by Tom Brokaw
As for Nixon, any excuse to get out of town and be the president was welcome. In early April he found an ideal opportunity.
The president of France, Georges Pompidou, who had a rare blood cancer, died at the age of sixty-two. Pompidou was originally an acolyte of Charles de Gaulle’s but had established his own distinctive legacy as prime minister by improving relations with the United States while strengthening the French economy. He served a record six years as prime minister before becoming president, and so his funeral was a grand affair.
As the pool reporter for the White House press—lucky me—I had a close-up view of the proceedings, including Nixon’s determination to make the most of any public opportunities. Although it was a time of mourning in France, Nixon immediately took to the streets of Paris, working the friendly crowds around the majestic American embassy as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
One enthusiastic bystander shouted out, “Mr. President! I’m from Ohio. I’m an American!” The president looked at the man with an expression of pure delight, responding in his awkward way, “You’re an American? So am I!” It was not a joke. It was one more example of Nixon’s earnest but baffling attempt to make small talk.
The American embassy was soon awash with long limousines as Nixon set up shop for meetings with the leaders of Italy, West Germany, Great Britain, Denmark, Japan, and the Soviet Union. The French were not happy with this American trying to hang on to his job by exploiting their mourning for his own purposes.
At Notre-Dame Cathedral, the roped-off area for the press offered only a limited view of the state funeral proceedings. Providentially, a friendly young priest who spoke English motioned for me to follow him to a worn wooden door behind the majestic altar area. It opened to a steep staircase weathered by time. Nan Robertson of The New York Times and I hiked straight up into the upper reaches of the cathedral, expecting to meet Quasimodo at every turn.
Finally, we reached another worn door and opened it to find ourselves on a narrow balcony at the highest reaches of the twelfth-century cathedral. It provided a sweeping view of the altar, the pews filled with presidents and kings, queens and grandes dames, military strongmen and families with wealth beyond the hopes of small republics from what was then called the Third World. The shah of Iran stood in the front pew alongside Haile Selassie, the diminutive emperor of Ethiopia. And there on the left side of the first pew was Richard Nixon, the president of the United States, making full use of the title that had brought him to this moment of grandeur and mourning for a distinguished statesman.
What could he have been thinking about his own farewell, or even about what awaited him once the Paris weekend was over?
The president would spend the night in Paris, and then a presidential limousine would take him to Air Force One, and that distinctive 707 would head back across the Atlantic to the reality of Watergate, which was growing more contentious with every passing day.
While he was away, his faithful appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, another of the Southern California troupe, was found guilty of two counts of lying to the Watergate grand jury. The pace toward impeachment was quickening, but Nixon was already planning more trips that would allow him to be president and not an unindicted co-conspirator.
William Cohen, then a freshman member of Congress from Maine, proved himself to be a maverick early on.
WHILE NIXON WAS WORKING HARD during his Paris stay to demonstrate that his power as America’s commander in chief was undiminished, there was a different reality in Washington.
One of those awaiting the president’s return was a freshman Republican congressman from Maine, William Cohen, the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother; he was my age during the summer that would change his life. He arrived in the capital with a law degree, an interest in poetry, a reputation back home as a high school basketball star, and a history of success in local politics. Another freshman representative on the House Judiciary Committee was a fiery Democrat, Liz Holtzman of New York, but Cohen attracted more attention because he didn’t fit the conventional GOP model. He quickly drew notice as an independent voice.
We met as a result of a mutual friendship with Pete Dawkins, the West Point Heisman Trophy winner, Rhodes scholar, and Vietnam veteran. Bill had already achieved a measure of notoriety during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Gerald Ford’s ascension to the vice presidency.
Ford had been the GOP leader in the House, so the questions from his former colleagues were collegial. When Cohen’s turn came, he referred to recent stories that the White House had attempted to recruit a federal judge to head the FBI while the judge was presiding over the trial of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Ford dismissed the concerns by saying simply that it was bad judgment and then drew laughter from his fellow Republicans by remarking that the FBI job would be a demotion.
Cohen, the new kid on that side of the aisle, was not amused. The next day he emphasized the gravity of the attempt to compromise the judge who was presiding in the Ellsberg trial, a trial of great importance. The freshman GOP congressman told the next vice president of the United States that this blatant interference in the Ellsberg trial was a gross violation of due process. Cohen wound up his time by praising Ford’s past record on the rule of law and, in an adroit turn, said he was confident that the incoming vice president would uphold the highest standards.
His Republican elders on the House Judiciary Committee were not pleased. The rookie had taken on the party member who could very well become the next president. Cohen was immediately labeled a maverick in his party, a brash upstart. Past contributors to his campaign wrote and called his office, saying in no uncertain terms, You have betrayed your party; expect no help from me. Nonetheless, when the House Judiciary Committee moved deeper into the impeachment proceedings, Cohen continued to defy his party’s expectations and voted with Chairman Peter Rodino on key questions about whether to proceed with impeachment.
