The Fall of Richard Nixon

by Tom Brokaw

  During that fall the White House press rarely saw the president in public appearances, and when we did he often seemed distracted, and with good reason. The attacks and fresh questions about his Watergate role were unrelenting.

  George Meany, the powerful head of the AFL-CIO when organized labor was still a muscular force in American politics, went after Nixon with blunt verbal force. He accused the president of creating a “dark shadow of shame over the spirit of America,” adding, “Never in history has a great nation been governed so corruptly.” The AFL-CIO convention called for Nixon to resign or the members would demand his impeachment.

  Nixon’s deputy director of communications was a burly former Washington Post reporter who liked to convey a tough-guy posture. Ken Clawson made it clear that he thought that as the new guy I was easy pickings, “just another pretty-face TV reporter from California.” But when he asked if I wanted to interview Pat Buchanan as a White House responder to George Meany, I thought, “Why not?”

  The president had a speech scheduled to explain his position on Judge Sirica’s demands for the Watergate recordings, so a response to Meany was relevant. It was to be the first Nixon speech since the White House had promised that it would no longer recruit in advance friendly voices to call the White House switchboard at a speech’s conclusion to rave about its effectiveness.

  I had a good relationship with Buchanan. He was an ideological warrior but with an Irish sense of humor and a built-in encyclopedia of American political lore. As head of the White House speechwriting team and a longtime Nixon aide, he was often called on as responder to criticism of the president.

  When the Buchanan interview was over, Clawson sent me to a spare office with a phone and a desk bare except for a staff memo face up. It outlined in detail how organizations supportive of the president would call in right after the speech to rave about it. The fix was in, despite the earlier promises not to stuff the ballot box, so to speak.

  I immediately thought, “Clawson is trying to set me up. He wants me to take the bait so he can claim it’s not true.” After memorizing the memo and returning to the NBC cubbyhole in the White House press room, I telephoned one of the organizations on the list.

  “Hey, it’s the White House. You guys all set with the call-in after the president’s speech tonight?”

  “Yessir, we have the phone bank all set up.”

  “Good deal.” Click.

  My next call was to the Nightly News producer in New York. I said, “I think I have something more newsworthy than Buchanan’s response to Meany.” When the story hit the air that night, Clawson was livid.

  Turns out the memo had not been a baited trap. It had just been carelessly discarded in an empty office.

  * * *

  —

  My relationship with Buchanan remained intact, however, and a few months later he was my guest at what then was a big deal in Washington, the annual Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner. The broadcast industry staged a black-tie affair that was entertaining but appropriate compared to the now well-known and overbaked White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is carried live on cable television and features celebrity guests, including one year Kim Kardashian, a choice that mystifies me still.

  During the week of the Radio and TV dinner, Pat chose to level another of his flamethrower assaults on the networks for their news coverage of Watergate. As we approached the NBC cocktail party hosted by Julian Goodman, the president of NBC, I suggested to Pat that he wait outside while I cleared the way. Julian, an affable Kentuckian wise in the ways of Washington as a former NBC News bureau chief in the capital, greeted me warmly until I mentioned that Pat was my guest

  “I heard you brought that SOB,” he said, his face reddening.

  Retreating, I told Pat, “We’d better find another place to have a drink.”

  He laughed and agreed.

  The night was a success, if for no other reason than the table at which I was seated. It included the elegant and widely respected Senator Phil Hart of Michigan, a Democrat who had admirers and friends in both parties. From across the table he was smiling at me.

  “Mr. Brokaw,” he said, “how old are you?”

  “I’m thirty-four, Senator,” I replied.

  He smiled again and shook his head slightly, saying, “That’s just great.”

  Senator Hart died of cancer less than three years later, the day after Christmas, at the age of sixty-four. Hart was known in both parties as the conscience of the Senate for his unassailable integrity and deep commitment to the great social issue of the day, civil rights. He was accorded the singular honor of having a new Senate office building named for him in his dying days.

  That night when we had a brief exchange across a banquet table, I did not know he had been a lieutenant colonel in World War II who’d earned a Purple Heart for wounds received while leading troops ashore in Normandy on D-Day. Shipped home to recover from his injuries, he was placed in a hospital ward with two strangers, Army infantrymen who had been grievously wounded in the hard-fought Italian campaign: Bob Dole of Kansas and Danny Inouye of Hawaii. Dole remembers that they spent a lot of nights during their convalescence talking about their futures. They decided public service would be a definitive calling in their civilian lives. Hart, Dole, and Inouye later had a reunion when all three were elected to the U.S. Senate from their respective states, Hart and Inouye as Democrats and Dole as a Republican.

  War and the lessons learned brought together Hart, this man of privilege from Michigan; Dole, a small-town kid from Kansas; and Inouye, a Japanese American from Hawaii. As Inouye left for the war, he heard his father say, “This has been a good country for our family. Never dishonor your country. Never dishonor your family. And if you must die in battle, die in honor.”

  That night in Washington was twenty-five years away from their recounting of their stories in The Greatest Generation, but to this day I treasure the memory of Senator Hart.

