RN

by Richard Nixon

  There were even denials that any precedents existed. For example, the Washington Post reported that Kennedy and Johnson had generally felt that wiretapping was too damaging to employ. After a press conference in which I responded to questions about the history of government-authorized break-ins, Johnson’s Attorneys General Nicholas Katzen-bach and Ramsey Clark said that they did not know about such things. And Sam Ervin used the nationally televised forum of the Watergate hearings to pontificate erroneously that J. Edgar Hoover would not have authorized any break-ins. Thus were the conventional pieties kept intact and my explanation of my actions undermined.

  In the face of the sanctimony that greeted my May 22 statement, I decided that I wanted all the wiretaps of previous administrations revealed. It was Robert Kennedy who had authorized the first wiretaps on Martin Luther King. Ultimately King was subjected to five different phone taps and fifteen microphone bugs in his hotel rooms. The Kennedys had tapped newsmen. They had tapped a number of people instrumental in the passage of a sugar import bill they considered important. I wanted to get out the particulars of Lyndon Johnson’s political use of the FBI. He had had thirty FBI employees at the 1964 Democratic convention monitoring events and overseeing wiretaps on Martin Luther King. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—a group that threatened to pose a political problem for him—was tapped, and the reports were relayed directly to the White House. His Press Secretary asked for name checks on Goldwater supporters. His Attorney General had authorized a tap on an author who had written a book about Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy. Hoover’s aide, William Sullivan, wrote, “To my memory the two administrations which used the FBI most for political purposes were Mr. Roosevelt’s and Mr. Johnson’s. Complete and willing cooperation was given to both.” I wanted everything out on the Democrats. My staff resisted me, and for several weeks we debated back and forth about it. I felt like a fighter with one hand tied behind his back: most of my advisers argued that if I revealed the activities of previous administrations, it would look as if I were trying to divert attention from myself by smearing others. If I did not, however, I was afraid that I would remain portrayed as a willful deviant from past practice and be condemned for my legal and legitimate uses of the same tactics my predecessors had used not only more extensively but for blatantly political purposes. In the end, I was persuaded against it, and we did nothing.

  If the public reaction to the May 22 statement was negative, the reaction in the White House briefing room was almost violent. Len Garment helped Ziegler with the briefing, and the reporters interrupted them constantly, shouting and jeering.

  By the summer the White House and my campaign organization were under investigation by the FBI, the Ervin Committee and four other congressional committees, the General Accounting Office, one House committee, grand juries in Los Angeles, New York, Florida, and Texas, and the Miami District Attorney’s office. More than a dozen civil suits had been filed. Now we also had a Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, whose sole responsibility was the investigation of Watergate.

  The Ervin Committee had a staff of 92; the Special Prosecutor’s office had a staff of 80. We had fewer than 10 people: Fred Buzhardt and Len Garment, who bore the full-time burden; Charles Alan Wright, a distinguished constitutional scholar from the University of Texas Law School who helped on a part-time basis; and young lawyers to assist them. Compared with the forces ranged against us, we were like a high school team heading into the Super Bowl.

  At the end of May it was clear that Dean’s effort to gain immunity from the federal prosecutors had failed. All that was left for him was to push harder for Senate immunity in the hopes that his testimony before the Ervin Committee would renew pressure in his favor that might make the Justice Department reconsider its decision.

  On Sunday morning, June 3, there were front-page headlines in the New York Times and the Washington Post: Dean Said to Tell of 40 Meetings with Nixon in 1973 and Dean Alleges Nixon Knew of Cover-up Plan. I quickly scanned the Post’s story. It began: “Former presidential counsel John W. Dean III has told Senate investigators and federal prosecutors that he discussed aspects of the Watergate cover-up with President Nixon or in Mr. Nixon’s presence on at least thirty-five occasions between January and April of this year, according to reliable sources.” The story in the Times similarly reported that Dean had said that I had met with him alone and in small groups more than forty times between January and April, and that in these meetings I had shown “great interest” in making sure things were “taken care of.”

  I read on in the Post and felt a sudden sense of dread as I came to another part of the story. “One of the strongest charges,” according to the Post, was Dean’s assertion that in March 1973, shortly before the Watergate burglars had been sentenced, I had met with him and asked him how much the defendants would have to be paid to ensure their continued silence. Dean was said to have told me that the additional cost would be about $1 million, and I was said to have replied that there would be no problem in paying that much money. Dean claimed that after January I had begun calling him personally to “find out the status of the cover-up,” and on March 21 he had told me that “to save the presidency” it would be necessary for Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean himself to disclose fully their involvement in the Watergate affair. He charged that after that meeting I had met with Haldeman and Ehrlichman and then told Dean that I would not tolerate any division in the White House ranks and warned him that he would stand alone if he went to the prosecutors.

  I felt discouraged, drained, and pressured. I asked Haig whether I shouldn’t resign. His answer was a robust no, and he urged me to steel myself to taking whatever time and effort would be required to listen to the tapes of the Dean meetings and to construct an unassailable defense based on them. I agreed to see what we could do in this regard, and Haig said that he would make the necessary arrangements.

