to say what the law was. They invoked the words of James Madison from the Federalist Papers, a foundation for the Constitution: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The decision satisfied the chief’s desire to establish a legal principle of executive privilege—and the Court unanimously ordered Nixon to hand over the tapes.

  * * *

  Since July 12, Nixon had been isolated at La Casa Pacifica, the “House of Peace,” his home in San Clemente, huddled with a few close aides waiting for word from the Supreme Court and the impeachment committee. “I suppose it could be said this is our Seventh Crisis in spades,” he wrote in his diary on July19. “We can only hope for the best and plan for the worst.” On July 23, he learned that one of the conservative Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee was going to vote for impeachment.

  “Well, Al,” he said to Haig, “there goes the presidency.”

  He tried to draft a speech that night, but he was overtaken with hopelessness. In the margin of his legal pad, he wrote, “12:01 a.m. Lowest point in the presidency, and Supreme Court still to come.” He could not sleep until 2:30 on the morning of July 24. The Court handed down its ruling four hours later.

  Haig awakened him. “It’s pretty rough, Mr. President.”

  “Unanimous?”

  “Unanimous. There’s no air in it at all.”

  “None at all?”

  The House began its hearings against the president that evening. The drafting of three articles of impeachment went up to the last minute. The debates over the charges against the president lasted through three long nights before the first vote was taken. Nixon would not return to Washington until it was tallied.

  The hearings, televised in prime time, had moments of rambling diatribes but also some reasoned discourse. Forty million Americans received an education on the principles of the Constitution, along with a bill of particulars on the high crimes and misdemeanors of a president.

  The tapes were transcribed, as commanded by the Supreme Court, and prepared for publication. These words could not be deleted; they were indelible.

  * * *

  On July 27, by a vote of 27–11, with six Republicans joining all twenty-one Democrats, the committee passed the first article of impeachment against the president. In a preamble, it said that Richard Nixon, by obstructing justice, had violated his oath of office to defend the Constitution and to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

  The bill of particulars listed his high crimes. The president had lied. He had withheld evidence. He had counseled his aides to present false testimony. He had stonewalled the Justice Department, the FBI, the special prosecutor, and Congress. He had approved paying hush money to criminal defendants, thus “rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.” He had tried to misuse the CIA to obstruct the FBI, a fact derived from the meticulous files of Gen. Vernon Walters. And he had “made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation had been conducted” into Watergate.

  “Wherefore,” the article concluded, “Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

  Nixon had been swimming in the Pacific while the yeas and nays were tallied. He was changing at the beach house when Ron Ziegler called. And there, looking out into the ocean, barefoot and wearing a blue windbreaker emblazoned with the presidential seal, Nixon began to realize that he might have to resign. The full House would surely pass that article—and, as Nixon was learning from his dwindling band of allies on Capitol Hill, a vote of conviction by two-thirds of the Senate was increasingly likely.

  Monday, July 29, was his first full day back in Washington after more than two weeks in San Clemente. The second article of impeachment came down with an even stronger vote, 28–10. It read like a criminal indictment: the president had abused his power by interfering with the lawful conduct of the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the Justice Department, and the special prosecutor. It made special note of the White House Plumbers, whose work was “financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions.” And it cited the 1969 White House wiretaps as unwarranted “electronic surveillance … for purposes unrelated to national security.” The second article concluded, “Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”

  The third and final article passed the next day—like the first, by a 27–11 vote. Following the patterns of fact laid down in United States v. Nixon, the committee accused Nixon of defying lawful subpoenas, and thus usurping unto himself “judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.”

  Nixon could not sleep at all that night. Noting the time and date atop his legal pad—3:50 a.m. on July 31—he weighed three choices: resign, fight until impeached by the full House, or struggle through the trial before the Senate. Dawn had broken before he concluded, “End career as a fighter.”

  And then he showed Al Haig the “smoking gun” tape transcript. The words of the president recorded on June 23, 1972, were evidence of his obstruction of justice in the Watergate break-in. There they stood in black ink: his order that the CIA must tell the FBI, “Don’t go further into this case—period.” By command of the Supreme Court, those words would be a matter of public record in a few days. Nixon himself had said that obstruction of justice was an impeachable offense. Haig thought the smoking gun was fatal; Nixon feared the same. If he fought his impeachment, he could be convicted by the Senate. He would no longer be his own judge and jury. He would stand alone.