  Whenever I go to the Hart Senate Office Building, I hear him saying, “That’s just great.”

  Months before Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (center) was fired in the Saturday Night Massacre, he had been chosen by Attorney General Elliot Richardson (right) to lead the investigation.

  POLITICAL AND LEGAL PRESSURE on the White House continued to escalate. Judge Sirica and the Democrats in Congress pressed the president for the Watergate tapes. He continued to resist, claiming executive privilege.

  As the feud between the president and special prosecutor Archibald Cox was heating up, Rod and Carla Hills, friends from California, called. They would be in Washington and wanted to have dinner. The Hills were partners in a prestigious Los Angeles law firm headed by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s alter ego. At a time when women were mostly second-class citizens in blue-ribbon law partnerships, Carla, a Stanford and Yale Law honors graduate, was widely regarded as a star in the high-profile and ultracompetitive California legal culture. Her husband, Rod, another Stanford grad, had clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court and was equally admired for his legal and political skills.

  We met for dinner in Georgetown and Carla confided that Attorney General Richardson had offered her a prestigious post as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. But would it make sense to give up their golden life and prosperous practice in Southern California to join the Nixon administration? They were well aware of the growing tensions between the Justice Department and the White House, although Richardson had assured them that Carla would be walled off from that political dispute.

  What did I think? I encouraged her to accept, saying that now more than ever the country needed qualified people in the important roles, offering to call senior Washington hands to get their reactions. The survey was unanimous: we needed the likes of Carla for the good of the country. So Rod and Carla found a home in the District, put down a deposit, and retu
rned to California to wrap up their professional and personal business before making their big move to Washington and an exciting new job for Carla.

  Meanwhile, the tensions between the Oval Office and special prosecutor Cox grew greater every day. Pat Buchanan made no secret of his thoughts: Cox should be fired.

  As Pat later wrote in Nixon’s White House Wars, “I sent Nixon a 1,500-word ‘Administratively Confidential’ memo…urging him to destroy the tapes, fire Cox, and launch a counteroffensive to save his now-imperiled presidency.” Buchanan said that “the bonfire of the tapes ‘should be announced, not in advance, but as a fait accompli.’ ” He saw Cox and his “Army…like a loose cannon lurching around the deck of a wooden ship.” Mixing his metaphors, Buchanan urged the president “to kill the viper in its crib.”

  Nixon called in his chief of staff, Al Haig, and chief legal counsel, Fred Buzhardt, who disagreed with Pat. They saw his recommendation as the destruction of evidence. The Buchanan memo was written in July 1973. Three months later, the tapes had become so toxic and the president so resistant to demands for them that the stage was set for a monumental showdown with Attorney General Richardson and special counsel Archibald Cox.

  Elliot Richardson, with his elite Boston background, was never a natural in the Nixon circle, wanting to be loyal but increasingly concerned about the president’s intentions. Richardson had brought to Washington his fellow Harvard alum Archibald Cox, who, with his tweed suits, bow tie, and crew cut, was the epitome of a New England establishment lawyer-professor.

  In mid-October, Richardson made a clandestine trip to the White House, where Al Haig, by now the president’s chief strategist, proposed a compromise: Nixon would listen to the tapes and arrange for transcripts for Judge Sirica, cutting out Cox. That was a nonstarter for Richardson. He reminded Haig and White House counsel Fred Buzhardt that, during his confirmation hearings, he had promised the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would remove a special prosecutor only for “extraordinary improprieties.” Richardson left the White House angry.

  A short while later, Haig called with a new proposal: the president had agreed to a plan to have Mississippi senator John C. Stennis listen to the tapes and sign off on their transcripts. Stennis was hard of hearing and a staunch conservative, but for some reason Richardson didn’t immediately object. However, his staff back at Justice convinced him that he was being set up.

  Richardson took the plan to Cox, who had reservations but agreed to the plan if the tapes involved were the ones that had been subpoenaed by a grand jury, as requested by the special prosecutor. Cox also wanted Richardson and the White House to understand that he reserved the right to ask for other evidence. When Richardson took that proposal back to the White House, he was blocked in no uncertain terms by Haig and the legal team. If it came to firing Cox, they argued, the public would understand that the president had a right to defend the presidency against inappropriate demands. As we now know from retrospectives on that critical time, Richardson went home and began to outline why he felt obliged to resign.

  None of this was known to the White House press at the time, but the next morning I called a source in the White House congressional relations office. He had been briefed on the machinations of the day before and cheerily told me that Richardson had been at the White House and a compromise had been worked out.

  Really?

  When was this?

  Last night or this morning. He wasn’t sure.

  Good God, this was a major development.

  It was early, so I was one of the few reporters already at work. I strolled up to Ziegler’s office, where he was drinking coffee out of the White House china cup he always insisted on. I said, “So Richardson was here yesterday and not happy but turned around? How did that happen, Ron?”

  The china cup rattled as he hurried it back onto the saucer and said, “Come on. We’re going to see Haig.”

