RN

by Richard Nixon

  As early as 1971 I had turned my personal attention to giving an impetus to the production of nuclear energy. I ordered the first American breeder reactor project to begin in the spring of 1971.

  By June 4, 1971, our study of the imminent energy problem had evolved into the first Presidential message on energy in our history. In it I urged the continuation of the development of the breeder reactor and committed the administration to the creation of a program for converting coal into clean gaseous fuels and to the acceleration of oil and gas lease sales on the outer continental shelf. I also proposed that all the federal government’s energy resource development programs—some fifteen of them—be brought together under one agency. I said, “This message points the way for America—at considerable cost in money, but an investment that is urgent and, therefore, justified—points the way for finding new sources of energy and, at the same time, clean energy that will not pollute the air, will not pollute the environment.”

  On April 18, 1973, I sent Congress five major new requests involving the energy program. In the twenty-two months since my first message the worsening energy situation had been almost ignored. On our own, the administration had increased funding for experimental research and development by nearly 50 percent, but legislation was needed to forestall the crunch that we saw coming.

  I asked Congress to deregulate natural gas and let the price rise with the market so that there would be more money and more incentive in the private sector for additional development. I also requested tax credits for oil exploration, approved extending the deadline on unreasonable environmental regulations, and ended the mandatory quotas on imports. By executive action I tripled the offshore acreage for oil and gas leases. I made requests for further research and development on nuclear and geothermal energy and on shale oil energy resources. I also announced the creation of an Office of Energy Conservation and proposed a new Cabinet-level department dealing exclusively with energy, the Department of Energy and Natural Resources.

  In mid-May we began to insist on the voluntary sharing of gasoline resources between the major retailers and independent dealers. On June 29 I named John Love, governor of Colorado, to head the new energy office. I renewed my appeal to Congress, calling for a $10 billion program for energy research over the next five years, to match the anticipated $200 billion that would be spent in the private sector.

  I asked that people voluntarily reduce road speeds to fifty miles an hour; this alone would have saved 25 percent of the fuel consumed traveling at seventy miles an hour. I said that the government was going to reduce its energy consumption by 7 percent over the next year and urged that personal consumption voluntarily be cut by 5 percent.

  I again appealed to Congress on September 10, when I urged passage of seven bills, including one approving construction of the Alaska pipeline, and others covering deepwater port construction to make bigger fuel imports possible, the deregulation of natural gas, and new legislation on strip mining.

  The first distant rumble of a possible Arab oil embargo began in the spring of 1973. By mid-summer King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was warning that unless our policy toward Israel changed, there would be a reduction of the oil sent to us. We stood our ground, and I said in a press conference on September 5: “Both sides need to start negotiating. That is our position. We are not pro-Israel and we are not pro-Arab, and we are not any more pro-Arab because they have oil and Israel hasn’t. We are pro-peace and it is the interest of the whole area for us to get those negotiations off dead center.”

  After the outbreak of the Mideast war on October 6, the Arab position hardened, and by the end of October we were confronted with a full-scale embargo. By November it was clear that we were going to fall as much as 10 percent behind our energy needs, a figure that could rise as high as 17 percent by winter, depending upon weather conditions.

  On November 7 I went on television to announce to the American people what I called the “stark fact”: we were heading toward the acutest shortage of energy since World War II.

  I called for a three-stage conservation effort, involving executive action, state and local action, and congressional action. Heating in federal buildings would be lowered to between 65 and 68 degrees, and I urged the same for private houses. I called for car pooling and asked state and local governments to set speed limits at fifty miles an hour. I asked Congress to pass an emergency energy act that would give me the authority to relax environmental restrictions on a case-by-case basis as I deemed necessary, and would impose special restrictions on the use of energy resources. I asked that the country be returned to daylight-saving time and called for the imposition of a nationwide speed limit of fifty miles an hour on federal highways.

