RN

by Richard Nixon

  When the schedule was completed, chest X-rays were taken, which confirmed Tkach’s diagnosis: I had viral pneumonia. That evening I was driven to Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  I was determined to show that even in the hospital I was able to carry out my duties as President. As I received inhalation therapy and underwent tests and X-rays, I continued to take calls and to see Ziegler and Haig. I phoned Kissinger and reviewed the plans for Phase IV of our economic policy with Shultz. The worst thing about the pneumonia was the inability to sleep because the discomfort was so great. During the nights I lay awake counting the minutes. I ended up staying on the phone until late at night, checking on the day’s events.

  By Sunday, July 15, my temperature had dropped below 100 degrees. For the first time since I entered the hospital I was able to eat a full meal. I had even slept two full hours on Saturday night.

  Early Monday morning Haig called to tell me that Haldeman’s former aide Alex Butterfield had revealed the existence of the White House taping system to the Ervin Committee staff and that it would become public knowledge later that day.

  I was shocked by this news. As impossible as it must seem now, I had believed that the existence of the White House taping system would never be revealed. I thought that at least executive privilege would have been raised by any staff member before verifying its existence.

  The impact of the revelation of our taping system was stunning. The headline in the New York Daily News was Nixon Bugged Own Offices.

  Fred Buzhardt sent a letter to Ervin confirming that the system described by Butterfield did exist and pointing out that it was similar to the one that had been employed by the previous administration. Buzhardt’s letter provoked swift reactions laced with righteous indignation. LBJ Aides Disavow System was the Washington Post’s headline. Johnson’s former domestic aide, Joseph Califano, said, “I think this is an outrageous smear on a dead President.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said that it was “inconceivable” that John Kennedy would have approved such a taping system. Kennedy’s former aide, Dave Powers, then curator of the Kennedy Library, denied that there were tapes. But Army Signal Corps technicians who had installed the Johnson taping system gave Fred Buzhardt sworn affidavits about the placement of the machines and microphones, and within a few days the archivist at the Johnson Library in Austin confirmed the existence of the LBJ tapes. Then, the next day, the Kennedy Library admitted that in fact there were 125 tapes and 68 Dictabelt recordings of different meetings and phone conversations.

  Haig and I spent several hours in my hospital room talking about what the revelation of the existence of the tapes would mean. I reflected ironically that just a few months before, on April 10, after I had met with two of the POWs, I had told Haldeman to get rid of all the tapes except those dealing with important national security events. I had made a diary note about it afterward.

  Diary

  I had meetings with Stockdale and Flynn today. They were just as moving as the meetings I had had earlier with Risner and with Denton. I hope that we have tapes of these conversations.

  As a matter of fact, I had a good talk with Haldeman about the tapes—decided that we would go back over the period of time that they have been taken and destroy them except for the national security periods in Cambodia, May 8, and probably December 18, having in mind the fact that otherwise either he or I would be the only ones that could listen to the tapes and decide what could be used—and that would take us just months and months of time.

  But this discussion had taken place in the midst of our concerns about Watergate, and three weeks later he was no longer there to do it.

  In the hospital I raised the idea of whether we should not destroy the tapes now. Haig said he would have a talk with the lawyers about it. In the meantime we agreed that the taping system itself must be removed.

  Over the next three days, while the doctors anxiously tried to keep my meetings to a minimum, I discussed the situation with Haig, Ziegler, Buzhardt, and Garment. Legally the tapes would not actually be evidence until they were subpoenaed. But since we knew that the Ervin Committee or the Special Prosecutor would subpoena them momentarily, it would be a highly controversial move to destroy them. Nonetheless, Buzhardt felt that the tapes were my personal property and he favored destroying them. Garment considered the tapes to be evidence, and while he did not favor releasing them, he made it clear that he would strongly oppose any move to destroy them. Haig made the telling point that, apart from the legal problems it might create, destruction of the tapes would forever seal an impression of guilt in the public mind. When Ted Agnew came to the hospital to visit, he told me I should destroy them.

  We contacted Haldeman to find out what he thought I should do. His advice was to claim executive privilege and not surrender an inch of principle to the witch-hunting of Ervin and his committee staff. Haldeman said that the tapes were still our best defense, and he recommended that they not be destroyed.

  When I had entered the hospital on July 12, I had been looking forward to fighting our way out of the slump into which Dean’s testimony had sent us. But by the time I prepared to leave the hospital on July 20, the revelation of the tapes had changed everything. In the early morning hours of July 19 I had made a note on my bedside pad:

  We must go forward on the business of government for three years. It’s the only way we can get by this ordeal. We mustn’t let this continuing investigation get to us as the revelation of the existence of the tapes did to Garment and some of the members of the staff. We must be strong and competent. We must go ahead.

  Should have destroyed the tapes after April 30, 1973.