  In Haig’s office Ziegler said simply, “Brokaw knows about Richardson’s visit and that he was unhappy.”

  It was my first one-on-one with Haig. He came around the desk and said, “Oh, it’s all been worked out. We talked this morning. Elliot likes a drink, you know”—Haig mimicked someone hoisting a glass—“and he told me this morning he’s feeling better. We can work something out. Not to worry.”

  When I pressed for the new arrangement, he said something to the effect of “Not yet. We’ll let you know.”

  Since it was our first personal meeting, he asked how I was getting along in my new assignment.

  “Well, General, it’s like learning to ski in an avalanche.”

  That drew a chuckle from Haig, who, after all, was skiing in an avalanche all day, every day.

  Haig was confident Richardson was now open to the Stennis option.

  Wrong.

  As we know now, Cox would not accept the constraints on his mandate and made that clear to Richardson, who understood. It was a Friday night, the eve of one of the most dramatic Saturdays in White House history. The tempo leading to a historic showdown was speeding up.

  * * *

  —

  Saturday morning I was leaving Washington for my weekly commute to New York and the weekend NBC Nightly News as Archibald Cox was preparing to give his side of the story in an appearance at the National Press Club. Weekends were often thin on important news, but this weekend promised to be different. Cox, with his salt-and-pepper crew cut, still the special prosecutor, was all charm and tweedy manners.

  “I’m certainly not out to get the president of the United States,” he said in an Ivy League classroom tone at the Press Club. “I am even worried…that I’m getting too big for my britches,” he added—a touch of self-deprecation from this New England model of establishment pedigree.

  But he made clear that he knew that his brief compelled him “to stick by what I thought was right.”

  The president was not amused. He wanted Cox fired. When Elliot Richardson had gone to the White House late Saturday afternoon, we later learned, Nixon had told Haig, “If Elliot feels he has to go with his Harvard boy, then that’s it.”

  Richardson informed the president that he was resigning because he would not fire Cox.

  Nixon responded, “Let it be on your head,” pointing out that this decision came as the Soviets were looking for division in America while the Middle East war was still under way.

  Pat Buchanan said, “Nixon didn’t want Brezhnev, the Soviet leader at the time, to think Cox could push him around, so he decided to fire Cox.”

  Richardson, who had been a decorated combat medic during the Normandy invasion in World War II, was not intimidated. He told the president, “I can only say that I believe my resignation is in the public interest.”

  As we know, Nixon reached the number two man at Justice, William Ruckelshaus, and gave the same order—fire Cox—and got the same response. Ruckelshaus refused and resigned.

  Next up was Robert Bork, a conservative former Yale Law professor who was solicitor general. Bork said later that he disagreed with the president’s decision but concluded that Nixon did have the authority, so he wrote Cox a letter, dismissing him.

  I’m not sure who first used the phrase “Saturday Night Massacre,” but it stuck.

  In New York Dan Rather, who anchored the Saturday CBS Evening News, and I led our broadcasts with the news of the president’s actions, then raced to LaGuardia to get the last shuttle to Washington. As we boarded we saw the sage of CBS News, Eric Sevareid, sitting in an aisle seat with other passengers crowding around, asking what was going on. Eric said he really couldn’t talk about it and then came back to Dan and me and asked, “What the hell happened?” He was returning from a speaking engagement in New England and didn’t have a clue. But by suggesting to other passengers that the story was too big to share, he preserved his reputation as an oracle.

  In Washington t
he scene at the Justice Department was cinematic. Stanley Pottinger, the assistant attorney general for Civil Rights, told me recently that no one knew quite what to expect. He said two FBI agents appeared to secure the offices. They surveyed the scene of white-collar workers looking on and decided on a low-key approach. They kept their weapons visible but holstered as they went to Richardson’s office. The now ex–attorney general greeted them cordially and invited them in.

  Arriving in Washington, I went directly to the White House lawn for an 11:30 P.M. special report anchored by John Chancellor, who opened by saying, “The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history.”

  Later Pat Buchanan, history buff and press monitor, wrote that in fact the Confederacy breaking away from the Union was much more consequential.

  Fred Emery, a British journalist with an English ear for the tabloid punch, went further, saying, “The whiff of the Gestapo was in the clear October air.” In Washington a birthday-party tennis tournament for humor columnist Art Buchwald ended in a clatter of abandoned rackets as journalists raced to reporting assignments.

  Press Secretary Ron Ziegler was cool and confident, saying the president had made a defensible decision in firing special prosecutor Cox, who had ignored direct orders from the commander in chief. That was not what we were hearing from Republicans as well as Democrats on Capitol Hill and across the country. It was a firestorm of condemnation of Nixon’s action.

  At midnight, when we wrapped up, Ziegler stood at the diplomatic entrance, waiting for a White House car to take him home. He was smoking a pipe and waved good night convivially before being driven off. I distinctly remember thinking, “Does he really believe this firing of Cox is a victory for the president?” That thought would keep coming back to me in the coming months.