RN

by Richard Nixon

  Any such high hopes were dashed by the Israeli counteroffensive made possible by the American airlift. For the second time in six years the Arabs lost most of the Soviet equipment that had been sent them. Moreover, for the first time in an Arab-Israeli conflict the United States conducted itself in a manner that not only preserved but greatly enhanced our relations with the Arabs—even while we were massively re-supplying the Israelis. Once they realized that military victory was now beyond their reach for at least the next several years, the Egyptian and Syrian leaders were ready to try the path of negotiation. Thanks to our new policy of carefully cultivated direct relations with the Arab capitals, the Arab leaders had a place other than Moscow to turn.

  So obsessive had Watergate become for some reporters and publications that suggestions continued to be made that I had purposely provoked or encouraged the Mideast crisis to distract attention from Watergate and to demonstrate that I was still capable of leadership and action. With this in mind, and thinking about the reporting on the Cox firing, I faced this problem head on at a press conference on October 26. “I have never heard or seen such outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting in twenty-seven years of public life,” I said. “And yet I should point out that even in this week, when many thought that the President was shell-shocked, unable to act, the President acted decisively in the interests of peace, in the interests of the country, and I can assure you that whatever shocks gentlemen of the press may have, or others, political people, these shocks will not affect me in my doing my job.”

  At the end of October there was another hot-line exchange. Brezhnev made a formal complaint about what he called Israeli hostilities; in particular he referred to their handling of food and medical supplies intended for the trapped Egyptian Third Army. He also stated that the recent U.S. alert had surprised him, and he complained that it had not promoted a relaxation of tension.

  In my reply I said we would do our part to assist the transport of supplies to the wounded Egyptians in the Third Army. In response to his criticism of the alert I quoted the words he had written threatening to take unilateral action unless we joined his plan to send U.S. and Soviet forces to the Middle East. I stated, “Mr. General Secretary, these are serious words and were taken seriously here in Washington.”

  I followed up on November 3 with a letter to Brezhnev stating the importance of respecting the principle stated in our agreement on the prevention of nuclear war: that efforts at gaining unilateral advantage at the expense of the other party were inconsistent with the objectives of peaceful relations and the avoidance of confrontations. I repeated the fact that the peace of the world depended on the policies and actions of our two countries—in both a positive and a negative sense.

  After almost three weeks Brezhnev replied to this letter. He indicated a willingness to pick up the dialogue of détente where it had left off before the Mideast crisis, and he closed with an unusually personal reference: “We would like, so to say, to wish you in a personal, human way energy and success in overcoming all sorts of complexities, the causes of which are not too easy to understand at a distance.”

  At the beginning of November Golda Meir came to Washington. We met for an hour in the Oval Office, and she expressed her gratitude for the airlift. “There were days and hours when we needed a friend, and you came right in,” she said. “You don’t know what your airlift means to us.”

  “I never believe in little plays when big issues are at stake,” I said.

  I urged a policy of sensible restraint for Israel. “Sometimes, when you have a situation of attrition, even winners can lose,” I reminded her. “The problem that Israel must now consider is whether the policy you are following can succeed. Lacking a settlement, the only policy is constantly being prepared for war. But that really is no policy at all.” I said that she could be remembered as the leader who created an Israel that was not burdened with a huge arms budget or with having to fight a war every five years.

  Mrs. Meir seemed to understand the essential common sense of what I was saying. She also seemed to appreciate my lack of illusions about the limitations of détente or the nature of the Soviet threat. “When the Europeans talked about détente,” she said, “they were bleary-eyed and naive. But you know exactly what you are doing and who your partners are.”

  On November 5 Kissinger began the first of many journeys to the Middle East in which he personally guided first Israel and Egypt, and then Israel and Syria, along the unfamiliar and often painful road toward a peaceful settlement of their differences. On November 7, 1973, after six years of tense estrangement, the United States and Egypt resumed diplomatic relations.

  After Cox had been fired, I had intended that Henry Petersen and his Justice Department staff would be allowed to complete the Watergate investigation, which they had begun and which was properly their responsibility. But it was evident that Congress was determined to have another Special Prosecutor. It was equally evident that I was in no political position to prevent it.

  Robert Bork, as Acting Attorney General, began searching for a new Special Prosecutor. A few days later Haig reported to me that he and Bork had concluded that Leon Jaworski, a successful Houston lawyer, a former president of the American Bar Association, and a prominent Texas Democrat, was the right man for the job. Haig had already tentatively approached Jaworski, who had said he would accept if he could have our agreement that in the event we came to an impasse he could sue me in the courts for evidence. I agreed to this condition, and, as a further guarantee, we announced that there would have to be a supportive consensus of the Majority and Minority Leaders of the House and Senate and the ranking majority and minority members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees before he could be fired.

