The Fall of Richard Nixon

by Tom Brokaw

  As the staff frantically yells, “Cut the cameras! No more pictures,” the president tilts the cake so Timahoe can have a long, slurping taste.

  Finally the cameras are shut off, but the embarrassing moment has been caught on tape.

  The cake fiasco was a fitting harbinger of what was to come in the new year.

  * * *

  —

  After a few days Meredith joined me in Orange County and got a close-up look at the life of a network correspondent even when the news was thin. The daily effort to get material on Nightly News was a frenetic exercise in cars, motorcycles, and helicopters.

  This was well before the digital age, so I would race to a nearby helicopter launchpad by two o’clock California time to catch a thirty-minute flight to NBC in Burbank; there I’d write and edit that night’s story for NBC Nightly News, anchored by John Chancellor, and maybe leave something behind for the next morning’s Today show. Then back on the chopper for the return to San Clemente.

  With so little meaningful news out of the White House, dinner plans were always a high priority. Meredith and I had a long-standing favorite: Matteo’s, a popular Italian restaurant connected to its glittering cousin of the same name in West Los Angeles. That the original Matteo’s was owned by a Hoboken boyhood friend of Frank Sinatra’s made it a regular watering hole for big-name Hollywood stars.

  When we had first arrived in Los Angeles, friends suggested meeting at Matteo’s on Westwood after a football game. There, Willie, the bartender, wondered where we were from. When we said South Dakota, his eyes widened and he asked Matty, the owner, “Do we fly over South Dakota when we come from Hoboken?” Then he commented on Meredith’s youthful beauty and asked a rugged guy with his back turned if he agreed.

  It was Lee Marvin, and he endorsed Willie’s assessment.

  It was the beginning of a familial relationship with Matty and the Hoboken crowd. We felt like favorite offspring.

  When the Orange County Matteo’s opened, we were seated in a booth next to a familiar figure who had been driven up from San Clemente: Henry Kissinger. He was with a striking White House staffer not yet well known but destined for her own fame: Diane Sawyer.

  For his part, the president remained holed up in La Casa Pacifica except for the occasional solitary walk along the Pacific. As one of my colleagues put it, “The president left D.C. but brought his cloud with him.”

  Protesters in Spokane, Washington, using a turn of phrase that Watergate introduced to the country.

  Nixon’s 1974 State of the Union address was the only one to feature Gerald Ford in the vice president’s seat.

  AT THE END OF HIS CALIFORNIA STAY, the president went back to the fleet of Air Force One, with the usual backup staff carriers, military escorts, and the attendant bells and whistles for the commander in chief. He returned to Washington with his new lawyer and plans for taking on Watergate in his State of the Union address. But first his new vice president, Gerald Ford, landed on the network news and on front pages with an appearance on Meet the Press.

  I asked Mr. Ford if he agreed with the president’s decision not to release presidential documents to the Senate Watergate Committee, which was still investigating White House behavior connected to the burglaries. The vice president initially agreed, saying the request for five hundred documents was a scattergun approach.

  But wouldn’t the current environment be better served by a compromise agreement? Mr. Ford called the request a “fishing expedition” and then went off message, saying, “I hope and trust that as we go down the road perhaps there can be some compromise.”

  As I pressed on, the vice president again strayed from the White House line, saying that if there were some refinements in the Senate Committee’s request for documents, there might in fact be room for compromise. You could almost hear the White House expletives from Pennsylvania Avenue all the way to the outer fringes of the District.

  The next day the White House indicated that the vice president had been speaking “on his own” and that nothing had changed since the president’s refusal to hand over the subpoenaed tape documents.

  Meanwhile, the president kept preparing for the State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress and a vast television audience.

  Personal images from the night of that address—January 30, 1974—remain. As a pool reporter, I joined the dramatic caravan of the presidential limousine, Secret Service vehicles, and motorcycle escorts racing through the dark from the White House to Capitol Hill. We traveled at high speed along Pennsylvania Avenue, where just the year before the president had paraded in the triumphant glory of his reelection. Now the country faced an uncertain future as the president arrived to make his case again as chief executive beyond the reach of Congress.

  Inside the Capitol Building, an air of courtesy mixed with curiosity about what the president would say.

  He opened with the standard good news, bad news assessment: “We meet here tonight at a time of great challenges and great opportunities for America.” He expressed hope that America’s longest war—Vietnam—would be followed by America’s longest peace. That received a rousing reception. He then introduced “a personal word with regard to”—and here his tone took on a dismissive note—“the so-called Watergate affair.”

  The president challenged his adversaries: “I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end.

  “One year of Watergate is enough!”

  That challenge brought a booming round of applause from the Republican side of the House chamber. It was also a preview of the president’s strategy, so familiar to his political opponents. The best defense for Nixon was always a strong offense. And we would quickly learn that he intended to use the symbolic and real power of his office at every turn. One could imagine him saying to himself late at night with his yellow legal pad in his lap as he sat in a favorite easy chair, “You are the president, goddammit—act like it.”

