My temper was already frayed by the time we arrived at the hall where I was scheduled to speak. When I saw Ziegler at the head of a pack of reporters, following right behind me into the VIP waiting room, I took out my frustration by giving him a solid shove and an unmistakable instruction to put the press in the special room that had been provided for them. I apologized immediately afterward to Ziegler, but the incident sent hot flashes through the press corps, and it was portrayed as the desperate flailing of a man at the end of his tether. CBS network news showed the pushing episode twice in slow motion.
It was in his influential “Nixon Watch” column in the next issue of The New Republic that John Osborne first put into print the talk among reporters that they had detected “something indefinably but unmistakably odd” in my gait and gestures in New Orleans. Some speculated that I was drunk. Osborne, however, said that he believed the assurance of my aides that I did not drink in the daytime, especially not before a speech. His verdict was that it “may just have been the tension taking its toll.”
Several weeks later this idea was presumably what accounted for the contention by some reporters and commentators that I had maniacally manufactured the military alert at the time of the Yom Kippur War as a result of the desperate personal and political straits I was in because of Watergate. Considering the combined pressures of the Agnew resignation, the troubled economy, the oil embargo and the fuel shortage, and the Cox firing and its aftermath, many reporters apparently decided that I could only be in a state of mental overload. By early December, the New York Times ran a story with the headline State of Nixon’s Health Is a Dimension of Watergate Affair Constantly Being Gauged. At the daily press briefings reporters began asking questions about whether I was under psychiatric care, if I were using drugs, and if I still prayed or believed in the efficacy of prayer. Theodore White once called reporters’ conduct “macabre sadism.” There was even a rumor in the press room that I was wearing makeup to disguise a fatal illness. This was a forerunner of the theory that I planned to get a serious illness and use that as my excuse for resignation. The final evolution of this bizarre amateur psychiatry was a deduction at the time of my resignation and in the period immediately following it that my problem was a death wish and that I yearned for dramatic extinction.
All these things were conceived, perpetuated, promulgated, and then analyzed by a comparatively small but immensely influential press corps living in the rarefied environment of Watergate-obsessed Washington, feeding on its own inbred ideas.
During this summer and fall of 1973 Pat and I seldom discussed the daily news stories and television broadcasts. She was magnificent in this period of exceptional adversity, just as she had always been before. She felt that in the end we would come out all right and that, above all, we must not allow the attacks to depress us to the point that we would be unable to carry out our duties effectively.
I think of one time in particular when, after an especially difficult day of unrelenting attacks about Watergate, we had to attend the state dinner for Prime Minister Norman Kirk of New Zealand. When the entertainment was over, we saw the Kirks to their car. Just as Pat and I started back through the Grand Foyer on our way upstairs, the Marine Band began playing “The Sound of Music.” Following Pat’s impulse, we took each other’s hands and danced a short fox trot over to the stairs. The press was astonished and the guests delighted. It is a moment I shall always remember.
I believe that the attacks on my financial probity and integrity were the ones that hurt Pat most of all. When she had to join me in signing the statement relating to the preparation of the audit of our taxes, I could sense her tightly controlled anger. She said that she could understand the political attacks that were being made because of Watergate, but she thought that the attacks on our personal and financial integrity were totally unfair. She pointed out how careful she had been in the White House and through all the years we were in government. With a visible shudder she said that this reminded her of the agony and humiliation we had had to endure during the fund crisis in 1952.
At one point a Washington gossip columnist went to extraordinary lengths of innuendo to accuse Pat of unethically keeping jewels given to her as state gifts. In fact, Pat had the jewels listed in a gift register so that there would be no question when they went to the Nixon Library after our administration. Publicly she was charitable about the insults. “It’s for the birds,” she said laughingly. But privately, she came to me in despair. “What more can they possibly want us to do?” she asked.
Tricia did not make many public appearances during this period, but whenever she was staying with us for a few days she would come to the Lincoln Sitting Room late at night just to be with me while I worked. I knew that deep inside she ached with concern, but she never let Pat or me see it. On a few occasions when we talked about Watergate, she said, “We always have to look down to the end of the road. In the end it will come out all right and that is all that really matters.” Ed was a source of steadiness and support for the whole family.
Julie decided that she wanted to go out and fight, and she threw herself into the battle with characteristic verve and intensity. She made as many as six appearances in different parts of the country in one week. David was just starting a new job as a sportswriter with the Philadelphia Bulletin, but he joined her when he could. They lived in the front lines of Watergate, and they suffered its brutal assaults every bit as much as I did.
The annual Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington is an event at which the political humor of the after-dinner skits and speakers is usually sharp and irreverent. Julie specifically asked to attend the 1973 dinner to prove that we were not ashamed or afraid to appear in public at such events. David decided to go with her and lend his moral support. On the night of the dinner, however, his car ran out of gas as he was driving to meet her. He hitchhiked the rest of the way, but he did not make it in time and Julie had to attend the dinner alone.