  Within ten days of the Cox firing and after the high political price I had had to pay for ridding myself of him, I was back in the same trap of having to accept a Watergate Special Prosecutor. But there was one major difference: I had been told that, unlike Cox, Jaworski would be fair and objective. Although as a Democrat he would be under pressure from other Democrats to score partisan points, I was led to believe that he respected the office of the presidency and that therefore he would not mount court challenges just for the plaudits and publicity he would thereby receive. Haig said that Jaworski recognized that the staff assembled by Cox was excessively anti-Nixon and that he was determined not to become their captive. He told Haig that he planned to bring in his own people and would see to it that the staff limited its activity to relevant and proper areas. Haig liked Jaworski and was impressed by him; he told me that Jaworski would be a tough prosecutor but not a partisan who was simply out to get me. On November 1, we announced that Leon Jaworski would be the Special Prosecutor.

  I also needed a new Attorney General. The political situation created by Richardson’s resignation dictated that in order to get my nominee confirmed, I would have to select someone who would not have to contend with charges of excessive personal loyalty to me. Senator William Saxbe of Ohio had long since established that he was a man without that problem. As my father would have put it, he was as “independent as a hog on ice.” His appointment was announced the same day as Jaworski’s.

  SETBACK AND RALLY

  In late September, when we were first preparing for the Stennis compromise, Steve Bull had had some difficulty locating several of the nine subpoenaed conversations. The Secret Service had catalogued the tapes, but their system was informal at best and haphazard at worst. In one case, Bull finally found an apparently missing conversation on a reel that had been erroneously labeled. In the case of a June 20, 1972, phone conversation with John Mitchell, I remembered that I had talked to him from a phone that was in the Family Quarters and therefore not connected to any recording equipment. In another case, that of an April 15, 1973, conversation with John Dean, the tape simply could not be found.

  Near the end of October, about a month after Bull’s initial search, Fred Buzhardt conducted one of his own. He confirmed that t
he phone call to Mitchell was from the Residence and had never been recorded. He also confirmed why Bull had not been able to find a tape of the April 15 meeting with Dean.

  I usually did not go to the EOB office on Sundays. The Secret Service, who monitored the taping system, had not anticipated that I would have several unusually long conversations there on Saturday and Sunday, April 14 and 15. Thus by the time I sat down with Dick Kleindienst at 1:15 on Sunday afternoon, the reel of tape was near the end. It ran out in midsentence during our conversation, and the afternoon and evening meetings of April 15 with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Petersen, Kleindienst, and Dean were never recorded.

  On October 30 Buzhardt informed Sirica that two of the subpoenaed conversations had never been recorded. We readily agreed to have a panel of experts investigate our explanation for each case. We also offered my written notes of the April 15 meeting with John Dean and the tape of my meeting with him the next day, because a comparison of the April 15 notes and the April 16 tape indicated that we had covered much the same ground in the two sessions.

  I was sure that a full explanation of how and why the phone call to Mitchell and the meeting with Dean had failed to be recorded would clear things up completely. I simply did not understand the degree of public anticipation that had developed around these nine subpoenaed tapes; now I can see that it was largely the result of the degree to which my personal credibility had sunk.

  The news was met with an outburst of anger and indignation. The next day the media began reporting about two “missing tapes.” This was both unfair and misleading: the use of the word missing implied that the two tapes had existed in the first place. People felt that I was toying with their patience and insulting their intelligence.

  For the first time since the Watergate affair began, the New York Times urged editorially that I resign the presidency. Time, in its first editorial in fifty years, also said that I should step down. Even old friends, among them the Detroit News and ABC’s Howard K. Smith, began to express doubts. It was in the wake of the two so-called missing tapes that Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts became the first Republican in Congress to urge that I resign.

  When Barry Goldwater saw the frenzied turn events were taking, he went on the air to ask people to “curb their wild stampede, to pause a moment in their tumult and trumpeting” and give thought to the consequences of the hysteria if it continued uncurbed. “In God’s name, cool it,” he said.

  On November 1 I wrote a frustrated note on the top of a briefing paper:

  There were no missing tapes.

  There never were any.

  The conversations in question were not taped.

  Why couldn’t we get that across to people?

  That same day I left for a weekend in Florida. I looked forward to the chance to get some rest and to try to assess the damage. I had no idea that our problems with the tapes were just beginning.

  In April 1973, in a phone conversation with Henry Petersen, I had unthinkingly said that I believed that my April 15 conversation with John Dean had been recorded on tape. Petersen reported my remark to Cox, who later wrote to us requesting this tape for his investigation. In order to avoid revealing the existence of the taping system, I told Buzhardt to write to Cox and tell him that the “tape” I had had in mind was actually the Dictabelt I had made after the meeting. Now it turned out that the April 15 conversation had never been recorded because the tape had run out. But there was worse news still to come. We were about to learn that no Dictabelt could be found either.