  * * *

  —

  The New Year was to be a stage for Nixon to deal anew with the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and domestic initiatives; his presence would be required at natural disasters and ceremonial events, where his office added to the grandeur. But that was the stage. The reality was contained in the tape recordings stored in the White House, the tapes with the president’s own voice clearly showing he was an active participant in the Watergate cover-up. Those were the separate worlds of Richard Nixon as he headed into what would be his final months in office.

  There was no more telling sign of Nixon’s depleted influence than in the “thumb” of eastern Michigan, near Gerald Ford’s congressional district, which had been safe territory for Republicans since early in the twentieth century. Despite pleas from Michigan Republicans to stay in Washington, Nixon invaded Vice President Ford’s neighborhood for a dreary day of campaigning, with sparse crowds and a funereal atmosphere. When a special election was held to fill a reliably Republican House seat in Ford’s home state, the Democratic candidate won comfortably, the first loss for Republicans in that district in forty-two years.

  The president’s attorney, James St. Clair (left), conferring with John Doar, lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee.

  FOLLOWING THE PRESIDENT’S State of the Union address, there was no indication on Capitol Hill, in the federal judiciary, or in the national news media that Watergate had a calendar end date. Too many questions remained for it to be closed down simply because a year had passed.

  Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski was a formidable adversary as he demanded White House files and transcripts of tape recordings. A federal grand jury also remained in session, and on the Hill, House Democrats were preparing for the possibility of impeachment proceedings. So the president was surrounded by investigators. Woodward and Bernstein were now joined by other journalist
s from around the world on what had become a global fascination: Would the president of the United States be brought down?

  For his part, Nixon was dealing with a tightly controlled group of advisers: Haig; the lawyer St. Clair; White House counsel Buzhardt, who we now know thought the president was guilty; Ziegler, now expanding his role as a political adviser as well as a militant defender of the president; Pat Buchanan, the commando with a speechwriter’s lance.

  On the Democratic side, a little-known New Jersey Congressman, Peter Rodino, was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and he had selected a Republican lawyer with impeccable credentials to be the lead counsel for his committee’s investigation of Watergate. John Doar was a fifty-two-year-old Wisconsin Republican who had earned a sterling reputation in the 1960s. Doar had headed the Civil Rights Division of Justice during the Kennedy administration, and he had bravely waded into violent demonstrations organized by angry white crowds, appealing for calm. He brought the same quiet courage and measured deportment to his new job as chief counsel of House Judiciary. His party registration as a Republican was a big plus.

  At the end of February, we were aware that the federal grand jury that had been hearing evidence on Watergate for twenty-one months was ready to report. Special prosecutor Jaworski met with the jurors and found a fired-up crowd. They wanted to indict Richard Nixon as well as Haldeman, Ehrlichman, former attorney general John Mitchell, Chuck Colson, and other Nixon acolytes involved in the illegal activities. Jaworski was sympathetic, but he persuaded the jury that there was a better way to hold the president accountable: impeachment. They withheld news of the most explosive codicil in their verdict: Richard Nixon was an unindicted co-conspirator. It leaked out a couple of months later, and I can still see Helen Thomas parading through the White House press room, waving the press account and saying over and over again, “Nixon is an unindicted co-conspirator.”

  The president would not stand trial in a federal courtroom, but with impeachment proceedings advancing, his role as judged by a citizen jury was clear. It was difficult for even the most faithful followers of the president to dismiss that reality.

  Once a month I’d slip out of the White House and head to Capitol Hill to measure the attitudes of two senators who were in leadership positions but were not firebrands: Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the canny senior Democratic senator, and Robert Griffin of Michigan, the number two Republican in the Senate.

  When the grand jury’s “unindicted co-conspirator” judgment was released, Senator Griffin’s implacable expression and extra-cautious comments changed. He acknowledged that it was a serious blow but, ever circumspect, reminded me that the assessment had come from a District of Columbia grand jury. Nonetheless, he deliberately chose not to defend the president to me. That was a shift.

  In Griffin’s outer office, visitors could pick up a copy of Mrs. Griffin’s cookbook featuring recipes made with Michigan apples. In Senator Byrd’s office, the public pamphlets for visiting West Virginia constituents were instructions on the most efficient way to castrate a hog.

  Byrd sat at a table covered with those instructions and gave me a lesson in the most efficient way to deal with a reporter. Always a man of the people and a senator with a reputation for deal making, Byrd would invariably open our conversations by asking, “What are they up to now down at the White House?” I’d remind him that I was there to plumb his thinking on how Democrats were planning to go forward.

  Impeachment was a House of Representatives responsibility, but the Democratic Party beyond the House had skin in this game. Up until the grand jury report, Byrd had been very cautious; now he acknowledged that the grand jury’s co-conspirator verdict made it easier for Democrats in both chambers to move forward more aggressively.

  On the way out of his office, I grabbed one of the hog castration pamphlets because, well, you never know.

  Dan Rather asking Nixon a question at the National Association of Broadcasters. My question was the last one of the night—and the last question of any press conference President Nixon would hold.

