RN

by Richard Nixon

  In one meeting Jacob Javits leaned over to me reassuringly and said, “Lincoln was called a lot worse things than you, remember that.” “I’m catching up,” was all I could reply.

  The media, ever in search of a simple label for complex events, latched on to one coined by Newsweek. An article in the magazine had referred to my stepped-up activities and my televised remarks against impeachment as “Operation Candor.” The intent of the label, of course, was to trivialize my effort and to imply that candor was something I thought could be turned on and off like a faucet. A sloppy press corps soon forgot that this label had been its own invention and started using it regularly without putting it in quotation marks or explaining its origin. On December 2 an editorial in the New York Times stated authoritatively that: “President Nixon’s counteroffensive on Watergate, billed by the White House as ‘Operation Candor,’ is visibly collapsing.”

  THE 181/2-MINUTE GAP

  It was during one of the congressional briefing sessions on November 15 that someone asked, “Is there another shoe to drop?”

  As far as I’m concerned,” I replied, “as to the guilt of the President, no.” But I added, “If the shoes fall, I will be there ready to catch them.”

  Late that afternoon Haig came into the Oval Office looking strained and worried. He said that the lawyers had been preparing an index of the tapes that were to be turned over to Sirica. After checking the original subpoena against a supplementary document that had been sent by Cox during the summer, they had now decided that Buzhardt’s earlier interpretation, based on the subpoena alone, was wrong. The supplementary document made it clear that the subpoena did cover the June 20, 1972, conversation with Haldeman—the tape with the gap.

  It was a nightmare. How in hell, I asked, could we have made a mistake about something as fundamental as whether or not a particular conversation was covered by a subpoena? I asked if we could still argue that it wasn’t covered by the subpoena. Haig said that he would get Haldeman’s notes from June 20, 1972, and try to reconstruct what had been said during the missing segment of our conversation. When the notes finally arrived, they turned out to be a mixed blessing. While they made it clear that we had been talking about Watergate, they indicated that the conversation had been in general terms about the political impact of the incident:

  be sure EOB office is thoroly ckd re bugs at all times—etc.

  what is our counter-attack

  PR offensive to top this—

  hit the opposition w/ their activities

  pt. out libertarians have created public callousness

  do they justify this less than stealing Pentagon papers, Anderson file etc.? we shld be on the attack—for diversion—

  There was still more bad news about the gap that day: I learned that it did not run for just the four or five minutes that Rose had estimated as the length of time she had spent on the telephone. Buzhardt informed me that, after playing the tape through, they found that the gap ran 181/2 minutes. No one could explain how or why it had happened or account for the shrill buzzing sounds that punctuated the otherwise blank portion.

  When we left for a few days in Florida on November 17, Buzhardt stayed in Washington to see if the 181/2 minutes of conversation could be electronically recovered. He was also going to see if he could re-create the circumstances that had caused the gap and the peculiar sounds that now appeared on the tape.

  On the way back to Washington on Tuesday, November 20, I stopped off in Memphis, Tennessee, to attend a meeting of the Republican Governors Conference. In a private and freewheeling session we covered every major foreign and domestic issue, including Watergate. At one point in the meeting I was asked if there were going to be any more Watergate bombshells. I immediately thought of the tape with the 181/2-minute gap—that was certainly in the bombshell category. But we still had not heard from Buzhardt whether the conversation could be recovered, or, failing that, whether we could find some logical explanation of how it had happened. I knew that if I indicated even the remotest possibility of a new bombshell, I would have to say what it was—and I still was not sure of the answer to that myself.

  For all these reasons I answered, “If there are, I’m not aware of them.”

  On the plane on the way back to Washington Haig told me that Buzhardt confirmed that the missing portion of the June 20 conversation was not recoverable. Furthermore, Buzhardt had had no success in his efforts to reproduce the buzzing sound.

  The headline in papers all across the country the next morning was my assertion that there would be no more Watergate bombshells. That same morning Buzhardt told Jaworski and Sirica about the 181/2-minute gap, and Sirica announced it to the press.

  I know that most people think that my inability to explain the 181/2-minute gap is the most unbelievable and insulting part of the whole of Watergate. Because of this, I am aware that my treatment of the gap will be looked upon as a touchstone for the candor and credibility of whatever else I write about Watergate. I also know that the only explanations that would readily be accepted are that I erased the tape myself, or that Rose Mary Woods deliberately did so, either on her own initiative or at my direct or indirect request.

  But I know I did not do it. And I completely believe Rose when she says that she did not do it. I can only tell the story of the 181/2-minute gap—as incomplete and unsatisfactory a story as I know it is—from the vantage point of having watched it bring my reputation and my presidency to new lows of public confidence and esteem.