In the end, Cohen was right and he was rewarded with recognition by Time magazine as one of America’s 200 Future Leaders. He also was named by the national Junior Chamber of Commerce as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men in America. He went on to win three terms as a U.S. senator from Maine, but because of his independence he was rarely mentioned as a standard-bearer for the GOP.
Cohen became so frustrated with the rigid partisanship that he decided to leave politics after a total of three three terms in the House and three in the Senate, but Bill Clinton intervened, nominating Cohen successfully for secretary of defense in 1997, a good fit for his broad experience in national security and international political matters.
Watergate changed a lot of lives, not many of them for the better, but Bill Cohen was an exception. While other young men his age were going off to jail, he was making his mark with his Maine independence.
The destruction from the Xenia, Ohio, tornado was devastating, and unlike anything President Nixon had ever before witnessed.
PRESIDENT NIXON IN THE SPRING OF 1974 was on the lookout for any opportunity to be an empathetic commander in chief. In early April a rash of devastating tornadoes—some of the most destructive ever—swept across the South and the Midwest, leveling everything in their paths. One bore down on Xenia, Ohio, a prosperous small city in the southwestern part of the state, founded in 1803 and later well known for a large orphanage established to care for children who had lost parents in the Civil War.
Early one morning, the phone rang in our home on Woodley Road, announcing a call from the White House: The president is going to Xenia. You’re the broadcast pool reporter.
As a child of the Great Plains, I was a tornado veteran, but Xenia was shocking. The town took a direct hit, and the twister, one of 148 that day, leveled vast swaths of residential neighborhoods, commercial districts, and public areas. Thirty-four people were killed.
When Nixon arrived, there was
none of the usual commotion accompanying a presidential visit. The extent of the damage created a kind of vacuum; there was an eerie stillness as residents and first responders picked through the damage.
The president appeared to be shocked as well, saying several times, “Just total devastation, this is the worst I have seen.” He promised immediate federal disaster relief, and then the president moved on to the town square to confer with local officeholders.
As he stood in a huddle of relief workers and city officials, a woman approached along a sidewalk across the street. She stopped and said aloud in the quiet of the moment, “Is that Nixon? Impeach him! Impeach him!” Her voice was like a fire alarm going off. A Secret Service agent moved to quiet her, but it was too late. The president didn’t turn, although his shoulders tightened, and when his aide Steve Bull directed him toward the city hall, the president rejected his help, saying, “I know where I am going!”
Two footnotes to that day: when Xenia was founded, the city fathers gave it that Greek name because it means “hospitality” and “friendship.” Xenia was also the boyhood stomping grounds of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the renowned American historian. His grandfather had emigrated there from Europe. Schlesinger was well known not only as a writer and historian but also as a close family friend of the Kennedys and a persistent critic of Nixon, the man and the politician.
President Nixon made a show of releasing edited transcripts of many Watergate tapes. America was introduced to the term “expletive deleted.”
TRY AS NIXON MIGHT to separate himself from Watergate, the scandal continued to be an unrelenting presence. As the House Judiciary Committee and special prosecutor Jaworski continued to build their case, the White House team knew it would have to make some effort to slow the momentum. The House Judiciary Committee had issued a subpoena for forty-two White House conversations and Jaworski had issued a subpoena for material related to sixty-four White House conversations.
In late April 1974, the president went on national television to announce that he would make public transcriptions from more than forty-two White House conversations related to Watergate in response to the House Judiciary subpoena. He explained that he had theretofore refused to do so because some of the transcripts contained state secrets protected by executive privilege.
In his most earnest fashion, he explained he had edited the tapes to exclude material “not relevant” to the Watergate investigation. The transcripts were in expensive binders stacked behind the president, in full view of the cameras. The visuals gave the impression that there were maybe a thousand pages in each binder, when in fact heavy editing had reduced the number of pages to a much more modest amount. The next day the show continued in full view of our cameras, as binders were loaded into the back of a White House station wagon parked in the circular driveway at the West Wing, to be driven to Capitol Hill.
The most damaging transcripts were held until late in the afternoon to make it more difficult for the press to review the contents and get the relevant parts onto the 6:30 news shows and into the next day’s newspapers.
After working late into the evening to prepare reports for the Today show, I returned home well after dinner to a plate of fried chicken Meredith had left out.
She came downstairs to find me standing in the kitchen with a transcript in one hand and a chicken leg in the other, transfixed by reading Oval Office conversations that were stunningly candid and crude. The president had said that getting a million dollars in cash for payoffs would not be easy, “but it could be done.”