  It was a beautiful summer day when I returned to the White House from the hospital. Most of the staff had come out to the Rose Garden to greet me, and as I walked up the steps to the Oval Office I turned around and spoke to them. That brief speech remains my favorite of all the statements I made during this difficult period:

  I feel that we have so little time in the positions that all of us hold and so much to do. With all that we have to do and so little time to do it, at the end of the next three and a half years to look back and think that, but for that day, something went undone that might have been done that would have made a difference in whether we have peace in the world or a better life here at home, that would be the greatest frustration of all.

  I turned to the predictable comments the staff would be hearing that, because of my illness and the rough assaults being directed toward me, I should consider either slowing down or resigning. I gave my answer to that idea in one of my father’s favorite words: “poppycock.” I talked about all the things we could accomplish—prosperity without war, controlling crime, drugs, providing opportunity. Then I said:

  There are these and other great causes that we were elected overwhelmingly to carry forward in November. And what we were elected to do we are going to do, and let others wallow in Watergate, we are going to do our job.

  If I had indeed been the knowing Watergate conspirator that I was charged as being, I would have recognized in 1973 that the tapes contained conversations that would be fatally damaging. I would have seen that if I were to survive, they would have to be destroyed.

  Many factors bore on my decision not to destroy the tapes. When I listened to them for the first time on June 4, 1973, I recognized that they were a mixed bag as far as I was concerned. There was politically embarrassing talk on them, and they contained many ambiguities, but I recognized that they indisputably disproved Dean’s basic charge that I had conspired with him in an obstruction of justice over an eight-month period. I had not listened to the March 21 tape, but Haldeman had, and while I knew it would be difficult to explain in the critical and hostile atmosphere that now existed, he had told me that it could be explained, and I wanted to believe that he was right.

  I was also persuaded by Haig’s reasoning that destruction of the tapes would create an indelible impression of guilt, and I simply did not believe that the revelation of anythi
ng I had actually done would be as bad as that impression. On Saturday, July 21, I made a note outlining this rationale: “If I had discussed illegal action, I would not have taped. If I had discussed illegal action and had taped I would have destroyed the tapes once the investigation began.”

  Finally I decided that the tapes were my best insurance against the unforeseeable future. I was prepared to believe that others, even people close to me, would turn against me just as Dean had done, and in that case the tapes would give me at least some protection.

  Once I had decided not to destroy the tapes, I had to decide whether to release them to the Ervin Committee and the Special Prosecutor or to invoke executive privilege. When President Andrew Jackson had been presented with a congressional request for a White House staff document that had been read at a Cabinet meeting, he had said, “As well might I be required to detail to the Senate the free and private conversations I have held with those officers on any subject relating to their duties and my own.” Jackson had thought that this example was a ludicrous extreme but that extreme turned out to be the most moderate position espoused by the Special Prosecutor and the Ervin Committee.

  I know that most people think that executive privilege was just a cloak that I drew around me to protect myself from the disclosure of my wrongdoing. But the fact that I wanted to protect myself did not alter the fact that I believed deeply and strongly in the principle and was convinced then—as I am now—that it stands at the very heart of a strong presidency. Even though the application of the principle to this case was flawed by the nature and extent of my personal interest and involvement, I did not want to be the first President in history who acquiesced in a diminution of the principle.

  There were other, less abstract reasons for not turning over the tapes. I sensed what Agnew and Buzhardt were sure of: the very existence of the tapes was a tantalizing lure for the political opposition. As far as the Democrats were concerned, fighting the battle to get the tapes could be as politically rewarding as winning it. But if even one tape was yielded, it would only heighten the desire for two more. In his eloquent argument before the court of appeals, our constitutional specialist Charles Alan Wright likened the pressure for the tapes to a “hydraulic force”:

  Once there is a hole below the waterline of a ship, no matter how small, the tremendous hydraulic pressure of the sea quickly broadens the gash in the ship and the ship is in danger.

  And it will be that way, too, if the hydraulic pressures of Watergate are thought to permit to tolerate even a very limited infraction of the confidentiality that every President since George Washington has enjoyed.

  Shortly after I had heard about Butterfield’s disclosure I had written on my bedside notepad: “Tapes—once start, no stopping.”

  And, finally, I simply was not sure what was on the tapes. If I had been confident that they were without ambiguity and would show me speaking like the romantic ideal of a President pursuing justice undeterred, I suppose that I might have found some way to overcome my inhibitions about releasing them. But they did not—at least the few that I had heard did not—and I could only fear what might be on the others that I had not heard and could not remember. Therefore, I decided to invoke executive privilege to prevent disclosure of the tapes. On Monday, July 23, I sent Senator Ervin a letter informing him that I would not supply any tapes for his committee’s investigation.

  As soon as Ervin received my letter he convened his committee, which voted unanimously to subpoena five of the taped conversations and a mass of documents relating directly or indirectly to the “activities, participation, responsibilities, or involvement” of some twenty-five individuals in “any alleged criminal acts related to the presidential election of 1972.” Cox moved to subpoena nine conversations.

