RN

by Richard Nixon

  The next morning, August 7, the Wall Street Journal had the scoop: a story attributed to “knowledgeable attorneys” stated that Agnew was under investigation. Haig had told me that Agnew was wavering between fighting and resigning.

  That afternoon I met for an hour and a half with Agnew. He walked into my office with the same easy, confident stride he always had and began our conversation by declaring that he was totally innocent of the charges. He said they would not hold up in court, and that if it should ever go that far he would be proved innocent. He repeated to me his feeling that someday the prosecution team in Baltimore would be shown up for what it was.

  I told him that I had confidence in his integrity, that I believed him and would stand by him unless clear and final evidence was presented to me that forced me to think otherwise. When he said that he was planning a press conference for the next day, I urged him to consider carefully before he said anything that might haunt him later.

  I told him that one man whose fairness I could completely vouch for was Henry Petersen. I said I would arrange with Richardson for Petersen to undertake his own independent investigation of the case and to prepare his own independent recommendation.

  By August 8 the newspapers and the networks had begun reporting a series of leaks and attacks on Agnew that became so irresponsible that the New York Times and the Washington Post ended up criticizing on their editorial pages what was being done on their own news pages.

  On August 8 Agnew marched indignantly into the EOB briefing room and denounced the leaks. “I have no intention to be skewered in this fashion,” he said. “I have nothing to hide.” He denied charges that he received $1,000 a week in kickbacks, calling them “damned lies.” He was asked if he had ever had a political slush fund financed by Baltimore County contractors. “Never,” he replied. He was asked if he had ever received money for his personal use from any person or company doing business with the state of Maryland or the federal government. “Absolutely not,” he said.

  Haig and Buzhardt came in to tell me that Agnew’s press conference looked like a short-term political triumph. In view of the evidence that was bound to come out, however, they did not see how it could be anything but a long-term disaster. Buzhardt shook his head and said that he could not see how Agnew could have made such blanket denials—“never,” “absolutely not”—that simply would not hold up.

  I faced an impossible dilemma. I knew the charges against Agnew were serious and completely persuasive to responsible people. But this knowledge was private. The press leaks, and Agnew’s impassioned denials, had convinced many people that the charges were a vendetta against him. If I actively defended him, and the charges were later substantiated, I would have succeeded only in further eroding my own already dwindling credibility. If I took a neutral position, Agnew’s supporters would think I had let him down. In the end I chose the second course as the sounder approach and decided I would simply have to bear the brunt of the criticism that was to come.

  Agnew continued to fight back. On August 21 he had issued a statement charging that some Justice Department officials had decided to indict him in the press regardless of whether the evidence supported their position. Elliot Richardson went on television to deny that the leaks were coming from the Justice Department; later he had to acknowledge that his department was in fact probably responsible for some of the stories.

  The concerted press attack against Agnew caused me to reconsider my belief in the dependability of the investigation going on in Baltimore. In a press conference on August 22 I warned that any Justice Department or United States government employee who had leaked information would be dismissed immediately upon discovery.

  On September 1 Agnew came in, at his request, in order to bring me up to date on the situation. The strains were beginning to show. He told me bitterly how the prosecutors were pressing him for a wide range of personal financial data going back to 1962. He said that he was considering whether it would not be better for him to seek impeachment by the House than to have a trial in the federal court.

  From talking with Agnew I understood the manner in which he had come to think about his actions as governor. State government salaries were meager. He was sure that three-quarters of the governors in other states had done the same kind of thing, namely, accepted campaign contributions from contractors doing business with the state. As he saw it, the whole trumped-up case simply involved campaign contributions that had been used to help meet expenses legitimately incurred by him and his family in their public roles. He argued that the contractors were all well qualified and that there had been no quid pro quo involved. He heatedly denied having received money while Vice President. Once again he complained about the Baltimore prosecutors. He said they were trying to track down everything he had ever bought, and every detail of his personal life.

  I was genuinely sympathetic to Agnew, and I shared with him his painful concern about the effect this controversy would have on his family and friends. I said that I could not and would not ever judge his case; but I urged that he, as a lawyer, try to analyze it as objectively as he could. Only then would he be able to make decisions in his own best interests.

  I could see that he was no longer as sure as he had been in our first meeting that the charges against him were not provable in court; now he reflected on the fact that no court anywhere near Washington or Maryland could possibly treat him fairly.

  On the morning of September 10 Fred Buzhardt and Al Haig brought Agnew a new assessment. Buzhardt, who at my request and with Agnew’s consent was keeping me informed of developments in the case, told Agnew that Justice Department officials were convinced that he would be indicted, convicted, and sentenced to a jail term. The gravity of Haig and Buzhardt’s report must have had some effect. Within days, Agnew’s lawyer, Judah Best, had made the first tentative overtures toward negotiations with the Justice Department.