Most of the after-dinner humor had to do with Watergate, and the jokes were cutting and brutal. Julie sat with courage through every derisive laugh. After the program she was approached by Ambassador Guillermo Sevilla-Sacasa of Nicaragua, the dean of the Washington diplomatic corps. He whispered to her, “Your father still has one friend.” She had steeled herself to the vicious jibes, but this kindness broke her heart. She could no longer hold back the tears, and with all the eyes fixed on her she rushed out of the room.
I did not want Julie to take the brunt of the Watergate questioning, but she could not bear the fact that there did not seem to be anyone else who would speak out for me. Whenever I suggested that she not become so involved, she always replied, “But Daddy, we have to fight.”
My immediate family were not the only ones close to me who found themselves under merciless attack from the press. My brothers Don and Ed were called in for questioning. Reporters and investigators also turned on my friends Bob Abplanalp and Bebe Rebozo.
For Bebe Rebozo, 1973 was the beginning of an eighteen-month nightmare of harassment. He was investigated by the IRS, the GAO, and the Miami District Attorney, in addition to being scandalously hounded by the Ervin Committee staff.
Bebe Rebozo is one of the kindest and most generous men I have ever known. He is a man of great character and integrity. Yet anyone who read only the press stories about him, his business dealings, or his friendship with me would have had to conclude that he combined the worst traits of Rasputin and Al Capone.
The main vehicle for the attack was a $100,000 campaign contribution from Howard Hughes. Rebozo had accepted the money on his understanding that it was intended for the 1972 presidential campaign. He kept it in a safe-deposit box in his bank. In 1970, a serious power struggle erupted within the Hughes empire, marked by vicious infighting among several factions. Rebozo remembered the 1962 California gubernatorial campaign and the issue that had been made then of the loan from the Hughes organization to my brother Don. He wanted to make sure that I was not
embarrassed again by any connection with Howard Hughes, so he decided not to mention the money to me and simply to hold on to it until after the election, when he thought it could either be used to help pay any deficit the campaign had incurred or for the 1974 congressional election.
In 1973 the IRS was in the midst of conducting an investigation of Hughes’s holdings, and Rebozo knew that he would be asked about the $100,000 contribution. He had told me about the money by now, and I said that unless we could obtain the approval of the Hughes organization to put it into the 1974 campaign, we should return it. The money was accordingly returned to Hughes’s representative in June 1973. A check of the serial numbers on the bills confirmed that they had all been issued before Rebozo had received the money, thus supporting his claim that he had left the money untouched in the safe-deposit box until he returned it, exactly as he had said.
When the Ervin Committee found out about the Hughes contribution they had a field day with leaks and innuendos, ironically confirming Rebozo’s worst fears about the damaging publicity this innocent transaction could create.
There were reports that the Ervin investigation was going to charge that the Hughes money had been put to my personal use and that the money had been a quid pro quo for a Civil Aeronautics Board ruling favorable to Hughes’s airline. Other stories reported charges that it was in exchange for an anti-trust favor. UPI said that the Ervin Committee was investigating whether the money had helped to pay for the purchase of my San Clemente home. Some stories referred to the contribution as a “payoff.” All these widely reported stories were false.
On October 8 Rebozo was interviewed by the Ervin Committee. UPI ran a report alleging that he had been “hazy” on what happened to the money while it was in his possession. This was outrageously false. The New York Times reported charges that the contribution may have been part of an effort to stop a scheduled atomic test, since Hughes feared the effects of nuclear testing in Nevada on his Las Vegas properties. Another article reported that the contribution might have been in exchange for favors on Hughes’s tax-exempt medical institute. That story, like the others, was untrue.
The Hughes contribution was not the only weapon used to harass Re-bozo. On August 1 ABC had reported that investigators were checking reports that huge sums of illegal campaign contributions had been laundered through gambling casinos in the Bahamas with the aid of his bank, the Key Biscayne Bank; on August 20 ABC reported a story from “committee sources” that the Ervin Committee had subpoenaed the bank’s records in connection with contributions run through the Bahamas of possibly $2 million or more. There were no such contributions, and there had been no such “laundering” of them.
On October 22 ABC reported the alleged existence of an illegal “private investment fund” administered on my behalf through the Rebozo bank: “Described by sources close to the investigation as the ‘Nixon Checkers Fund of 1973,’ the alleged investment portfolio is being probed to determine whether large unreported political contributions may have been diverted to Nixon’s personal use.” The story said that two corporations might have contributed more than $1 million. The charges were totally false.
In the meantime the Ervin Committee’s pursuit of Rebozo was ruthless. It is described in detail in At That Point in Time, by the committee’s Minority Counsel Fred Thompson. He tells how, in sets of twos and threes, staff investigators went to Miami four separate times to interview Rebozo, each group repeating the questions of the previous group. The committee interviewed his family and his business friends and subpoenaed financial records of everyone with whom he had engaged in business transactions over a period of six years. They also interviewed everyone to whom he had written a check over the last six years.