The decision to release the tapes was an indication of just how delusional the president and his team had become. Leading Republicans on Capitol Hill were stunned by much of what they were reading.
In an exchange with John Dean, the president volunteered that “maybe it takes a gang to do that,” to manage the money. Mind you, these were the least damaging conversations, in the eyes of the White House. America was hereby introduced to the term “expletive deleted.”
Many years later, while I was organizing material from my White House days, the thick blue book containing the transcripts of the White House tapes turned up with a dark stain on the cover.
The last of the chicken leg.
Ron Ziegler, Bob Haldeman’s protégé as an ad man, became one of Nixon’s top advisers as chief of communications. Ziegler stayed with Nixon until the end.
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN the White House senior staff and the correspondents were not as testy as they are in the age of Trump—we’d occasionally share a drink or a tennis match—but the tension was always present. One day during the time the House Judiciary Committee was gearing up for impeachment hearings, Ron Ziegler called.
“Lemme buy you lunch,” he said in that gravelly voice, and the tone didn’t seem cordial.
We took a booth at Sans Souci, the power brokers’ hangout around the corner from the White House. He ordered a Rob Roy and veal piccata and got right to his message: “You’re a disappointment, Tom. We thought you’d come to the White House with a fresh attitude, but you’ve jumped right in with the Georgetown crowd.”
“Ron,” I said, “first, that’s an overstatement, and second, I don’t think I ordered up the impeachment proceedings which are now under way.”
We were still sparring in that tone a few minutes later when suddenly Paul, the maître d’, dropped a note on our table. Ziegler got to it before I did, read it, flipped it to me, and said, “I rest my case.” And then, to his credit, he laughed.
The note said,
Hey, kid, I guess this means you’re not coming to Hickory Hill for dinner tonight.
Love, Ethel
Ethel Kennedy was sitting at a table across the room, and although I had not been invited to dinner, she knew a great joke opportunity when she saw it. The Ethel intervention defused the tension, and Ron and I had a leisurely walk back to the White House.
President Nixon visited friendly territory at a campaign-like rally in Phoenix.
BY MAY 1974, PRESIDENT NIXON had decided that his best hope was to get out of Washington and revert to a campaign mode. Senator Barry Goldwater, who was increasingly concerned about the president’s state of mind, agreed to stage a campaign-like rally for him in Phoenix on May 3.
Goldwater, along with Arizona congressman John Rhodes, the House minority leader, and Arizona governor Jack Williams, gave the president a five-star welcome, praising him as a “great president” to an enthusiastic audience, estimated at fifteen thousand, in Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Goldwater told reporters, “I believe the American people aren’t worried about” Watergate.
A noisy crowd of anti-Nixon protestors had congregated outside the coliseum, but the evening belonged to the Nixon enthusiasts. Those of us in the White House press corps were huddled on the floor of the auditorium feeling like members of a hostage collective as Nixon supporters screamed at us, “Traitors! Liars!”
The president, warmed by the enthusiastic reception, was in full campaign mode, saying again, “I believe the time has come to put Watergate behind us and get on with the business of America!”
The president and Mrs. Nixon went from the rally to a private party at the home of Senator Goldwater, where they must have been grateful for the distance between Arizona and Washington, D.C. By all appearances, it had been a successful event, and now they would continue on to Spokane, Washington, and the opening of a world’s fair with an environmental theme.
When Fred Zimmerman and I settled into our seats on the charter flight, an eager young flight attendant came over to share her excitement about seeing the president at the next stop. Fred looked up and said in his droll manner, “He’s going to f—— it up.” Unnerved, the attendant retreated to her station in the galley.
I turned to Fred and exclaimed, “Why did you say that?” Fred answered wearily, “Hey, he got the last appear
ance right. He never gets two in a row right.”
When we arrived in Spokane, Fred invited the young woman to join us, explaining that we could get her inside the rope line. The host on the stage was Washington governor Dan Evans, a popular moderate Republican, tall, handsome, and distinguished. He was also a close friend of William Ruckelshaus, a fellow resident of Washington State who had resigned his Department of Justice position during the Saturday Night Massacre.
Nixon was plainly uncomfortable standing next to Governor Evans, who was known to be critical of him. Evans stepped up to the microphone and used an appropriate but minimal introduction for a chief executive: “It is my high honor and personal privilege to introduce the president of the United States.” No additional flourishes.
Nixon, who was on this trip to put Watergate behind us, stepped to the microphone and said, “Uh, thank you, thank you, Governor Evidence.
“I mean Evans!”
Fred turned to the flight attendant and said, “See, I told you…”
Twenty-five years later I encountered Governor Evans at a University of Washington commencement ceremony and said, “Governor, I was in Spokane—” and before I could finish he laughed and said, “Governor Evidence, right?”