  On August 1 the president told Haig he would resign within a week. Every preparation for the transition of power was to be conducted in complete secrecy, with one exception. Nixon instructed Haig to tell Gerald Ford: it was time for him to steel himself to be sworn into office. Ford, on the day before the vote on the first article of impeachment, had made a rousing speech in Indiana proclaiming the president’s innocence. He was about to be disabused.

  Then, on Tuesday, August 6, Nixon, incredibly, held a full-dress Cabinet meeting and, with a straight face, said that in the best interests of the nation he would not resign. He then launched into an exposition of the economic policies that the White House would propound for the next six months. Attorney General William Saxbe was appalled. “Mr. President,” Saxbe said, “don’t you think we should be talking about next week, not next year?” In dead silence, Nixon arose from the table and left the room.

  * * *

  At 9:00 p.m. on August 8, 1974, the thirty-seventh president of the United States made his thirty-seventh formal televised address to the American people. He came quickly to the point.

  I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter, I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way t
he interests of the Nation will require.

  I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interests of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.…

  Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

  The following morning, everyone working at the White House, from the uniformed women who vacuumed the carpets to the military officer who carried the briefcase with the launch codes for nuclear war, gathered in the elegant East Room of the White House to await the president’s last words.

  Nixon came out of an elevator and started walking down the corridor slowly, as if in a trance. His military aide put his hands on Nixon’s chest, bracing him, telling him where he was, who was in the room, and what was about to happen. The atmosphere was overwhelmingly emotional. Many people were in tears.

  Among the hundreds who saw Nixon’s farewell was NSC officer David Michael Ransom, the marine veteran who had detected Soviet warheads heading toward Egypt during the Yom Kippur War.*

  “There was a hush as he went up to the podium,” Ransom remembered. “People cheered and tried to cheer and applaud. He gave a speech that I could only describe as pathetic.”

  I remember my old man. I think that they would have called him sort of a little man, common man. He didn’t consider himself that way. You know what he was? He was a streetcar motorman first, and then he was a farmer, and then he had a lemon ranch.… And then he was a grocer. But he was a great man, because he did his job, and every job counts up to the hilt, regardless of what happens.

  Nobody will ever write a book, probably, about my mother. Well, I guess all of you would say this about your mother—my mother was a saint. And I think of her, two boys dying of tuberculosis, nursing four others in order that she could take care of my older brother for three years in Arizona, and seeing each of them die.… Yes, she will have no books written about her. But she was a saint.

  The president concluded, “We think that when we suffer a defeat that all is ended.… Not true. It is only a beginning, always.… Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.”

  Ransom remembered: “I felt relief about his resignation, but I also felt a deep running admiration for a man who faced adversity so courageously. Sometimes, when you are a soldier, the enemy might overrun you; you then have a choice between surrender and fighting. My heart has always gone out to the men who keep on fighting.”

  The morning was cloaked with clouds. A helicopter awaited on the lawn. Nixon left the White House, said farewell to Gerald Ford, and walked to the chopper. Ransom stepped out onto a balcony to watch Nixon fly away. Two other people stood beside him. One was the White House chef, wearing his white uniform. The other was Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, smoking his pipe.

  “Nixon flashed his double-armed signal of departure with two fingers raised in a ‘V’ sign and then he turned and entered the helicopter,” Ransom said. “It began cranking up very slowly. Finally, there was a deafening sound. The chopper lifted off, pivoted, and disappeared into the gloom of the morning. It was almost a haunted scene.”

  As the helicopter faded into the fog, the three men looked at one another. Schlesinger took his pipe out of his mouth, banged it on the railing, emptying the bowl, and said, “It’s an interesting constitutional question, but I think I am still the secretary of defense. So I am going back to my office.” He looked at the cook and said, “What are you going to do?”

  The cook said, “I’m going to prepare lunch for the president.”

  “I thought, ‘Of course. The king is dead. Long live the king!’” Ransom said. “The cook had it right. This wasn’t a matter of abstruse argument over constitutional privileges. Our state was going to carry on and the president would want lunch in about an hour and a half. So, the cook went off and prepared it.

  “I’ve always thought of that as something very important about our country. We may stumble but we don’t fall.”

  Epilogue

  RICHARD NIXON fought wars he could not win, feared his enemies at home would defeat him, and felt unconstrained by law when he sought to destroy them first. That belief led him to break his oath of office and violate the Constitution. He permanently damaged people’s respect for the presidency, a danger in a democracy.

  And now his legacy is all around us.