  I had not actually checked when I told Buzhardt to tell Cox there was a Dictabelt. I had simply assumed that I had made one, since I had been doing so almost daily in that period; my notes of the meeting were clearly marked for dictation. But we could not find a Dictabelt for that conversation.

  I had put Buzhardt in an untenable position: first I had had him send a letter to Cox in order to divert him from a tape recording to a Dictabelt; now there was no Dictabelt. Len Garment felt that the public revelation of this latest blunder would throw us into a fatal spin. Beyond that, both he and Buzhardt felt that they were not making any progress or doing any good. We were always in a completely reactive situation, and there seemed to be no prospect for changing that pattern no matter what we did.

  On Saturday, November 3, Garment and Buzhardt had come to Florida. Haig brought me a diluted report of his meeting with them, but I sensed what he was saying between the lines: even before we finally confirmed that there was no Dictabelt, they felt they had had it. I could not blame them. They had been hopelessly undermanned, chronically overworked, and regularly undermined by events and now by me. They had both urged, and Haig concurred, that we look for another lawyer, perhaps someone from outside the White House, who would deal with nothing but Watergate.

  That weekend in Florida was a new low point for me personally and a turning point for our approach to dealing with Watergate. Even as I realized the depth to which we had plunged, I recognized that there was only one way out. We were under relentless attack by the opposition, and now we were faced with defections by our supporters as well. More than anything else, we had to stop that erosion. “We will take some desperate, strong measure,” I told Ziegler, “and this time there is no margin for error.”

  First, I had to address the increasing number of demands for my resignation. On November 7, at the end of a televised speech on the energy crisis, I turned over the last typed page of the text to the handwritten notes I had made only a few hours earlier. I said:

  Tonight I would like to give my answer to those who have suggested that I resign.

  I have no intention whatever of walking away from the job I was elected to do. As long as I am physically able, I am going to continue to work sixteen to eighteen hours a day for the cause of a real peace abroad, and for the cause of prosperity without inflation and without war at home. And in the months ahead I shall do everything that I can to see that any doubts as to the integrity of the man who occupies the highest office in this land—to remove those doubts where they exist.

  And I am confident that in those months ahead, the American people will come to realize that I have not violated the trust that they placed in me when they elected me as President of the United States in the past, and I pledge to you tonight that I shall always do everything that I can to be worthy of that trust in the future.

  I decided to begin meeting with different congressional groups until I had personally talked to every Republican in Congress and to all my supporters on the Democratic side. This would not be just a way of presenting my side of the Watergate case and answering whatever questions they had about it; it would also provide an opportunity for beginning to rebuild the badly damaged bridges of communication and shared purposes that had been among the casualties of Watergate. All told, in nine separate two-hour sessions over the next week, I met with 241 Republican and 46 Democratic senators and congressmen. In each meeting I ran over the charges and answered questions, repeating the defense spelled out in my public statements. I explained to Ed Brooke that I would not consider resigning because it would change the American system of government. I remember sitting with Eastland, McClellan, Stennis, and Long, the deans of the Senate, and starting to review the Watergate charges with them. Jim Eastland leaned forward and said, “Mr. President, we don’t need to hear any explanations. We don’t even want to talk about Watergate. Just tell us what to do to help.” Seventy-year-old John Stennis leaned over to Eastland and said, “Quiet, Jim. Let the boy speak.”

  I told these congressional groups that we would issue white papers on the major charges. I also said that we were contemplating releasing transcripts or summaries of the tapes that had been turned over to the court—something that they had all urged.

  Some of the congressmen suggested that I try to put Watergate to rest by making one grandstand play or one dramatic gesture that would answer all the questions and exorcise all the demons. Some suggested that I voluntarily appear before a joint sessi
on of Congress and stay until I had answered every question that every member wanted to ask. The suggestion was well intentioned, but I had no confidence whatever that any single gesture would be successful at this late date. Watergate had gone too far for me to be able to dispel it in one speech. As I told one Republican group that urged this as a solution, if I gave a speech and said, “I didn’t do it,” the Democrats would say, “The son of a bitch is lying”; and the Republicans would say, “Ho hum, he is probably lying but he is our son of a bitch.”

  I also said that if the charges against me continued in the same partisan way, “I will go down—and I will go down gracefully—but I will not resign.” And I tried to tell them I understood what a burden Watergate had been on them: “You have all worked hard, your careers are involved, you are worried about the polls and about whether the money is going to come in for your campaigns. You are wondering why in hell the President can’t clear it up and so forth. I’m worried about it too, because these last few months have not been easy.”

  And I urged some sense of perspective. “I know people say I shouldn’t talk about meetings with Brezhnev and Mao, that people aren’t interested in that,” I said. “But I know that in the history books twenty-five years from now what will really matter is the fact that the President of the United States in the period from 1969 to 1976 changed the world.”