by Nancy Gibbs
After years of Nixon’s ponderous, defensive, and sometimes leaden performances, the reporters ate it up. Over the next twenty-nine minutes, he dispensed with twenty-seven questions.
Unfortunately, ten were about Nixon and Watergate.
The most precious commodity of the United States of America is neither the gold bullion in Fort Knox nor the launch codes in its ballistic missiles. It is the time of the commander in chief: there is only so much of it, and how it is spent shapes pretty much everything else. Which is why Ford was fuming when that first press conference ended and he walked back to the West Wing with aides. “God damn it,” he said as he returned to the Oval Office, “every press conference from now on, regardless of the ground rules, will degenerate into a Q and A on ‘Am I going to pardon Mr. Nixon?’”
He had the same feeling the next day, when he reviewed the transcript of the East Room session: though Nixon was gone, Ford could see that questions about the former president could consume his own presidency indefinitely. On the one hand, the plainspoken, Midwestern Fords, their handsome, teenaged kids, and Betty Ford’s extraordinary candor had refreshed a musty and corrupted White House. Ford hosted women and blacks and labor leaders for the first time in years; after wincing over Nixon’s stilted Sunday church services in the East Room, Betty Ford banned them; Billy Graham and Lawrence Welk were out; the new first couple made news when they stayed up until 1 A.M. dancing after a state dinner to Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”
But while Nixon was gone, his shadow lingered. His fate in the courts, the continuing congressional investigations, the disposition of his secret papers—not to mention the presence of dozens of Nixon aides still on Ford’s White House staff—all conspired to divert the new president for months. “I had to get the monkey off my back,” he wrote later.
Two days after the press conference, Ford secretly ordered Phil Buchen, his White House counsel, to look into a pardon. Buchen and aides worked through the Labor Day weekend to find a legal basis for the decision, and particularly as to whether Ford could grant a pardon in advance of indictment or conviction. When Ford informed his political aides of what he was contemplating (and swore them to secrecy), they nearly mutinied. But as they implored him to reconsider or at least wait a few months, it became clear to all that Ford did not want to wait; and that he might have already made up his mind. “Is this the right time?” asked John Marsh, the man Ford called “the conscience of his administration.” Replied Ford, “Will there ever be a right time?”
And while it seemed almost unthinkable then, it is easy to see now that Ford had a problem unlike any faced by an American president in history; he was the accidental president, the man who had neither wanted the job nor been elected to it. Worse, perhaps, even though he had inherited the title, the job was not yet his. That was something, because of the peculiar way he had ascended to the top, that he still had to earn. Ford needed not only to take control of the presidency in a hurry; he needed to shove his radioactive predecessor offstage for good if he had a shot at being a success himself. He needed to make Dick Nixon go away.
Ford believed that a criminal indictment and trial would take months if not years to reach a conclusion, and either way would force Ford to play an awkward sideline role throughout. He feared that the endless spectacle of a former president on trial would undercut his ability to conduct foreign policy. And Ford worried about Nixon, whose family and friends peppered the White House with reports that the former president was acting strangely, was deeply depressed, and, some feared, might be self-destructive. All these factors pointed to one solution: a full and complete pardon, even in advance of indictment and trial. “The quicker I made the decision,” he believed, “the quicker that issue would get off the agenda.”
While a pardon carried immense political cost, some of Ford’s closest advisors worried that it might lead to something more serious than that: an investigation into possible collusion between Ford and his dishonored predecessor. Only a handful of Ford’s aides knew how close Ford had come to agreeing to a deal just a month before taking over as president in exchange for granting Nixon a pardon.
The drama had unfolded eight days before Nixon resigned, on August 1, 1974, when Nixon chief of staff Al Haig requested an urgent meeting with Ford at the White House. The two men had already met earlier that morning with one of Ford’s aides present, but in the later session—between the two men alone, at Haig’s insistence—Haig urged Ford to be ready to take over “in a short period of time.” The reason: the discovery of a new tape recording from June of 1972 that left no doubt about Nixon’s role in a criminal cover-up of the Watergate break-in.
