During the night of July 21–22, we forced a cease-fire by threatening Turkey that we would move nuclear weapons from forward positions — especially where they might be involved in a war with Greece. It stopped Turkish military operations while Turkey was occupying only a small enclave on the island; this created conditions for new negotiations slated to start two days hence, with the Turkish minority obviously in an improved bargaining position and with some hope of achieving more equitable internal arrangements.
On July 22, the junta in Athens was overthrown and replaced by a democratic government under the distinguished conservative leader Constantine Karamanlis. Within days, the mood in America changed. The very groups that had castigated us for our reluctance to assault Greece now wanted us to go into all-out opposition to Turkey. We were being asked to turn against Turkey over a crisis started by Greece, to gear our policies to the domestic structures of the governments in Athens and Ankara regardless of the origins or merits of the dispute on Cyprus, to take a one-sided position regardless of our interest in easing the conflict between two strategic allies in the eastern Mediterranean, and to do all this in the very weeks that the United States government was on the verge of collapse. For two weeks we maintained our tightrope act, but during the weekend following Nixon’s resignation the crisis erupted again, culminating in a second Turkish invasion of the island. While Ford struggled to restore executive authority over the next months, a freewheeling Congress destroyed the equilibrium between the parties we had precariously maintained; it legislated a heavy-handed arms embargo against Turkey that destroyed all possibility of American mediation — at a cost from which we have not recovered to this day.
But even in the third week of July it was clear that we were losing control over events. Foreign policy, as I have repeatedly stated, is the mastery of nuance; it requires the ability to relate disparate elements into a pattern. That coherence was rapidly disintegrating.
Our internal disputes were no longer geared to substance; they had become a struggle for preeminence. Schlesinger and I battled over turf continually; every issue, whether it was SALT or human rights or Cyprus, became a source of tension between us. The bureaucratic struggle reduced my dominance only to create a deadlock; for it could not be resolved by a President in extremis three thousand miles away. The merit of our respective positions is now irrelevant. I made the key point to Haig on the morning of July 21: It was impossible to keep going through crises with the procedures we were now following; sooner or later something would get out of hand. The unspoken corollary was that our own constitutional crisis had to be brought to an end if the nation was to avoid catastrophe.
The End of the Road
THE climax finally announced itself. It was heralded by the United States Supreme Court. On July 24 it ruled by a vote of 8 to o that executive privilege, though a valid doctrine grounded in our constitutional history, could not prevail over the impartial administration of justice. The President must turn over to Judge John Sirica the sixty-four tapes subpoenaed for the cover-up trial of the six former White House aides. Nixon’s lawyer announced his compliance at once. But for those of us who knew Nixon’s way of talking, the ruling spelled the end; if the tapes did not prove legally fatal, they would be politically.
Yet Nixon, still in San Clemente, would not discuss Watergate during our frequent daily conversations, or at least did not refer to the substance of the issues. We went over the day’s foreign policy events in a routine fashion. Now and then he would mention one or another Congressman — usually a conservative Democrat from the South — to whom it would be useful to pay attention; the vote in the House on impeachment was expected to be that close.
I began a discreet investigation into the mechanics of impeachment. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives by a majority vote may impeach, or accuse, the President of specific charges — acting much like a grand jury in our judicial system. The Senate then sits as trial judge and jury presided over by the Chief Justice of the United States; a two-thirds vote is necessary to convict, that is, to remove the President from office.
Nixon’s fate thus resolved itself into arithmetic: whether there was a majority in the House for impeachment and whether one-third plus one could be mobilized in the Senate to oppose. Senator Jacob Javits told me that he did not expect the Senate trial to start before November; the outcome would not be certain until late January. It was a horrendous prospect. In the light of what we had just been through, a further five-month period with even weaker executive authority was unthinkable. Worse, Javits predicted that Nixon would be forced to be “in court” for the greater part of the trial.
I therefore intended to ask Nixon to institute a small group to act in his place when he was not available, with his authority and subject always to his review. The group I had in mind was Ford, Schlesinger, Simon (now Treasury Secretary), Haig, and me. I intended to suggest that the bipartisan Congressional leadership — Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield and Republican leader Hugh Scott, Speaker of the House Carl Albert and House Republican leader John Rhodes — be invited to meet with this group twice a week to be briefed on major policy issues. Such a system could at best keep matters reasonably under control although it was quite unsuited for crisis management or serious planning. Luckily, it never had to be created.
Meanwhile, foreign policy claimed its routine. And I report its manifestations here because they in fact took more of my time than the denouement of the Nixon Presidency. The day after the Supreme Court ruling, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher paid his first official visit to America. Naturally he wanted to meet the President. Genscher and I had met for the first time on June 11, the day of my Salzburg press conference. He had invited me to nearby Bad Reichen-hall on German soil to begin the process of improving German-American relations frayed by the Year of Europe and the vacillations of the end of the Brandt period. Genscher was then a novice in foreign policy, without either prior experience or independent study. Still, I was impressed by his strong, self-confident manner and perceptive questions. It was not the ideal day for a calm discussion. He did not bring up my press conference; I did not raise it. Only as I was leaving did I say that I had had to lance the boil; I did not think the new investigation I had requested would end in my resignation; if I had thought that, it would not have been worth staying in the first place. I had also briefed him in early July, as I have noted, on my way back from the Moscow summit.