Rebozo was subjected to fourteen weeks of IRS audits, an investigation by the GAO, an investigation by the Ervin Committee, and an investigation by the Miami District Attorney, and finally the Watergate Special Prosecutor. When in January 1975 Leon Jaworski finally confirmed that there was no evidence for a case against Rebozo, the New York Times did not carry the story at all and the Washington Post carried only a short report. Not one of the television networks, which had been reporting the false allegations nightly, even mentioned Jaworski’s statement.
By the time the Rebozo investigation was finally concluded in October 1975, the Special Prosecutor’s office had issued more than 200 subpoenas, questioned 123 people ranging from me to the gardener at my Key Biscayne home, and hauled 28 people before a grand jury. In 1978 internal staff documents from the Special Prosecution Force were made public that showed the lengths to which the investigators were willing to go. A memo by the head of the Rebozo investigation acknowledged that the informant who had prompted their investigation of the secret multimillion-dollar Bahamian bank account supposedly maintained for me by Rebozo turned out to be a “con man with a criminal record” who had made an identical allegation years earlier against Earl Warren. The documents he had shown to back up his story were “determined to be fraudulent.” The memo concluded, “Like so many of the Rebozo allegations, it seemed at first to have great potential. Like so many, it lacked critical details. And like so many, it proved utterly baseless.”
But this was years later, and in the meantime the Special Prosecutor’s office had investigated Rebozo for sixteen months, evidently caring little that they made his life hell.
An estimated $2 million had been spent investigating Bebe Rebozo. In the end all the allegations and innuendos proved false, and he was officially vindicated. In the meantime, of course, he had been unmercifully harassed and defamed. But those who had made the charges, and those who had printed and broadcast them, despite his complete exoneration by the Special Prosecutor’s office, did not have the decency to retract them or to apologize for the damage they had done. Bebe Rebozo endured a modern-day Star Chamber of political persecution. His crime was that he was Richard Nixon’s friend.
Earlier in 1973 polls had shown that despite a widespread assumption that I was involved in the Watergate cover-up, a majority of the public still believed I was a man of high integrity. The effect of the year’s relentless assault was that it began to succeed in doing what the charges of a political cover-up alone could not do: it began to undermine that confidence in my integrity. In the spring of 1974 columnist Nicholas von Hoffman would write:
But the formal process of legal impeachment has to wait upon a kind of informal social impeachment whereby the man is stripped of the reverence, protections, and deference with which we treat our presidents. He has to be tried, convicted, disgraced and expelled before he is formally accused. . . .
Until a few months ago any American president could have sent the IRS American Express slips and doodles . . . and gotten a pass. . . . Small unflattering tidbits about Nixon and his family are now broadcast and repeated with the special satisfaction of the self-righteous.
Von Hoffman predicted that an inevitable train of events had been set in motion based more on the imperatives of good drama than on questions of impeachable guilt or innocence. He stated that I was going to be impeached “although nobody quite knows why. . . . Nixon’s policies such as they were would never get another man impeached. Nevertheless one senses the decision has been made. . . . None of this has to do with whether there are enough votes . . . to do him in now. Before too long there will be.”
During my meetings with congressmen in November I had said that I might make the subpoenaed tapes public, in summary form if not in full transcripts. The congressional leadership, particularly Hugh Scott, had strongly urged that I do so. Pat Buchanan was assigned to go over these transcripts and compare them with John Dean’s testimony. When I read Buchanan’s report of his findings, I was reassured by the thought that anyone reviewing the tapes would agree with my view that Dean had lied when he charged that I had conspired with him for eight months on a Watergate cover-up. I knew that the March 21 tape would cause an uproar. But I was sure that in the end people would recognize that it was what I had
done that mattered, not what I said, much less what I had temporarily contemplated.
Haig brought Garment, Harlow, Ziegler, and communications aides Ken Clawson and Dick Moore in on the decision. Each of them first read the tapes, then Buchanan’s summaries. Haig tried to soften his report of their opinion for me, but I could tell that they did not share my optimism that if we could weather the many admittedly rough passages, the tapes in their entirety would prove that Dean had lied and I had told the truth. Harlow in particular thought that the tapes would be deadly because the conversations on them were just too realistically political for public consumption.
Buchanan, however, was strongly in favor of releasing the transcripts. I shared his belief that if we could survive the first shock waves, the tapes would end up proving Dean a liar. But I also appreciated Harlow’s insight into possible public and congressional reactions, and I felt that in our present parlous situation these considerations would have to be treated as paramount. Therefore, despite the expectations that had been raised by announcing our intention to release the transcripts, I decided not to do so.
On December 2, 1973, William Greider wrote in the Washington Post: “What the public has to understand is that if it asks Congress to impeach and try Mr. Nixon, it is really asking for much more than that. Impeachment on these offenses implicitly requires Democrats and Republicans alike . . . to render judgment not just on Mr. Nixon, but on the political past.”
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