  In the midst of these negotiations I met with Agnew again. He had come a long way since that first session six weeks earlier at which he had protested his complete innocence. Now he asked what I thought he should do and talked poignantly about the problems of going away and starting a new life.

  Once again I said that this was a decision only he could make, because only he knew the facts and only he knew those who would be testifying against him. He said that he simply was not going to leave under the terms Richardson was proposing: Richardson wanted to drive him into the ground, he said, and he would fight in court before he would allow that. He would risk jail rather than grovel. After this meeting I had Haig and Buzhardt tell Richardson that he must not force the country into the nightmare of a trial by insisting on unreasonably tough terms.

  On Friday, September 21, Buzhardt reported to me that he thought there had been a breakthrough. Richardson and Best had reached agreement on language that would not commit Agnew to a “knowing” acceptance of money for preferential treatment, while still acknowledging that others would allege it. Agnew was going to think about it over the weekend, so Monday would be the day of decision. “I think it is just about over,” Buzhardt said.

  But Saturday morning brought a new set of leaks. The Washington Post carried a front-page story “from two sources” revealing that Agnew’s lawyers were bargaining on a plea. Then CBS reported that Henry Petersen had told his associates, “We’ve got the evidence. We’ve got it cold.”

  Buzhardt reported that Agnew was outraged; he was convinced that the leaks had come from the Justice Department and were part of a deliberate strategy to weaken his position in the negotiations. By Sunday he had once again decided to fight.

  On Monday morning, September 25, I met with Richardson and Petersen. Petersen went over the principal allegations and gave me his conclusion that it was an “open-and-shut case.” He said that Agnew would be found guilty and would have to serve a prison term. Richardson said that he was now ready to send the evidence to the grand jury. I asked Richardson to have the Justice Department prepare an opinion on the
question of whether it would be constitutional to indict a Vice President while he was still in office. The Constitution specifically provides that a President can be removed from office only by being impeached and convicted; only then can he be indicted in criminal proceedings and brought to trial for his offenses. Although the Vice President is not specifically mentioned in this clause of the Constitution, I argued that a case could be made that he would be in the same position.

  Agnew came in at 10:30 A.M. He told me that he had decided to go to Speaker Carl Albert and request that the House of Representatives undertake a full impeachment inquiry. He still adamantly denied having received any money while Vice President and said that the charges were just part of the effort to sink him. He told me that he would reconsider resigning only if he were granted complete immunity from prosecution. Then, for a moment, his manner changed, and in a sad and gentle voice he asked for my assurance that I would not turn my back on him if he were out of office.

  That afternoon Agnew went to Carl Albert’s office and presented his formal request for an impeachment proceeding. Though I seriously doubted that it would be granted, I had the congressional relations staff talk with leading House Republicans, urging them to support the request. The next day Albert let it be known that he was rejecting it. The same day, the Justice Department alerted me that its study had concluded that a President could not be indicted while in office, but a Vice President could. I asked that Agnew be informed of this development. That evening Agnew and his family left for California. Haig’s impression was that he was going away to think things over, talk with his family, and perhaps prepare them for his resignation.

  Agnew’s troubles had taken a serious toll. The news stories continued to deluge us and made the Watergate stories seem even worse than they already were. In addition, Agnew’s staff had become embittered about our cautious position because they didn’t understand the weight of the case against him. Confidence in government—and confidence in me—was already reeling from Watergate and was now being eroded even further. While I still felt enormous personal sympathy for Agnew, over the past days I had grown increasingly disturbed by his prolongation of what seemed an inevitable end and felt he had to resign.

  I was at Camp David on Saturday afternoon when Haig called with the latest development. Agnew had just spoken to a group of Republican women in Los Angeles and told them that during the past several months he had been living in purgatory, finding himself confronted by undefined, unclear, and unattributed accusations. As the audience cheered and waved signs reading “Spiro is my hero,” Agnew had proclaimed his innocence, attacked Justice Department officials, and shouted: “I will not resign if indicted! I will not resign if indicted!”

  When I received Haig’s call, I had just finished talking with Rose Woods, who had come up earlier in the day to start typing the conversation from the tapes subpoenaed by the Special Prosecutor.

  I had already begun to anticipate that the court of appeals would rule against us. I wanted to break the paralysis caused by the court battles. Rather than take the case to the Supreme Court I had begun to consider a compromise: submitting written summaries of the tapes subpoenaed by the Special Prosecutor and by the Watergate Committee after national security discussions and other matters irrelevant to Watergate had been deleted.

  I had asked Rose to do a quick run-through of the subpoenaed tapes to give us the gist of the conversations without taking the time to prepare complete transcripts. She is such a fast typist that I thought it would take her only a couple of days to finish the whole lot. But she found that the quality of the tapes was so bad and the voices so hard to distinguish that she had to go phrase by phrase, listening to each section several times in order to make out the words. After several hours she had finished only one short passage of the first tape.