  Some presidents who succeeded Nixon never seemed to learn. Ronald Reagan ran covert wars overseas with clandestine funds. His top national security aides were indicted, then pardoned, by George H. W. Bush. Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury. George W. Bush’s abuses of power dwarfed Nixon’s—secret prisons, sanctioned torture, limitless eavesdropping, all supported by presidential fiat and secret statutes, aided and abetted by Vice President Dick Cheney. Barack Obama’s administration tormented more reporters and their sources under threat of subpoena or prison than Nixon’s ever did. In America, now more than ever, campaign cash from corporate magnates controls elections.

  South Vietnam fell nine months after Nixon left office, as did Cambodia, which went on to suffer the torments of a tyrannical regime, and Laos, where many thousands of tribesmen who had fought alongside Americans for twenty years fled into exile. The last Americans to leave Saigon took neither peace nor honor with them. And still we go to war without knowing our enemies, or the contour of the battlefield, or the way out.

  * * *

  Richard Nixon was unconditionally pardoned for the crimes of Watergate—an unpopular proclamation by President Ford—a month after he left the White House. Within six weeks, Nixon came close to dying.

  His chronic phlebitis, doubtless compounded by depression, flared dangerously. He entered Long Beach Memorial Hospital near San Clemente on October 23, 1974. His physicians saw the danger. Nixon’s left leg was obstructed by blood clots; if one broke loose and invaded his lungs, he would almost surely suffer a potentially fatal embolism. Without surgery, his prognosis was grim. He was sixty-one years old.

  Nixon collapsed after the operation. A vein ruptured. Bleeding internally, he fell unconscious, white as a sheet, in deep vascular shock. His heart stopped. “He just flat-lined,” said his White House aide Steve Bull, who was with him in the hospital. “Clinically … he was dead.” His nurse slapped his face, repeating: “Richard! Wake up, Richard!” When he came to consciousness the next day, his doctor told him: “We almost lost you last night.”

  For the next two decades, Richard Nixon tried to turn his life into a parable of a man who suffered, died, and rose again.

  Having taken every tape and every file he could find before he left the White House, he signed a $2 million contract for his memoirs, a 1,094-page book that he drafted with the help of the future television news anchor Diane Sawyer and his favorite speechwriter, Raymond Price. He signed a $600,000 deal with the British broadcaster David Frost for a series of interviews.

  Nixon made a cunning remark near the end of his encounters with Frost. “What history says about this administration will depend on who writes history,” he said. “Winston Churchill once told one of his critics that history … would treat him well, and his critic said: ‘How do you know?’ And he said, ‘Because I intend to write it.’”

  And Nixon did, first in his memoirs, then in eight volumes on statecraft and power. “As people look back on the Nixon administration,” he said in 1988, “they’re probably most likely to remember fifty years from now, one hundred years from now, that we made a difference on a very major issue. We changed the world.” He and he alone had transformed the global balance of power with “the China initiative, which only I could do.”

  “History will treat me fairly,” he concluded. “Historians probably won’t.”

  The tales of the tapes remained untold: Nixon and his w
ealthy supporters fought a twenty-year battle until his death in 1994 to keep them out of the hands of historians and citizens alike. It took twenty more years, up through 2014, before the last of the tapes were released and made available for the arduous task of transcription.

  The tens of thousands of recently declassified documents from his years in office, on top of the tapes, are the real history of the Nixon administration. This book’s task is to tell it as it happened, in the words of the man himself—the man who said in his second inaugural address that we must answer to history, and to our conscience, for our work.

  * * *

  Ray Price, who was with Nixon throughout his presidency and in his exile, gave an oral history interview in 2007 to Timothy Naftali, who transformed the Richard Nixon Presidential Library from a mausoleum into a living museum.

  Talking about Nixon’s burdens in the Oval Office, Price said: “You have to, in some cases, sacrifice a lot of virtue. You may not have to sacrifice virgins, but you may have to sacrifice virtue sometimes. And that’s the only way you get things done in the real world. It is a real world, and a lot of the critics tend to forget that the world is real.… And people forget he actually was human. A lot of people may not believe this, but he was.”

  “We don’t expect our presidents to be human,” Naftali said.

  The two men laughed together.

  “But almost all of them have been,” Price said.

  Judgments

  President Richard M. Nixon: Named as an unindicted coconspirator by the Watergate grand jury; unconditionally pardoned by President Ford.

  Vice President Spiro T. Agnew: Pleaded no contest to evaded taxes on bribes he took while in office; three-year sentence suspended.

  Attorney General John N. Mitchell: Convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and perjury; served nineteen months in prison.