  A check of my daily logs showed that I had met with Dean twenty-one times and made or received thirteen phone calls from him between February 27 and April 1973. Except for the March 21 conversation I had little or no recollection of any of the rest of them. As I sat looking at this list, an uneasy feeling came over me as I wondered what we might have talked about in all those conversations.

  Monday, June 4, was the first time I listened to a tape. Steve Bull brought a tape machine to my EOB office and cued the first one for me. I put on the earphones and pressed the “play” button. The reel began unwinding. Sounds drifted in and out; voices overrode each other. Gradually, as my ears became accustomed, I could pick up more and more. I listened to conversation after conversation with Dean in February and March, all before March 21. At the end of the day I was both exhausted and relieved.

  I knew that there would be problems, but I was sure that they could all be explained. I had said that I first learned about the cover-up on March 21, and the tapes showed that in the conversations prior to March 21, Dean and I had talked about Watergate, the Ervin Committee, executive privilege, and political retaliation against the Democrats strictly as political problems. Dean had told me that no one in the White House was involved in the Watergate break-in.

  He had reassured me that from the White House point of view, Watergate and Segretti were not nearly so bad as they had been made to appear in the press. He had agreed with me that he himself had had nothing to do with campaign activities. And he had certainly not disclosed his own role in the cover-up to me before our meeting on March 21.

  I called in Haig and Ziegler to tell them the good news: I felt the tapes proved Dean was lying. For just a moment after I had read all the newspaper stories, I was worried that maybe Dean and I had talked about a cover-up. But now that I had reviewed the tapes, I told Ziegler I felt enormously relieved. “Really, the goddamn record is not bad, is it?” I remarked almost cheerily.

  The day that John Dean was scheduled to begin his testimony before the Watergate Committee, June 18, was also the day that Leonid Brezhnev was to arrive in Washington to be
gin the second U.S.-Soviet Summit. At the last minute Ervin—“with some degree of reluctance,” as he himself said— postponed Dean’s appearance for a week, until after the summit.

  SUMMIT II

  By early spring of 1973, the Soviets appeared to be moving full speed in pursuit of détente. Brezhnev, according to press and intelligence reports, had conducted a quiet purge of the Politburo, apparently in order to remove anti-détente recalcitrants. In February he wrote me a letter outlining his expectations for the summit, saying that he looked forward to the signing of a treaty on the nonuse of nuclear weapons; to useful discussions of the Middle East; to the completion of a further SALT agreement; to the signing of trade and economic agreements and agreements to cooperate in the areas of science, technology, health, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy; to discussion of relations between the two Germanys; and to talks concerning European security and mutual and balanced force reductions in Europe. Considerable progress had already been made in building on the agreements for cooperation in economic and other non-military areas we had reached in Moscow in 1972. The prospects for a successful summit appeared good.

  But problems were beginning to develop at home, even apart from Watergate. In the year between the first and second Soviet Summits, a fusion of forces from opposite ends of the political spectrum had resulted in a curious coalition. Kissinger later described it as a rare convergence, like an eclipse of the sun. On the one side the liberals and the American Zionists had decided that now was the time to challenge the Soviet Union’s highly restrictive emigration policies, particularly with respect to Soviet Jews. On the other side were the conservatives, who had traditionally opposed détente because it challenged their ideological opposition to contacts with Communist countries. My request in April 1973 for congressional authority to grant most-favored-nation trade status to the Soviet Union became the rallying point for both groups: the liberals wanted MFN legislation to be conditioned on eased emigration policies; the conservatives wanted MFN defeated on the principle that détente was bad by definition.

  I have never had any illusions about the brutally repressive nature of Soviet society. But I knew that the more public pressure we placed on the Soviet leaders, the more intransigent they would become. I also knew that it was utterly unrealistic to think that a fundamental change in the Soviet system could be brought about because we refused to extend MFN status.

  I felt that we could accomplish a great deal more on the Jewish emigration issue when we were talking with the Soviets than when we were not. As I said to one group of American Jewish leaders, “The walls of the Kremlin are very thick. If you are inside, there is a chance that they will listen to you; if you are outside you are not even going to be heard.” That was the approach we adopted. Although we did not publicly challenge the Soviet contention that these questions involved Soviet internal affairs, both Kissinger and I raised them privately with Brezhnev, Gromyko, and Dobrynin. This approach brought results. In March 1973 Dobrynin informed Kissinger that the high exit tax, which the Soviets described as the repayment of state educational expenses by those who wanted to move abroad, had been removed and only a nominal fee was now being required of émigrés from the Soviet Union to Israel. He said that a similar approach would be maintained in the future. Brezhnev sent me a personal note claiming that 95.5 percent of the requests for emigration visas to Israel during 1972 had been granted. Whether or not this claim was exaggerated, the statistics are proof of undeniable success: from 1968 to 1971 only 15,000 Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate. In 1972 alone, however, the number jumped to 31,400. In 1973, the last full year of my presidency, nearly 35,000 were permitted to leave; this figure is still the record high.