  I recalled the dedication that had characterized the Manhattan Project and the unity of spirit that had made the Apollo program a success. It was clear that when the American people decided a particular goal was worth reaching, they could surmount every obstacle to achieve it. Then I announced the beginning of Project Independence, with the goal of attaining energy independence for America by 1980.

  Unfortunately only two of the proposals I requested—daylight-saving and a lowered speed limit—made it out of Congress before the Christmas recess. With the important exception of the Alaska pipeline bill, which I signed on November 16, Congress had failed to pass one major energy bill that I had requested.

  Although the congressional response was disappointing, the American people rallied through the long winter months of 1973 and 1974. Conservation was working; but the crisis still existed. On November 25 I had to tighten controls still further, banning the sale of gasoline on Sunday, requesting cutbacks in outdoor lighting, and announcing that we were going to have a cutback on gasoline allocations by 15 percent in order to have enough heating oil.

  The White House Christmas tree had 80 percent fewer lights that year. And instead of flying to California on Air Force One for the holiday season, Pat and I flew on a commercial airliner. We returned on a small Air Force Jetstar that had to make one refueling stop and got us back to the White House at 3 A.M.

  Despite the truly valiant nationwide conservation effort, it was a long winter of energy discontent. Lines at gas stations lengthened. People had to get up in the early hours of cold mornings to get in line for fuel. Even then, a station might not open because its allotted shipment did not arrive. If it did open, it was often only a short time until the supply ran out.

  Before long the energy crisis had generated a serious new economic crisis. As early as the spring of 1973 gasoline prices had taken the biggest leap in twenty-two years. The oil-producing countries had the leverage, and they were using it. The National Petroleum Council said that it feared the energy crisis might lead to a recession. The uncertainty began to snowball. A Harris poll showed that 54 percent thought we were heading into a recession. The stock market, which had topped a record high of 1000 at the start of my second term, was now down in the 800s. Every wild rumor gained some nervous credence: gasoline was going to rise to a dollar a gallon; bread would rise to a dollar a loaf. The Wholesale Price Index climbed 18.2 percent in 1973 and the Cost of Living Index registered the biggest rise since 1947. Most of these increases resulted directly from food and fuel prices.

  There was no easy place to lay the blame. There was even a lingering disbelief on the part of many Americans that the crisis was real. But every report I received assured me that the crisis had not been contrived by the oil companies. The cause seemed clear: foreign oil imports had risen from $4 a barrel before the crisis to $12 a barrel afterward, and the domestic oil companies were passing on this increase to consumers.

  Nor was there a particular school of economics to be made the scapegoat. Walter Heller, economic adviser to several Democratic administrations, said, “The energy crisis caught us with our parameters down. The food crisis caught us too. . . . This was a year of infamy in inflation forecasting. There are many things we just don’t know.”

  As the situation worsened t
he pressure for radical action—and specifically, for gas rationing—increased. Soon Senators Mansfield, Proxmire, and Jackson were spearheading a campaign to impose rationing. A number of governors also called for it, and before the winter was over they had been joined by several of my energy experts within the administration.

  I strongly opposed this idea. My personal experience at the OPA had convinced me that rationing does not work well even in wartime when patriotism inspires sacrifice. I knew that in peacetime an enormous black market would develop and the entire program would become a fiasco. The huge bureaucracy required to implement rationing would cost millions of dollars, and, like any bureaucracy, it would be determined to perpetuate itself long after it was needed. I was sure that rationing would end up being a cure worse than the illness.

  By January 19 I could report real progress: in the month of December national gas consumption was 9 percent below what had been predicted; use of electricity was down 10 percent; the federal government had actually cut back on its energy usage by more than 20 percent; and by executive action I had established a Federal Energy Office in the executive branch and placed Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Bill Simon in charge. Simon moved swiftly to impose a strong hand and was soon dubbed the nation’s “energy Czar.”