Genscher turned out to be the rare phenomenon of a man who, coming to diplomacy late in life, shows an extraordinary talent for it. He understood that Germany’s exposed position permitted no complicated maneuvers. He made his impact by steadiness, good judgment, shrewdness, decency, and the ability to evoke confidence. Through my term in office and that of my successors, he became known as a leader to take with the utmost seriousness; one whose views were reassuring when supportive and a welcome warning on the few occasions we disagreed. For me, our personal friendship has been one of the rewards of my public life.
On this occasion I took him, on July 25, to San Clemente to meet Nixon. On the way west, we stopped in North Dakota to inspect a field of Minuteman missiles and the one ABM installation remaining (since closed for budgetary reasons). It was the first time I had seen either. (The principal reason for my visit was to help out Senator Milton Young of North Dakota, ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who was in a fight for reelection and had been a staunch supporter.)
There is always something abstract and esoteric in the contemplation of nuclear strategy. The visit made it more tangible and at the same time, paradoxically, more abstract. It is an awesome sight. Flying over fields of missiles capable of destroying humanity on the basis of a single decision by an individual of normal fallibility, whatever the safeguards, evokes a latent uneasiness about the human condition. Here are weapons in a state of readiness for which there is no precedent in history, yet for whose use and consequence no practical experien
ce is possible. The abstract relationship of decision-makers to the weapons on which their strategy depends is shown by the attitude toward testing them. No Min-uteman has ever been test-fired from an operational silo even without a warhead — no Secretary of Defense has wanted to run the slight risk that some malfunction might cause a burning rocket to fall on American territory; all test-firings have been from a special silo at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the Pacific coast. No more than one Minuteman at a time has ever been tested, despite the fact that our strategy depends on multiple launches in an extremity. (Of course the Soviets must have similar problems.) All this suggests the inherent fragility of fashionable theories of hair-trigger response or reliance on general nuclear war.
Moreover, the abstractness of these weapons has another dimension: Their vulnerability requires that they be kept in a state of readiness so high that it cannot be increased; hence, they are almost useless for diplomatic purposes. In a crisis one cannot raise their alert status — as, for example, with bombers — to warn that things are getting serious. In the Middle East alert of October 1973, one component of our forces whose readiness was not enhanced and that therefore curiously did not contribute to this diplomatic pressure was the backbone of America’s military power, the 1,054 intercontinental ballistic missiles in our arsenal.
No previous generation of statesmen has had to conduct policy in so unknown an environment at the border line of Armageddon. Very few top leaders (Nixon being a notable exception) have had as many hours to study the issues of nuclear strategy as the experts have had years. They risk becoming the victims of the simplifiers — mindless pacifism on the left and on the right the equally mindless insistence on treating the new technology as conventional. Will we, I wondered, forever maintain the sense of proportion that does not stake the fate of mankind on a single judgment — and the fortitude to shun the pacifist temptation that will abandon the world to the most ruthless? Genscher and I toured the facilities impressed by the professionalism and dedication of the personnel and by the technical marvel of both weapons and warning installations. But they did not relieve the unease at the fact that the survival of our civilization must be entrusted to a technology so out of scale with our experience and with our capacity to grasp its implications.
I introduced Genscher to Nixon on July 26, two days after the Supreme Court decision. I was shocked by the ravages just a week had wrought on Nixon’s appearance. His coloring was pallid. Though he seemed composed, it clearly took every ounce of his energy to conduct a serious conversation. He sat on the sofa in his office looking over the Pacific, his gaze and thought focused on some distant prospect eclipsing the issues we were bringing before him. He permitted himself no comment about his plight. He spoke rationally, mechanically, almost wistfully. What he said was intelligent enough and yet it was put forth as if it no longer mattered: an utterance rather than an argument. The night before, he had addressed the nation on television about inflation — another incongruity in the effort to maintain some semblance of normality twenty-four hours after the devastating Supreme Court decision. Genscher congratulated Nixon on his remarks; the President looked at him with grateful melancholy, more like a professor being praised for an academic paper than a chief of government about to implement a program.
After Genscher and I met the press — and he replied noncommittally to a question about a possible Presidential trip to Germany — we walked along the edge of the cliff overlooking the Pacific. “How long can this go on?” asked Genscher suddenly. It was the key question. What would happen to our allies if the Presidency remained paralyzed? Genscher wanted to know. What about the structure of peace, so banal in its rhetoric, so fateful in its reality? I made reassuring noises that there was bound to be an early resolution, that we were prepared to act decisively as we had in the October alert. It was all make-believe. The question, once having been asked, hung in the air. In a way it supplied its own answer.