  I now believe that from the time of the disclosure of the existence of the tapes and my decision not to destroy them, my presidency had little chance of surviving to the end of its term. Unfortunately my instinct was not so clear or sure at the time, and I did not see that while destroying the tapes might have looked like an admission of guilt, invoking executive privilege to keep them from being made public appeared hardly less so. In the end my refusal damaged the very principle I thought I was protecting. I was the first President to test the principle of executive privilege in the Supreme Court, and by testing it on such weak ground—where my own personal vulnerability would inevitably be perceived as having affected my judgment—I probably ensured the defeat of my cause. Once the public got the impression that I was trying to hide something, the attempts by Ervin and Cox to get the tapes gained increasing public support.

  And quite apart from what was on the tapes, the very fact of their existence and the struggle being fought over their possession were about to do what I had been fearing most from the start: they were about to paralyze the presidency.

  After hearing Dean’s testimony, the Ervin Committee had recessed for a week. When its hearings resumed in July, the media coverage had tapered off considerably, so the witnesses who appeared in rebuttal to Dean did not have nearly so much impact. Only Dean had received complete live television coverage from all three networks on all five days of his testimony. An unnamed television news executive summed up the situation in an article in the Los Angeles Times when he said that the networks looked on these hearings as theatre, and as long as they were lively and controversial they would be broadcast. No one was particularly concerned about fairness. As the executive put it, “A man on defense can never match a man on the attack in terms of audience response.”

  The committee finally began to lose steam. It continued to hear witnesses, but it no longer provided the entertainment television viewers had come to expect; it had simply become overexposed.

  Its public death blow was dealt by Pat Buchanan. Appearing as a witness, he responded to the senators with sharp, combative, commonsense answers and documented illustrations of the fact that it was the Democrats who had set the precedents for dirty tricks in American politics. Ervin was visibly shaken and reportedly angry that his staff had exposed him to such embarrassment.

  Before long, most of the committee members were looking for a way to close down the hearings. Finally they came up with a face-saving justification: they sanctimoniously announced that they were concerned about prejudicing the rights of defendants.

  On August 7, after 37 days of hearings totaling more than 325 hours of network time, the Watergate part of the Ervin Committee’s hearings ended. More than 20 percent of that television time had gone to John Dean. When Ervin’s gavel banged this section of the investigation to a close, there had been an average of 22 hours of television news shows, specials, and daytime programming on Watergate for every week since the hearings began.

  On August 15 I made my second speech to the nation about Watergate. I talked about what I called “the overriding question of what we as a nation can learn from this experience and what we should now do.” I said: “The time has come to turn Watergate over to the courts, where the questions of guilt or innocence belong. The time has come for the rest of us to get on with the urgent business of our nation.”

  I repeated what I called “the simple truth”: that I had had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in; that I neither took part in nor knew about the subsequent cover-up activities; and that I had neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics. I said that far from trying to hide the facts, “my effort throughout has been to discover the facts—and to lay those facts before the appropriate law enforcement authorities so that justice could be done and the guilty dealt with.”

  This speech, with its call to turn Watergate over to the courts, hit a responsive chord. The numbers of telegrams and phone calls to the White House immediately after it was over were the biggest since the days of my Vietnam speeches. People were tired of Watergate.

  It was my belief then, and it is still my belief today, that the Democratic majority in Congress used the Watergate s
candal as an excuse for indulging in a purposeful policy of ignoring and actually overriding the landslide mandate that my programs and philosophy had received in the 1972 election. Unfortunately, by the way I handled Watergate, I helped them do it.

  TRYING TO REGROUP

  Three months of Watergate torpor had slowed Congress’s work on domestic and foreign affairs to a near halt. My anger at this situation came through in my toast at the state dinner for Prime Minister Tanaka of Japan in July:

  It is so easy these days to think in other terms, to think in the minuscule political terms that I think tempt us all from time to time and tempt those who represent the people in both countries—make a small point here, work in the murky field of political partisanship—but what really matters is this: after our short time on this great world stage is completed and we leave, what do we leave?

  Do we leave the memory only of the battles we fought, of the opponents we did in, of the viciousness that we created, or do we leave possibly not only the dream but the reality of a new world, a world in which millions of the wonderful young children . . . may grow up in peace and in friendship. . . .

  And so, let others spend their time dealing with the murky, small, unimportant, vicious little things. We have spent our time and will spend our time in building a better world.

  I was determined not to give up on my election mandate, and in the fall of 1973 I decided to send a second State of the Union message to remind Congress and the American people of the important and unfinished domestic agenda that had gone unattended during the Watergate spring and summer. The September 10 message was launched at a press conference on September 5, during which I reviewed the major categories of national concern: inflation, national defense, and energy.

  We had succeeded in holding down spending in 1973 and, despite Watergate, had managed to sustain all my vetoes of budget-busting spending bills. But Congress was now threatening to pass increases that would exceed the budget by at least $6 billion. I therefore called for an effort to keep spending within the budget in order to cut inflation and keep prices down.