  On December 11, 1973, the House of Representatives passed a trade bill that in effect prohibited MFN for the Soviet Union because of its restrictive emigration policies. I met with Dobrynin on December 26 and expressed my profound contempt for the alliance that had combined to defeat MFN, but I said that we must not let temporary setbacks, no matter how discouraging, interfere with or poison the relations between the two superpowers that still held the future of the world in their hands. In the end, the congressional action unfortunately but predictably had an effect that was exactly the opposite of what was intended: the number of Jews allowed to emigrate declined from 35,000 in 1973 to 13,200 in 1975.

  Brezhnev’s plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base on the afternoon of June 16. Because we had decided not to begin the summit officially until Monday, I had gone to Florida for the weekend. I called him from Key Biscayne shortly after he arrived at Camp David, where he would spend two days resting and adjusting to the time difference between Washington and Moscow. I had never heard him sound so friendly and completely uninhibited as he did on the phone that afternoon. I said that I wanted to welcome him to the United States. Even before Dobrynin, who was on an extension line to act as our interpreter, could begin the translations, Brezhnev said “thank you” three or four times in English.

  I told him to get as much rest as he could because I knew from experience that it would take some time to recover from jet lag. He said that he appreciated my thoughtfulness in providing a place as private and comfortable as Camp David, and that he regretted that his wife had not been able to take the trip with him. I said that Pat and I would look forward to having her come with him during the Fourth Soviet Summit, which would take place in America in two years. At least as far as atmosphere was concerned, Summit II was off to the best possible start.

  The Soviets were fully aware of Watergate, but they made little effort to conceal the fact that they could not completely understand it. Dobrynin told Kissinger that he was utterly dismayed by the way Americans were acting over the whole affair. He called it a “mess” and said that no other country would permit itself the luxury of tearing itself to pieces in public.

  Dean’s testimony before the Ervin Committee had been postponed until after Brezhnev’s departure, but the drumbeat of Watergate leaks and accusations from him and his nameless associates, and from various anonymous Ervin Committee sources, continued. On the morning Brezhnev arrived, the Washington Post published a front-page report revealing that “sources” said I was going to abandon Ehrlichman and Haldeman in a last-ditch effort to save myself. The story was absolute fiction, but perhaps more than many others, it contributed to the impression that the Nixon White House was a viciously cynical place where I would turn on my closest aides to save myself. Our denial of this front-page fabrication was relegated to page five of the next day’s edition. Archibald Cox also chose the day of Brezhnev’s arrival to hold a press conference, at which, in reply to reporters’ questions, he stated that he was studying whether or not he could indict me before an impeachment had taken place. Having said this, he hastened to add that, of course, such a study was only academic.

  Just before eleven o’clock on Monday morning Brezhnev’s car came up the curving driveway to the South Portico of the White House. In my welcoming speech I said, “The hopes of the world rest with us at this time in the meetings that we will have.” His response was warm: “I and my comrades, who have come with me, are prepared to work hard to ensure that the talks we will have with you . . . justify the hopes of our peoples and serve the interests of a peaceful future for all mankind.”

  After the brief speeches we walked out onto the rain-soaked lawn to review the honor guard. As we came to the end of the front line of troops and were about to walk by the rear ranks, Brezhnev could no longer suppress his animation and joviality. He waved enthusiastically at the spectators, who were applauding and waving American and Soviet flags, and then strode over to them just like an American politician working the crowd at a county fair. He shook hands with several people and grinned broadly as they reached out to him until I reminded him that we had to complete the ceremony. As we walked back to the South Portico, he threw his arm around my shoulders and said, “See, we’re already making progress!”

  Our first meeting in the Oval
Office was private, except for Viktor Sukhodrev, who, as in 1972, acted as translator. Brezhnev began by assuring me that he spoke for the entire Politburo. I replied that, despite domestic differences, I spoke for the majority of Americans. He nodded his head vigorously.

  We reviewed our general schedule and agenda for the next few days. As we talked he became more animated. Several times he grabbed my arm and squeezed it to emphasize the point he was making. I couldn’t help thinking that the last time such tactile diplomacy had been used in that room was when Lyndon Johnson wanted to make a point.

  Brezhnev became very serious when explaining his views about the relationship between our two countries. He said, “We know that as far as power and influence are concerned, the only two nations in the world that really matter are the Soviet Union and the United States. Anything that we decide between us, other nations in the world will have to follow our lead, even though they may disagree with it.” It was clear, although he did not mention China, that he wanted this summit to demonstrate that the U.S.-Soviet relationship was more important than the U.S.-Chinese relationship, and that if we had to choose between the two our ties to the Soviet Union would prevail.

  I replied that, while I recognized the reality of our pre-eminence as the two nuclear superpowers, we both had allies. “They are all proud people,” I said, “and we must never act in such a way that appears to ignore their interests.”

  At 12:30 our private session ended, and the other participants for both sides came in. Brezhnev quoted the Russian proverb that he would invoke several times during the visit. “We say,” he remarked to me, “ ‘Life is always the best teacher.’ Life has led us to the conclusion that we must build a new relationship between our countries.” Then he turned to the others in the room and announced that he had already invited me to return to Russia in 1974 and that I had accepted the invitation.