  Haig told me that Garment and Buzhardt were completely panicked by the discovery of the 181/2-minute gap. They suspected everyone, including Rose, Steve Bull, and me. Suspicion had now invaded the White House. I even wondered if Buzhardt himself could have accidentally erased the portion beyond the five-minute gap Rose thought she might have caused. Using the simple criterion of access to the tapes, there were many possible suspects. Haig and others joked darkly about “sinister forces” being responsible for the gap, but I think that we all wondered about the various Secret Service agents and technicians who had had free daily access to the tapes, and even about the Secret Service agents who had provided Rose with the new but apparently faulty Uher tape recorder just half an hour before she discovered the gap. We even wondered about Alex Butterfield, who had revealed the existence of the tape system. He had had access to all the tapes; in fact, he had regularly listened to random passages to make sure that the system was working properly. But it would have taken a very dedicated believer in conspiracies to accept that someone would have purposely erased 181/2 minutes of this particular tape in order to embarrass me.

  After an inconclusive public hearing the matter of the gap was turned over to the grand jury and a panel of court-appointed experts. I believe that the story of these experts represents one of the biggest, and least known, scandals connected with Watergate. The White House is not without blame, because we approved the six “experts” appointed by the court. If we had checked, we would have found that they were experts in the theory of acoustics but not the practicalities of tape recorders.

  In a January report the experts concluded that the buzzing sounds had been put on the tape “in the process of erasing and rerecording at least five, and perhaps as many as nine, separate and contiguous segments. Hand operation of the keyboard controls on the recorder was involved in starting and again in stopping the recording of each segment.” This conclusion was widely reported; not so widely reported was the fact that it came under immediate attack from other scientists and tape specialists, one of whom called it more a “news release than a solid investigation.”

  One electronics firm pointed out that the apparently incriminating sounds and magnetic marks attributed by the panel to specific manual erasures could have been made accidentally by a malfunction in the machine that caused the internal power supply to sputter on and off. Science magazine reported that other experts agreed with the feasibility of this alternate hypothesis. The only test that the court’s experts made of t
his hypothesis prior to the release of their preliminary report in January was made on a Sony, not a Uher 5000. They apparently failed to see this as a lapse in standard scientific testing procedure.

  One of the court’s experts testified that in testing the machine Rose had used, they “of necessity had to open up the interior . . . and tighten down several screws and quite conceivably, for example, may have tightened a ground connection to a point where it was making more firm contact than previously.” When they found a defective part they replaced it—and threw the defective one away! He acknowledged that after they had worked on the machine it no longer produced the buzzing sound they had noticed beforehand.

  After this extraordinary admission, Rose’s attorney, Charles Rhyne, said, “So in effect you obliterated the evidence which anyone else would need to test your conclusions, did you not?”

  “Yes, in large part,” was the answer.

  Richard Salmon, national manager of Uher of America, Inc., in Ingle-wood, California, the manufacturer of the machine Rose had used, scathingly criticized the court experts’ report. He said that on some of their specially modified machines pressing the “rewind” button in a certain way would cause the machine to erase automatically. Salmon said that by using a display “of great experience and electrical intelligence”—in other words, technical jargon—“they covered up a weak report.”

  The court paid these six experts $100,000 for their work. It was worthless as a legal document, but it produced more than its money’s worth of incriminating headlines.

  Rose Woods testified under oath concerning the 181/2-minute gap before a court hearing and the grand jury. In the hearing she was subjected to hours of merciless cross-examination on this issue. On July 17, 1974, Leon Jaworski informed Rose’s attorney that no case had been developed of any illegal action of any kind by Rose and that no charges would be made against her. He said that his assistant, Richard Ben-Veniste, agreed. Jaworski, however, did not make a public announcement of this fact, and to this day many people are not aware that Rose was exonerated by the Special Prosecutor in regard to the 181/2-minute gap.

  In late 1973, after the 181/2-minute gap had been revealed and it seemed as if nothing worse could happen to us, something worse did.

  PROPERTY AND TAXES

  From the start of my political career, I had tried to be scrupulously careful in the handling of public money. I grew up in a home where politics was frequently discussed, and where the greatest contempt was reserved for politicians on the take. If anything, I have always gone far beyond most people in government to document and account for public money, whether campaign or government funds. This was why the accusations of financial impropriety made during the fund crisis of 1952 had been particularly searing and embittering.

  After the 1968 election I decided to sell all of my stocks and outside holdings. This divestiture was not required by law, but I thought it would be worth going the extra measure to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. I took most of the money from the sale of the stocks and the sale of our New York apartment and put it into the purchase of two houses in Florida and a house in California.

  The San Clemente property was a 26-acre tract of land. Personally I could afford to buy only the house itself and the surrounding grounds, about 5.9 acres. In order to keep the adjacent property under my control, I bought the entire tract with the help of a loan from my friend Bob Abplanalp. In December 1970 I sold the 20.1 acres, plus an additional 2.9 acres I had acquired from a neighboring tract, to Rebozo and Abplanalp and retained only the house and the 5.9 acres I had wanted in the first place. In 1973 Rebozo sold his portion to Abplanalp.