Haig warned that Nixon wasn’t moving in a straight line toward stepping down; exactly how Nixon might leave the job was still unpredictable. And then he reviewed with Ford a number of options: Nixon could resign; he could fight an impeachment trial in the Senate; he could step aside briefly under the terms of the 25th Amendment—or simply resign later on if the game went bad, as it was likely to do. Also, said Haig, Nixon could pardon himself.
Until this point, everything about the August 1 conversation was unusual but fairly straightforward.
But it was also possible, Haig then explained, that Nixon could resign in return for a pardon.
This was a stunning dangle, a suggestion from the president’s chief of staff that Nixon might leave the presidency in exchange for a pardon to be announced or perhaps arranged later. The presidency was being bartered—and bartered for exoneration. Nixon was offering to cut a deal with Ford, his loyal old friend, the one who had almost always come to his defense in the past.
If Ford was shocked—and there is no evidence that he was—he did not show it; in fact, Ford said nothing at all. Recalling this story years later, Ford noted that he doubted that Nixon could be pushed out—he was too stubborn, too scarred, and too much of a survivor to respond well to threats. “That’s where Nixon’s peculiar personality came into play,” he noted. “He was not one to quit. If someone went to him and said, ‘You must resign tomorrow,’ that would inevitably tilt his decision to stay and fight it through.”
But Haig wasn’t proposing to push Nixon out; on the contrary, one of the options Haig had tabled was to buy him out, to trade the presidency for a Get Out of Jail Free Card. (In his memoirs, Haig called the suggestion that he was offering an exchange “witless.” He said the list of options had come from White House counsel Fred Buzhardt and the last option had been “typed on a separate sheet of paper; I don’t know why.”)
In any event, Ford told Haig he’d have to think it over, talk to his wife, and thanked the general for coming by. Over the next twenty-four hours, Ford reviewed the Haig conversation with his aides and advisors. To a man, they all believed that Haig had been offering a deal and, given Ford’s equivocal response, he was now duty-bound to call Haig back and, with witnesses listening in, crush the idea in its infancy. Ford did so late the next day, repeating over the telephone words he had written out by hand to prevent any misunderstanding. “I want you to understand that I have no intention of recommending what the President should do about resigning or not resigning and that nothing we have talked about yesterday afternoon should be given any consideration in whatever decision the President may wish to make.”
On at least one point, Haig was dead-on: Nixon zigzagged his way to resignation in the days that followed, leaning toward it one minute and then away from it the next. Around 5 P.M. on August 7, Nixon met a delegation of top Republicans from Congress—Arizona’s Barry Goldwater and John Rhodes and Pennsylvania’s Hugh Scott—who arrived to let Nixon know that his support on Capitol Hill was evaporating. “Mr. President,” said Goldwater, “this isn’t pleasant, but you want to know the situation and it isn’t good.” Goldwater said that Nixon might be able to beat some of the provisions of an impeachment resolution on the Senate floor but even the crusty Arizonan was thinking of voting for the article that charged abuse of presidential power. “I don’
t have many alternatives, do I?” Nixon said. At this moment, as he stared up at the ceiling, he searched for the brethren who might understand.
“Never mind, there will be no tears from me,” Nixon said. “I haven’t cried since Eisenhower died. My family has been fine and I’m going to be all right. I just want to thank you for coming up to tell me.”
As the three men prepared to leave, Nixon was truly all alone. “Now that old Harry Truman is gone,” he told his visitors, “I won’t have anybody to pal around with.”