That afternoon I broke an unspoken rule between Haig and myself. We had both shied away from ever mentioning the possibility of Nixon’s resignation; it had become an implicit agreement that it would not do to show doubt even to each other; it was our duty to keep the government going. But things had gone too far; a catastrophe was clearly imminent. So in his little office overlooking the Pacific, right next to the President’s, I asked Haig Genscher’s question: “How long can this go on?” Haig seemed tired. He did not know how it would end, he said. He was unfamiliar with the tapes being turned over; they were being reviewed. But, like me, he was convinced that a “smoking gun” would emerge sooner or later, if not from this batch then from some other. Nixon said too many things that he did not really mean to be able to withstand this kind of scrutiny. What did I think Haig’s duty was? I had worked with Haig long enough to be sure that he had thought deeply about it and had pretty much decided on a course of action. The question was more designed to gather intelligence than to seek guidance.
I said that since the end of Nixon’s Presidency was now inevitable, it was in the national interest that it occur as rapidly as possible. Haig and I had a special responsibility to end the agony if that was in our power and to bring about a smooth transition. And yet we were in a difficult position. An impeachment trial had to be avoided at nearly any cost. But Nixon’s fall must not occur as the result of a push by his closest associates. If at all possible, he had to resign because his own judgment of the national interest dictated it. Or else he should be brought to this realization by elected officials. We who owed our governmental positions to Nixon had a duty to sustain him in his ordeal; perhaps this would give him the strength for what must be done — after all, he had never failed at a moment of decision. We should not discuss the plight of the President with those able to affect his fate or lend ourselves to the impression that his closest aides were wavering. Our service would consist of loyalty to the President. The end — for the sake of everyone’s perception of our country — could not be the destruction of the President by his own appointees.
Haig said he agreed completely; he surely had come to the same conclusion independently. When the critical point arrived, he added, he would almost certainly know this before I did. He would then get in touch with me. He counted on me to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as we had so often in the past.
Only those who lived through the fervid atmosphere of those months can fully appreciate the debt the nation owes Al Haig. By sheer willpower, dedication, and self-discipline, he held the government together. He more than anyone succeeded in conveying the impression of a functioning White House. He saw to it that decisions emerged from predictable processes. He served his President loyally but he never forgot his duty to his country. To be sure, only a man of colossal self-confidence could have sustained such a role. His methods were sometimes rough; his insistence on formal status could be grating. But the role assigned to Haig was not one that could be filled by choirboys. He had to preserve the sinews of America for its indispensable mission of being the last resort of the free, the hope of the oppressed, and the one country that with all its turbulent vitality could be relied upon to walk the paths of mercy. It is not necessary that in an hour of crisis America’s representatives embody all of these qualities so long as they enable our country to do so.
Haig performed unique services before and after the fateful last month of the Nixon Presidency. He will never deserve better of the Republic than during that tragic and frenetic period when he sustained the President while moving him toward the resignation that Nixon dreaded, resisted, and yet knew increasingly to be inevitable. Haig kept the faith with his President and he kept it with the institutions of this country. Without him, I doubt that a catastrophe could have been avoided.
By now the juggernaut bearing down on Nixon was unstoppable. The very next day, July 27, a Saturday, the House Judiciary Committee passed its first impeachment article by a vote of 27 to 11, with six Republicans joining all the Democrats. The charge was obstruction of justice. I watched
the proceedings on television for a few minutes and I was sick about our country and about the personal horror that had befallen the President with whom I had worked for five and a half years. I could not bear the righteous moralizing of the commentators or the self-serving comments of some of the Congressmen even as I realized — and perhaps because of it — that had I been on that committee my duty would have been to vote with the majority. On July 29, the Committee approved its second article of impeachment, charging the President — by a vote of 28 to 10 — with abuse of power. That day the formation of a committee called Conservatives for the Removal of the President was announced. All the old bastions were crumbling. The Senate was getting ready for the impeachment trial by asking its Rules Committee to review relevant rules and precedents. On July 30, the House Committee voted a third article of impeachment — by a vote of 21 to 17 — charging the President with unconstitutionally defying its subpoenas. On July 31, John Ehrlichman was sentenced to twenty months to five years for conspiracy and perjury. The personal tragedies were mounting. In destroying himself, Nixon had wrecked the lives of almost all who had come into contact with him.
The President had returned to Washington on July 28. On July 31, Haig called me for an urgent appointment. It was one of the rare occasions he came to the State Department. Usually we met in his office at the White House after some interdepartmental meeting I had attended in the Situation Room. He wasted no time. The “smoking gun” had been found; one of the tapes turned over the day before to the Special Prosecutor — an Oval Office conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, 1972, less than a week after the Watergate break-in — left no doubt that Nixon was familiar with the cover-up; he may in fact have ordered it. Impeachment was now certain, conviction highly probable. We needed to coordinate our efforts. Should he inform defenders of Nixon not to go too far out on a limb? I said that the tape was bound to become public. Either the Special Prosecutor or the House Judiciary Committee was certain to leak it; the White House might consider preempting this by publishing the tape itself with whatever explanatory comment might be possible. Approaching any of Nixon’s defenders was not Haig’s job, I counseled; in the longer term it would make him the villain. Haig’s role now — and to the extent possible mine — was to ease Nixon’s decision to resign. The most important task before him — which no one else could carry out — was to give Nixon the psychological support to do the necessary.
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