“1973 will be a better year,” I had dictated in my diary in December 1972. Now, at Camp David on December 23, 1973, I wrote across the top of a page of notes I was making: “Last Christmas here?”
1974
It was difficult to believe that only eight months had passed since Haldeman and Ehrlichman had left, and since the full fury of Watergate had descended on me. It had been a brutal eight months, an endless cycle of blows and rallies followed by further blows. In May I had felt that there was a chance to renew, rebuild, and recover. Now I was reduced to analyzing my situation in the stark terms of the possibilities of simple survival.
It was after the weekend of Cox’s dismissal that I first considered what my actions had precipitated. I made notes to myself that I labeled “Analysis”:
1. Cox had to go. Richardson would inevitably go with him. Otherwise, if we had waited for Cox making a major mistake which in the public mind would give us what appeared to be good cause for him to go would mean that we had waited until Cox had moved against us.
2. We must learn from the Richardson incident what people we can depend on. Establishment types like Richardson simply won’t stand with us when chips are down and they have to choose between their political ambitions and standing by the President who made it possible for them to hold the high positions from which they were now resigning.
3. As far as the tapes were concerned we need to put the final documents in the best possible PR perspective. We must get out the word with regard to no “doctoring” of the tapes.
4. We must compare our situation now with what it was on April 30. Then the action with regard to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Gray, Dean, and Kleindienst did not remove the cloud on the President as far as an impression of guilt on his part was concerned. In fact it increased that doubt and rather than satisfying our critics once they had tasted a little blood they liked it so much they wanted far more. Since April 30 we have slipped a great deal. We had 60 percent approval rating in the polls on that date and now we stand at 30 percent at best.
5. Now the question is whether our action on turning over the tapes or the transcripts thereof helps remove the cloud of doubt. Also on the plus side, the Mideast crisis, probably if the polls are anywhere near correct, helped somewhat because it shows the need for RN’s leadership in foreign policy.
6. Our opponents will now make an all-out push. The critical question is whether or not the case for impeachment or resignation is strong enough in view of the plus factors I noted in previous paragraph.
At 1:15 A.M. on January 1, 1974, I made this note: “The basic question is: Do I fight all out or do I now begin the long process to prepare for a change, meaning, in effect, resignation?”
Over the past months I had talked about resignation with my family, with a few close friends, and with Haig and Ziegler. But the idea was anathema to me. I believed that my resignation under pressure would change our whole form of government. The change might not be apparent for many years; but once the first President had resigned under fire and thereby established a precedent, the opponents of future Presidents would have a formidable new leverage. It was not hard to visualize a situation in which Congress, confronted with a President it did not like, could paralyze him by blocking him on legislation, foreign affairs, and appointments. Then, when the country was fed up with the resulting stalemate, Congress could claim that it would be better for the country if the President resigned. And Nixon would be cited as the precedent! By forcing Presidents out through resignation, Congress would no longer have to take the responsibility and bear the verdict of history for voting impeachment.
My notes continued:
The answer—fight. Fight because if I am forced to resign the press will become a much too dominant force in the nation, not only in this administration but for years to come. Fight because resignation would set a precedent and result in a permanent and very destructive change in our whole constitutional system. Fight because resignation could lead to a collapse of our foreign policy initiatives.
I made another list of notes for myself later that morning, New Year’s Day, 1974:
Decision to fight:
1. Resign sets precedent—admits guilt.
2. Lets down friends.
3. Fight now makes possible fight for future as a man of principle.
4. Only substance, not politics, must affect this decision.
Priorities:
1. Press conference and media meetings.
2. Organize our hard core in the House, Senate, among top governors and our friends like Kendall, etc., who were working under Flanigan’s direction.
3. Mobilize the Cabinet.
4. Buck up the staff.
Substantive areas:
1. Rodino, Jaworski, et al.
2. Foreign policy initiatives.
3. Run the shop well on the domestic front (energy, et al.).
Style:
1. Confidence.
2. Compassion.
3. Color—the necessity for the interesting.
Be strong against unprecedented adversity but avoid intemperate remarks or conduct.
I made still another note on January 5, at 5 A.M.:
Above all else: Dignity, command, faith, head high, no fear, build a new spirit, drive, act like a President, act like a winner. Opponents are savage destroyers, haters. Time to use full power of the President to fight overwhelming forces arrayed against us.
As I assessed the situation, impeachment was not going to be decided on the basis of the law or historical precedent. Impeachment would be an exercise in public persuasion: while I was trying to restore public confidence in my ability to lead, my opposition would be trying to condition the public to the idea that I had to be removed from office.
THE LAST CAMPAIGN
I had thought that 1972 was going to be my last political campaign. But at the beginning of 1974 I recognized that I was about to embark on the campaign of my life.