  In what now seems a bitter irony we decided to keep these transactions private, not because there was anything improper about them, but because I knew how the Washington press corps would play up my acquisition of such a large and expensive property, and the fact that I was doing it with loans from my friends. Once Watergate snowballed and reporters began to tear the skin off every aspect of my life, this innocent secrecy led to suspicions that I could not dispel.

  On May 13 Ervin Committee “sources” leaked a story to a California newspaper alleging that up to “$1 million in campaign funds” might have been used to buy my California property. Even when Ervin claimed that he had never heard of such a thing, the newspaper would not retract its story, which was quickly picked up by the national wire services. Early in July a leak caused by the Cox office produced a story indicating that they too were investigating whether union, corporate, or campaign money had been used to buy any of my houses. The stories mushroomed. Other newspapers spread leaked reports that my San Clemente property was underassessed for tax purposes, and papers all across the country carried the story. Subsequently the Orange County Assessment Appeals Board determined that the charge was not true, but it had already left its impression. I sensed that unless we stopped this kind of story immediately, my personal integrity would come under as much of a cloud as my political integrity was now under.

  I had nothing to hide concerning my finances and believed that the only defense against these kinds of charges was to put out everything. Therefore we ordered the General Services Administration to begin assembling every document that related to government expenditures at my homes. On May 25 we released a statement recounting the details of the purchase of my property in San Clemente and Key Biscayne. I also paid over $25,000 to have an audit of these transactions prepared, and I released the report to the press on August 27.

  Despite these efforts the stories continued to be fabricated and to be printed. For example, the Washington Star falsely alleged that C. Arnholt Smith, a wealthy Californian then facing indictment for tax evasion, possibly helped in the purchase of my property. UPI reported that the “Senate Watergate Committee is investigating the possibility that $100,000 given by billionaire Howard Hughes was used to help pay for President Nixon’s San Clemente home, a committee source said.” ABC reported the equally outrageous charge that I had “a secret private investment portfolio” of $1 million in corporate campaign funds. Jack Anderson later charged I had Swiss bank accounts filled with cash. Newsweek even charged that I manipulated family property in such a way that my daughter Tricia may have filed false income tax returns. All these stories and charges were totally false. For at least the third time that I was aware of in my political career, someone in the IRS bureaucracy violated the law and leaked my tax returns to the press. The reporter who wrote the story based on this illegal act won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

  At the end of November I announced that I was planning to release my tax returns in their entirety. The IRS, which had twice earlier reviewed and approved my 1971 and 1972 tax returns, informed us that because of all the publicity they were going to reopen their examination. In the meantime, Texas Democratic Congressman Jack Brooks, one of the most partisan men in Congress, used his subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations to hold hearings on government expenditures on my houses.

  Every modern President has maintained property outside Washington for a change of pace and for the kind of privacy that is impossible in the capital. Johnson regularly visited three locations; Kennedy visited five. I had two of my own—in San Clemente and Key Biscayne—and I also sometimes used Bob Abplanalp’s island in the Bahamas. For me as for other Presidents, the government made expenditures on the places I regularly visited in order to ensure my safety when I was working or relaxing there. When I took office, four of my thirty-five predecessors as President had been assassinated and serious attempts had been made on the lives of several others. On the day Robert Kennedy died, Congress passed a new law that established extraordinary security measures to protect all future presidential and vice presidential candidates and incumbents. The legislation called for the full cooperation of government agencies in meeting requests by the Secret Service for protective devices. I was the first President in office after the legislation was passed to receive all the increase
d protection it provided. At the request of the Secret Service, the General Services Administration, which handles government buildings and supplies, installed intricate warning devices and electronic alarms on the grounds all around my houses; bulletproof glass was put into the windows; special outside lighting was installed. Secret Service command posts and outposts were constructed; landscaping was arranged and rearranged according to Secret Service requirements.

  In the end GSA spent $68,000 on my house at San Clemente. The bulk of this amount went for electrical security systems, fire protection, and the replacement of a gas heater with an electric heating system after the Secret Service decided that the less expensive gas system I would have installed was not sufficiently safe. I spent $217,000 of my own money on furnishings and improvements to the San Clemente house.

  GSA spent $137,000—all but $7,000 of it on bulletproof glass—on the two adjacent houses I owned in Key Biscayne. We used one as a family residence and the other as an office and work area. At the same time I personally spent $76,000 for remodeling the houses and for improvements on the grounds.

  In addition to the money spent on the houses themselves, GSA spent $950,000 on the grounds. This amount covered the installation of security lighting and alarm systems, walls, guard stations, and relandscaping to restore the areas torn up when the protective equipment was installed.

  I was no more eager than anyone else would be to pay for anything that could be legitimately construed as a proper government expense, but a General Accounting Office study concluded that with scattered exceptions, almost all of the $1.1 million spent on my personal properties in California and Florida was spent for protective purposes. In fact, all but $13,400 was specifically requested by the Secret Service. Other items, such as flagpoles and office furniture for my study, were procured under the auspices of the GSA. Flagpoles had routinely been placed at the homes of Presidents and Vice Presidents before me; and the office furniture would all revert to GSA after I left office.