“If I Can, I Must”
Given the stakes of Ford’s encounter with Haig, it became imperative that Ford close the deal on a pardon for Nixon with something more than just the former president’s okay; some of Ford’s aides pressed their boss to extract from Nixon a genuine confession of guilt. In his legal research, Buchen had discovered a sixty-year-old court case that held that a presidential pardon carried a clear implication of guilt whether it was acknowledged by the person or not. But that was not good enough for Ford’s aides. Buchen told Ford that he wanted to elicit from Nixon some explicit statement of regret or contrition as part of the pardon arrangement anyway (as well as winning access to Nixon’s presidential papers).
While Ford agreed such a statement from Nixon would be acceptable, he didn’t really think it was necessary. Ford didn’t want negotiations to hold up the pardon; he wanted to move fast. Ford and Buchen, who had been law partners in Grand Rapids, decided to dispatch Washington criminal lawyer Benton Becker, who knew Nixon’s personal lawyer, Jack Miller, well, to California. His mission: work out the exchange of presidential papers, win from Nixon an agreement to accept the pardon—and see about a statement of contrition. “Be very firm out there,” Ford said to Becker as he left the Oval Office, “and tell me what you see.”
What Ford had no way of knowing was that Haig, who had stayed behind in Washington to serve as Ford’s interim chief of staff, was keeping some of Nixon’s aides at San Clemente apprised of the new president’s thinking. Which meant that as Becker was flying out to the West Coast on an Air Force plane (with Nixon’s personal lawyer on board), Nixon and his aides had every advantage in the bargain: they already knew from Haig that they didn’t have to give the White House much, if anything, in exchange for what looked like a certain reprieve. And so, when Becker arrived, the Nixon team pretended as an opening gambit that it was in no mood to settle. As Nixon’s former press secretary Ron Ziegler told Becker, “Let’s get one thing straight immediately. President Nixon is not issuing any statement whatsoever regarding Watergate, whether Jerry Ford pardons him or not.” (Haig later denied playing any role in the pardon or speaking to Nixon about it.)
Nixon was playing hardball right to the end. Becker and Ziegler haggled over the wording of a Nixon statement the next day but made little progress. If Ziegler was helped by Haig’s intelligence, Becker was severely constrained by time; Ford wanted to move on the pardon within twenty-four hours. The best Becker could wring from Nixon’s aides carried only a whisper of contrition: “No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency.” Becker then called on Nixon personally, as Ford had asked him to do. That encounter bordered on the bizarre; Nixon presented Becker with a set of presidential cuff links and insisted on talking about the opening of the pro football season. Becker then flew home. The subject of saying sorry did not come up.
“I had to get rid of him!” Ford later told an aide. “I couldn’t get the work done. Everybody was trying to crucify the guy and I finally said to people, ‘Enough is enough. Pardon him.’ And Phil Buchen said, ‘On what basis?’ And I said, ‘I don’t care. Get him out of here. I can’t do this job until people stop. Enough.’”
On Sunday, September 8, Ford attended church across the street from the White House and then returned to the Oval Office to speak to the nation. Though Ford was never considered a great speaker or even a very good one, his remarks that day rank among the more eloquent statements about the loneliness of the presidency. “I have sought and searched my own conscience with special diligence to determine the right thing for me to do with respect to my predecessor in this place, Richard Nixon and his loyal wife and family. . . .
“Theirs is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”
Ford explained that while he believed that no man was above the law, the nation needed to put Nixon and Watergate behind them. “I dare not depend upon my personal sympathy as a longtime friend of the former president, nor my professional judgment as a lawyer, and I do not. As President, my primary concern must always be the greatest good of all the people of the United States whose servant I am. As a man, my first consideration is to be true to my own convictions and my own conscience. . . . My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it. I do believe that the buck stops here, that I cannot rely upon public opinion polls to tell me what is right.”
It was a dramatic, all-in, bet-the-farm decision. He was, as he had said in his private conversations earlier that week, counting on the goodwill of the American people.
And then, still on camera, he signed the pardon proclamation.