  Congress had adjourned for the Christmas holidays without passing any of the legislation I requested, so I met its return in January 1974 with a new appeal for four short-term actions and eleven other priority requests. In my State of the Union address I warned that the energy crisis was now our foremost legislative concern.

  From the moment the Arab oil embargo began we had worked unceasingly to end it. Kissinger discussed the problem with both King Faisal and President Sadat. After one of his meetings with Sadat in December, Kissinger sent me a memo describing how he had reminded Sadat of our unique role in bringing peace to the Middle East:

  I told Sadat that without your personal willingness to confront the domestic issue nothing would have been possible.

  Sadat promised me he would get the oil embargo lifted during the first half of January and said that he would call for its lifting in a statement which praised your personal role in bringing the parties to the negotiating table and making progress thereafter.

  I followed up with a letter to Sadat on December 28:

  For my part, I pledge myself to do everything in my power to ensure that my second term as President will be remembered as the period in which the United States developed a new and productive relationship with Egypt and the Arab world. . . .

  However, the clearly discriminatory action of the oil producers can totally vitiate the effective contribution the United States is determined to make in the days ahead. Therefore, Mr. President, I must tell you in complete candor that it is essential that the oil embargo and oil production restrictions against the United States be ended at once. It cannot await the outcome of the current talks on disengagement.

  A few weeks later, after the Egyptian-Israeli troop disengagement in January, we began urging Sadat even more insistently to help lift the embargo. At the end of the month he wrote to tell me that he had dispatched a special envoy to King Faisal and the other Arab leaders and that they had now agreed to lift the embargo, and a meeting to affirm this decision would be held in February. Unfortunately the meeting turned out to be a stalemate and the embargo continued.

  Sadat soon sent me another message through our UN Delegate Shirley Temple Black, who had seen him privately. “I will lift the embargo,” he told her. “I will lift it for President Nixon.”

  By mid-March there were reports that the embargo would be lifted conditionally, depending on the foreign policy behavior of the United States. I addressed these reports in a question-and-answer session in Chicago on March 15:

  The United States, as far as the embargo is concerned, is not going to be pressured by our friends in the Mideast or others who might be our opponents to doing something before we are able to do it. And I would only suggest that insofar as any action on the embargo is taken, that if it has any implications of pressure on the United States it would have a countereffect on our efforts to go forward on the peace front, the negotiation front, because it would simply slow down, in my opinion, our very real and earnest efforts to get the disengagement on the Syrian front and also to move towards a permanent settlement.

  Finally on March 18, after almost six months, seven of the nine Arab states finally agreed to lift the oil embargo. The decision was not supposed to be conditional on American policy, but it was to be subject to review in June.

  The Arab oil embargo caused America’s economic output to decline by as much as $15 billion during the first quarter of 1974. But it can be said that the energy crisis of 1974 had at least one positive effect: it made energy consciousness a part of American life.

  As the oil embargo was ending, Kissinger resumed his shuttle diplomacy. Now his goal was a Syrian-Israeli troop disengagement. By this time both he and I recognized that we were in a race against time before another incident, inadvertent or otherwise, further froze the Syrian and Israeli positions and perhaps even drew the Egyptians back into the conflict. We were also racing against growing uncertainty in the thinking of some of the Mideastern leaders as the impeachment turmoil steadily threatened to undermine my position. On March 21 I received a report from Henry J. Taylor, a columnist and former ambassador to Switzerland, who had recently seen Sadat. “I am very worried about the President,” Sadat had told Taylor. “I need time,” he added with concern. “I wonder if I am going to have it. I need six months. You know what I would like to do? I would like to come to Washington and fight for President Nixon.”