  WHEN MARCH 1974 ARRIVED, the pace of the Watergate developments and the case against the president accelerated. The month opened with the grand jury indictments against seven principal aides to the president: John Mitchell, his former attorney general; a campaign aide, Robert Mardian; Bob Haldeman, his former chief of staff; former domestic affairs chief John Ehrlichman; Charles Colson, former White House counsel; Kenneth Parkinson, attorney for the 1972 reelection committee; and Gordan Strachan, a former aide to Haldeman. It was this grand jury report that also included Richard Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator.

  That same month Robert Redford’s film company paid $450,000 for the film rights to Woodward and Bernstein’s yet-to-be-published All the President’s Men. It would have been a bargain at twice the price, given the film’s subsequent financial and cultural success.

  George Shultz, the highly regarded GOP establishment figure, a former World War II Marine and a professor of economics, quietly resigned as secretary of the treasury.

  As for the president, he continued what had become his road tour in an effort to demonstrate that he was doing business as usual, even with the threat of impeachment growing more likely every week. He was to address the National Association of Broadcasters in Houston, Texas, in mid-March and take questions from a mix of local broadcast journalists and some of us from the White House press corps.

  For some time I had been harboring a question about the limits of executive privilege. Specifically, I wanted to know if executive privilege applied in impeachment proceedings—an ever more important question as the prospects of an impeachment trial seemed more likely. My research assistant had canvassed prominent constitutional scholars, and the consensus was that executive privilege was not applicable in impeachment trials. Given the president’s assertion that executive privilege was viable even in impeachment cases, I understood that we were on new ground. However, before I could ask my question, the moderator called Dan Rather to the microphone.

  Houston was Dan’s hometown, and when he introduced himself—“Dan Rather of CBS News”—he drew a hearty round of applause, with some boos in the mix. The president responded in a way that was interpreted as hostile by some and just a little edgy by others.

  “Are you running for something, Mr. Rather?”

  Dan shot back, “No sir, Mr. President. Are you?”

  There was a short collective inhalation by the audience and then a mix of laughter and boos.

  After a preamble, this was Dan’s question: “How can the House meet its constitutional responsibilities while you, the person under investigation, are allowed to limit their access to potential evidence?”

  The president responded that the special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, had indicated that he had all he needed on the Watergate story. Dan followed up with a repeat of his initial question: If the House of Representatives has the constitutional authority to investigate, how can the president limit that authority? Nixon said, essentially, that if the House would adhere to its limits as spelled out in the Constitution, then he would as well.

  It was the perfect setup for my question.

  “Mr. President, Tom Brokaw of NBC News, following on my colleague Dan Rather’s question.

  “You have referred here again tonight, as you have in the past, about what you call the precedents of past presidents in withholding White House material from the House Judiciary Committee.

  “But other presidents protecting the confidentiality of their conversations were not the subject of impeachment investigations, Mr. President, and in fact many of them wrote that the House Judiciary Committee…had the right to demand White House materials in the course of the impeachment investigations. And history shows that Andrew Johnson gave up everything that the Congress asked him for when he was the subject of an impeachment investigation.

 
“So, Mr. President, my question is this: Aren’t your statements historically inaccurate or at least misleading?”

  The president conceded that the description of Andrew Johnson was correct, but he quickly reverted to his position that the principle of presidential confidentiality still stands, even in cases of impeachment. I knew from our research and from conversations with legal scholars, such as Alexander Bickel, a conservative professor at Yale Law School, that impeachment proceedings were exempt from claims of executive privilege.

  The next day Ron Ziegler upbraided me for challenging the president’s interpretation, suggesting that it was the chief executive’s prerogative to interpret the law, not mine.

  At dinner later that night in Houston, most of the buzz was about the Nixon-Rather confrontation. Should Dan have resisted the exchange? Adam Clymer, the acerbic correspondent for the Baltimore Sun and later for The New York Times, volunteered, “Very funny, Mr. President. Why don’t you tell us: Were you responsible for the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Watergate tape.”

  We all gave Adam high fives, but then he came clean.

  “Of course,” he said, “it took me two hours to think of that, and I wasn’t on television.”

  Self-deprecation is a virtue rarely exhibited in the White House press corps.

  Nixon at Notre-Dame for the memorial service for President Georges Pompidou of France.

  DESPITE NIXON’S CLAIM that one year of Watergate was enough, the grand jury, which had declared him an “unindicted co-conspirator,” sent to the House Judiciary Committee its report that the president was an active participant in the cover-up. The Judiciary legal team, in turn, took the report to Judge Sirica, the U.S. district judge who presided over the Watergate cases, for a two-hour review. So we had two scenarios operating simultaneously: the president adopting publicly, again, a “What, me worry?” attitude and the House Judiciary Committee pressing ahead, collecting material that would justify impeachment proceedings. We now know, thanks to the post-resignation reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, that the president’s legal and senior political team was struggling to find a plausible exit for the president from his trail of incriminating behavior.