Ten minutes after Ford spoke, a conference call organized for news organizations was convened by Nixon’s aides in San Clemente. Nixon’s final statement was then read by an aide. It wasn’t what Buchen had hoped for, but it would have to do. “I know many fair minded people believe that my motivations and actions in the Watergate affair were intentionally self serving and illegal,” Nixon said. “I now understand how my own mistakes and misjudgments have contributed to that belief and seem to support it. This burden is the heaviest one of all to bear. That the way I tried to deal with Watergate was the wrong way is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.”
It was inevitable that a blanket reprieve by one club member for another would generate suspicion, but the reaction was blistering; on Capitol Hill, liberals demanded a full rendering of any secret deal Nixon may have made to arrange for a pardon before he departed. Democrats who knew nothing of Haig’s furtive conversations knew enough about Nixon and his methods to fully believe that the whole resignation-and-pardon sequence had been cooked up by Nixon months before—and that Ford had been in on it.
Now the same committees that had been investigating Nixon a few months before began firing long lists of questions at Ford’s lawyers: What did he know and when did he know it? What arrangements were made between Ford and Nixon before the resignation? Attempts by Ford’s team to deflect those questions only made matters worse and as September turned into October, Ford was beginning to look like just another stonewalling Republican president. The man who wanted nothing more than to be Speaker of the House knew how to put a quick end to the unfolding mess. “You know,” Ford told aides, “I’ll bet you the best thing for me to do is just go up to Capitol Hill, testify and spell it all out.”
And so it came to pass that a sitting president would testify to Congress about his relationship with a former president.
On October 17, Ford appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in the same hearing room he had testified in a year earlier when he was nominated to be vice president. Noting that his presence had “no firm precedent in the whole history of Presidential relations with the Congress,” Ford added, “Yet, I am not here to make history, but to report on it.”
Ford walked the lawmakers through the August 2 conversations with Haig once more—and his decision a month later to set Nixon free from prosecutors forever. “The purpose [of the pardon] was to change our national focus. I wanted to do all I could to shift our attentions from the pursuit of a fallen President to the pursuit of the urgent needs of a rising nation . . . we would needlessly be diverted from meeting those challenges if we as a
people were to remain sharply divided over whether to indict, bring to trial and punish a former President, who already is condemned to suffer long and deeply in the shame and disgrace brought upon the office he held. Surely, we are not a revengeful people.”
Ford dismissed the notion—advanced most aggressively by New York congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman—that he had bartered his way into the Oval Office. “There was no deal, period, under no circumstances,” Ford said. But the hearing turned on a different fear: that by pardoning Nixon, Ford had missed a chance to extract some measure of contrition from the former president—a chance that would never again present itself. To that claim, Ford made a counterargument. Courts have held, he insisted, that a pardon carries with it an implicit confession of wrongdoing. Ford was suggesting that merely by accepting his pardon, Nixon had confessed. “The acceptance of a pardon, according to the legal authorities—and we have checked them out very carefully—does indicate that by the acceptance, the person who has accepted it does, in effect, admit guilt.”
It was a lawyer’s argument, one that papered over Ford’s failure to get something more explicitly apologetic out of Nixon in September. He remained sensitive until the end about not forcing Nixon to pay a bigger price in exchange for it, for not exacting from his old friend some admission of guilt. “It could have been better,” Ford told Bob Woodward in one of their post-presidential conversations years later. But as Woodward pressed him further, Ford pulled out his wallet and removed from one of its inner pockets what Woodward described as “a folded, dog-eared piece of paper.” It turned out that the Yale Law School graduate had been carrying around a portion of Burdick v. United States, a 1915 Supreme Court case about a newspaper editor who was pardoned by Woodrow Wilson for refusing to testify in a grand jury proceeding. Ford’s personal lawyer had discovered the case and the former president had carried a piece of the decision all those years with him like a prayer card. Woodward read from the paper: “The Justices found that a pardon ‘carries an imputation of guilt, acceptance, a confession of it.’”