  A WAR OF ATTRITION

  On Friday, March 1, John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Chuck Colson, Robert Mardian, Gordon Strachan, and Kenneth Parkinson, who had been one of the CRP’s lawyers, were indicted on charges of conspiracy and, except for Mardian, on charges of obstruction of justice. All but Parkinson, Colson, and Mardian were also charged with having given false testimony. On March 7 Colson, Ehrlichman, Liddy, and three others were indicted for the break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

  The indictments were not a surprise, but they were still a blow. These men were about to face trials in a city where it would be almost impossible for them to have an impartial jury; a poll taken in Washington showed that 84 percent of the people there already thought they were guilty.

  Earlier in the year Haig told me that Jaworski had reassured him that no one currently in the White House was going to be named by the grand jury—including me. Instead, we thought, he was sending grand jury material relating to me to Judge Sirica in a sealed report. On March 18 Sirica directed that this material be sent to the House Judiciary Committee. He also stated that, contrary to recent leaks, the grand jury’s report was only a straightforward compilation of evidence and drew no accusatory conclusions.

  The political prospects for Republican members of the House and Senate who faced re-election in November 1974 continued to worsen. I believed that the two issues of prosperity in the domestic economy and peace in the world, the same two issues that had swayed off-year elections for as long as I had been in public life, would ultimately tip the balance in this one, too. But many prospective candidates apparently felt that Watergate was going to overshadow everything else and that they would have a better chance to win with Jerry Ford as President.

  There were to be five special elections held in the first few months of 1974. Ordinarily these would have attracted only minor interest, but in the superheated climate of the time the media treated them as highly important and significant votes of confidence for me. Of the five, Republican candidates won only one.

  On March 19, 1974, Republican Senator James Buckley of New York became the first of my major conservative supporters to call for my resignation. He told reporters that he feared the effects of the “melodrama” of a Senate trial, in which “the Chamber would become a twentieth-century Roman Colosse
um, as the performers are thrown to the electronic lions.”

  I addressed myself to Buckley’s point in a press conference that same day:

  While it might be an act of courage to run away from a job that you were elected to do, it also takes courage to stand and fight for what you believe is right, and that is what I intend to do. . . . From the stand-point of statesmanship, for a President of the United States, any President, to resign because of charges made against him which he knew were false and because he had fallen in the polls, I think would not be statesmanship. It might be good politics, but it would be bad statesmanship. And it would mean that our system of government would be changed for all Presidents and all generations in the future.

  Four days earlier at a question-and-answer session in Chicago I addressed a similar question by recalling that Senator Fulbright had once demanded Truman’s resignation when he was at a low point of his popularity. “Some of the best decisions ever made by Presidents,” I said, “were made when they were not too popular.”

  In March and April I knew that what had been at best only a remote chance to block impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee had now become almost nonexistent. When Chairman Peter Rodino addressed the House of Representatives on February 6—the day of a resolution ratifying the impeachment inquiry—he had said: “We are going to work expeditiously and fairly. . . . Whatever the result, whatever we learn or conclude, let us now proceed with such care and decency and thoroughness and honor that the vast majority of the American people and their children after them will say, ‘That was the right course. There was no other way.’ ”

  Among the members of the committee who sat solemnly by when Rodino said this was John Conyers of Michigan, who had already told the Washington Star on March 17, that talk of conscience, evidence, and constitutional factors was “all crap.” In the New York Times Magazine on April 28 he had described his role on the committee as “making sure Rodino doesn’t get too damn fair.” Another member was Father Robert Drinan of Massachusetts, who had urged impeachment for nearly a year and was frequently seen wearing an “Impeach Nixon” button on his clerical lapel. Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin had decorated his office with “Impeach Nixon” bumper strips. Charles Rangel of New York had been quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “There is no doubt in my mind that the President of the United States is a criminal.” And Jerome Waldie of California had opened a letter to his constituents by thanking them “for supporting my efforts to impeach President Nixon.” These were some of the committee members who, in Rodino’s view, were going to proceed with “care and decency and thoroughness and honor” in their investigations into whether the evidence would justify the framing of articles of impeachment against me.