I was sure that, regardless of the substantive issues involved in the impeachment effort, it was the politics of the situation that would determine the outcome. At each stage the Democrats would be taking the political temperature, trying to determine whether the Republicans would be worse off in the 1974 congressional elections and in the 1976 presidential campaign with a discredited President still in office, or with a new President bearing the political burden of his predecessor’s impeachment or resignation. Pressure on the Democratic Congress was intensified by polls that showed that opinion of Congress was at its lowest percentage in the polls’ history—even lower than mine!
Many congressional Republicans were now also considering impeachment as a strictly political question in terms of the upcoming off-year elections—in which many of them had an obvious and immediate interest. For them, however, impeachment would clearly be a double-edged sword, because as much as they might want to be rid of me now that it appeared I would be a drag on the party’s fortunes in 1974 and 1976, they recognized that many Republicans, particularly the party workers, were outraged by the idea, and that the general public might consider their willingness to see me impeached self-interested and disloyal.
As I increasingly saw it, therefore, the main danger of being impeached would come precisely from the public’s being conditioned to the idea that I was going to be impeached. In the end, therefore, it would come down to a race for public support: in other words, a campaign. But this time, instead of campaigning for a political office, I would be campaigning for my political life.
As of December, the opinion polls showed that the people were still undecided. Fifty-four percent were against requiring me to leave office. At the same time, 45 percent would respect me more if I resigned so that the nation could concentrate on other problems than Watergate. The very thing I had been counting on to work in my favor had begun to work against me. In April 1973 I had hoped that the public would get tired of Watergate and apply pressure to Congress and the media to move on to other things. But the congressio
nal and media assault and the controversy over the White House tapes had so embroiled me in Watergate that the public was increasingly seeing me as the roadblock and their desire to move on to other things was affecting their willingness to have me removed. Unless I could do something to stem this tide, it would sweep me out of office.
As I had in every other campaign, I tried to weigh my strengths and weaknesses. As usual, the Democrats had the political edge because they had the numerical majority. Therefore impeachment was possible no matter what I did to try to stop it. It was probable if the Republicans decided not to help me or not to help me enough.
In fact, my Republican support in Washington had been steadily eroding. By the end of 1973, as the impeachment hearings drew near and as the prospect of the off-year elections threatened to become a personal barometer of public sentiment about me, even the solid middle-ground Republicans, including the party leadership in Congress, had begun to send out signals that unless I could dramatically turn the tide for myself, they would have to begin moving to arm’s length. I complained that it was typical Republican minority-party jitters, but in fact it was largely my own fault. Too many who had tried to defend me in the past had been burned, and many no longer felt sufficiently confident or motivated to take further risks for me.
My problems were compounded by the fact that all my activities with my congressional supporters had become uncomfortably self-conscious. No congressman could afford to seem to be too firmly committed to my camp lest he be accused of not considering the case against me on its merits—despite the fact that many on the other side were openly campaigning for impeachment. Normal phone calls and invitations to White House briefings were called into question by the press, and word started to come back that these activities might be made to look like attempts to influence votes and that congressmen would be grateful if I would leave them alone until after the impeachment question had been settled. This effectively barred any real strategy; my primary campaign weapon would have to be doing my job well and continuing to push for recognition of the fact that Watergate mattered so much less than the things I did well. At the same time, increasing irritation and factionalism began to build between the party’s liberal and conservative elements. With nerves rubbed raw from all the months of Watergate, and the usual uncertainties of an off-year election campaign, each group tended to view any policy action I took as a concession to the other side in an effort to win votes on impeachment.
Across the country several small but dedicated support groups began to appear. Don Kendall did a superb job trying to rally the business community; Rabbi Baruch Korff of Massachusetts spent his personal savings for an ad that launched a nationwide movement of people who felt that the current assault was not just against me personally but against the presidency as well. Peter Flanigan coordinated the liaison with many of the groups.
The Cabinet had held firm during the rocky passages of the last eight months. Some of them, such as Commerce Secretary Fred Dent and Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, went out into the country to speak in my behalf. Others stayed in Washington and showed their loyalty simply by doing their jobs despite all the pressures they had to endure. The White House staff was equally superb. I cannot ever adequately thank all those who stood by me. But despite the valor of the staff, everyone was completely exhausted. I do not for a moment concede that we were outclassed, but from the beginning we had been hopelessly outmanned. We reached out for new people. One was James St. Clair, a prominent Boston lawyer who came in to head the legal team. Dean Burch, former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, took over the political operation of the White House staff. Ken Cole, the Executive Director of the Domestic Council, became Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs. These appointments were well received, and they created a certain welcome momentum around the White House. But it would not last long.