  I took the earphones and listened myself. At first all I could hear was a complete jumble. I ran the machine back and listened again. Gradually I could make out a few words, but at times the rattling of a cup or the thump of a hand on the desk would obliterate whole passages. The tapes of conversations with John Dean that I had listened to in June had almost all been Oval Office conversations and John Dean’s flat, uninflected voice had been picked up reasonably well. It had not occurred to me that the other recordings would not be of the same quality. But in the EOB office the different microphone placements and seating arrangements, the shape of the room, and the height of the arched ceilings apparently created entirely different acoustics. Nor had I considered the problem of understanding a highly modulated voice like Ehrlichman’s.

  Steve Bull, a White House staff aide, had come to Camp David with Rose to help her locate the subpoenaed conversations on the tapes and cue them on the machine for her. At one point Bull hit upon the ambiguity in the Special Prosecutor’s subpoena. The subpoena requested a “Meeting of June 20, 1972, in the President’s Executive Office Building (‘EOB’) Office involving Richard Nixon, John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman from 10:30 A.M. to noon (time approximate).” Bull could not find such a meeting in the logs, which showed only a conversation with Ehrlichman alone, beginning at 10:25 and lasting until 11:20, followed by a separate conversation with Haldeman alone. Bull and Haig talked by phone, and Bull asked about the confusion. Haig talked to Buzhardt and called back to say that, according to Buzhardt, only the Ehrlichman conversation was subpoenaed, not the Haldeman conversation that followed it.

  By Sunday night, when we returned to Washington, Rose had worked twenty-nine hours with a Sony tape recorder and a typewriter, and she still had not finished even the first conversation with Ehrlichman.

  On Monday morning, October 1, I met with Ziegler, Haig, Laird, and Kissinger and then spent an hour with the President of the commission of the European communities before going to a military promotion ceremony and a bill-signing ceremony. I was in the EOB office when Rose came in visibly agitated.

  She said she thought she might have caused a small gap in the Haldeman part of the June 20 tape. For a moment I thought she must have meant the Ehrlichman conversation, because I knew that that was the one she had been working on. When I realized it was the Haldeman conversation I reassured her and told her that since the Haldeman conversation had not been subpoenaed, there was nothing to worry about.

  She explained what had happened. At Steve Bull’s request the Secret Service had given her a new tape recorder that morning. It was a Uher 5000 machine, a kind that she had never worked with before. Unlike the manually operated Sony she had used at Camp David, the Uher had a foot-pedal control that would help speed up the work considerably by allowing her to type without having continually to shift position back and forth from typewriter to tape recorder. She had been using this new machine only about half an hour when she finally came to what seemed to be the end of the Ehrlichman conversation. She ran the tape ahead to be sure that Ehrlichman had in fact left the room. She had reached a part where she heard Haldeman talking about schedule matters—she heard him say something about Ely, Nevada—when her phone rang and she turned to reach for the phone. When she finished the call, she turned back and started to listen to the tape again. All she could hear was a shrill buzzing sound. She did not know how it had happened. She said she had not heard any words after the reference to Ely. She guessed that she had been on the phone for about four or five minutes.

  I called Haig in and told him what had happened, and we checked with Buzhardt to make sure that I was right, that the Haldeman conversation had not been subpoenaed. Buzhardt confirmed this, so the peculiar incident did not seem to present any problem. It had been a busy morning, so Haig and I went for a long drive around Washington in order to talk about the problem that was foremost in my mind: what to do about Agnew. Compared to this, a few minutes missing from a non-subpoenaed tape hardly seemed worth a second thought.

  During a press conference on October 3 I again had to walk a verbal tightrope on the Agnew issue. I first came to his defense, urging that he not be tried and convi
cted in the press. But when the question was asked if there was any truth to Agnew’s charge that this had been just a political investigation, I answered that while I had been briefed only on what the witnesses might say, the charges were serious.

  After the press conference I left for a weekend in Florida. I asked Buzhardt to come with me. That afternoon he received a call from Judah Best, who said that Agnew was ready to resume discussions about a plea. Best flew to Florida and met with Buzhardt until late into the night. Earlier Best had pointed out to Buzhardt that Agnew was just a few months short of being eligible for retirement with a federal pension. He had wondered if there were not some way to give him a consultancy that would keep him on the government payroll and carry him over the pension deadline. I told Buzhardt that we could not do it at this time. Agnew had also asked if he could keep his Secret Service protection for a while, and he was concerned about what would happen to his staff. I promised that I would see to it that his Secret Service protection was extended, and that we would do our best to find jobs for his staff members.

  It was agreed that on Saturday, October 6, Buzhardt would call Richardson to arrange for the talks to begin again.

  OCTOBER 1973

  On that same Saturday morning we received a cable from Ken Keating, our ambassador in Tel Aviv, reporting that Golda Meir had just told him that Syria and Egypt were in a final countdown for war. Israel was about to be attacked on two fronts: by the Syrians from the north in the Golan Heights, and by the Egyptians from the south in the Sinai Peninsula.