Mel Laird soon announced that he was leaving the White House to begin a new career in the private sector. Jerry Ford had been sworn in as Vice President on December 6, and Laird indicated publicly that he expected Ford would take over many of the domestic policy and congressional liaison functions he had handled. However, Evans and Novak, the Washington Post columnists who so regularly reflected Laird’s point of view that they were jokingly referred to around Washington as his publicists, wrote that his departure was a signal to Republicans that they were no longer duty-bound to protect the President.
By the end of 1973 my longstanding political opponents began consolidating their efforts to make sure that I would be impeached. The ACLU distributed a fifty-six-page handbook that described ways to hasten and ensure impeachment. The principal ACLU spokesman was candid about their motivation: “There’s no civil rights movement. There’s no war. There’s no social-action movement. I hate to use the word, but it’s liberal chic. Impeachment is there.” Stewart Mott, McGovern’s principal contributor, under the guise of a “public interest” group, published a broadside accusing me of twenty-eight indictable crimes ranging from the war in Vietnam to the Watergate break-in. After Cox was dismissed, Ralph Nader’s organization began phoning around the country to promote impeachment. The AFL-CIO announced that impeachment could no longer be avoided and began a nationwide campaign, sending out four million leaflets on “Nineteen Points for Impeachment.” An AFL-CIO lobbyist observed in January 1974 that “when the timing is good” they were going to make an “all-out lobbying effort on the Hill” to have me impeached. The serious impact of organized labor’s decision to go all out for impeachment was underscored by the fact that nineteen of the twenty-one Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee had received a total of $189,196 in campaign money from organized labor in the 1972 election. Two of the Republican members had received $2,100. Committee Chairman Peter Rodino had received $30,923.
The question of impeachment would first be debated, and the evidence to justify it would first be investigated, by the House Judiciary Committee—and one had only to be able to count to know that the House Judiciary Committee was a stacked deck. Twenty-one of its thirty-eight members were Democrats; seventeen were Republicans. Of the twenty-one Democrats, eighteen either came from the party’s liberal wing or had reputations as hard-core partisans. Realistic observers of Washington politics conceded at the outset that these eighteen Democrats, despite their pieties about objectivity, were all going to vote for impeachment.
The three remaining Democrats were Southern conservatives: Walter Flowers of Alabama, Ray Thornton of Arkansas, and James Mann of South Carolina. They were the only unpredictable element on the Democratic side, because they had supported me in the past, often going against their party, on matters pertaining to national defense and budget restraint.
The consensus in Washington was that of the seventeen Republicans on the committee, eleven would stand by me. Among the remaining six, some were liberals who had rarely supported me on policy matters, some were facing difficult re-election campaigns, and some had already shown signs of personal disaffection because of Watergate. My only hope of averting a recommendation for impeachment from the committee would be either to hold every Republican and pick up two of the Southern Democrats, or to hold sixteen Republicans and win all three of the Southerners. Either of these outcomes was possible, but extremely remote.
Whatever the opposition from without, there was also an enemy within: the tapes. The biggest danger I saw in the year ahead was that both the Special Prosecutor and the House Judiciary Committee would begin requesting more and more tapes—always with the disclaimer that each request would be the last. But there would never be an end to these requests until all 5,000 hours of tapes had been requested and surrendered. These investigations had taken on a life of their own—I did not understand why more people could not see that. The various investigators were no longer trying to determine the truth of any particular charges against me. They wanted to go through everything, to pursue every lead, no matter how remote, until they found something that would in their view fin
ally justify my removal from office. And for me the continuing nightmare of the tapes was the possibility that, given enough time and enough tapes, they might find what they were looking for.
I wanted to stop it. In the past I had made the grievous mistake of saying I was going to stop it but failing to do so. Then, after paying the political price for refusing, we would cave when the pressure started to build. I regretted not having followed my instincts about this in the past and wanted to begin following them right away. I even talked about destroying the tapes. I argued that the best strategy would be to go to Congress and fling down the gauntlet and declare that enough is enough. I said that I wanted to do it in the State of the Union message on January 30: I would announce that I would provide nothing more to the House Judiciary Committee or the Special Prosecutor.
I was persuaded against it by the argument that using the State of the Union to draw lines and force confrontations would not only heighten the impeachment issue but completely overshadow the important national policy issues in the speech.
So the tapes sat there in the EOB. The ones I had already reviewed were bad enough; now what might be on the others haunted us all. I thought of the peculiar reality for me of Churchill’s observation: “The longer one lives, the more one realizes that everything depends upon chance. If anyone will look back over the course of even ten years experience, he will see that tiny incidents, utterly unimportant in themselves, have in fact governed the whole of his fortune and career.”
I had no way of remembering everything that was on the tapes, but I was sure that there were many more of the rough political patches that had already brought us to this point. I might survive any number of them, but eventually the accumulated weight would bring me down. Tricia later showed me a note from her diary that reminded me that sometimes people around you understand things better than you understand them yourself:
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