RN

by Richard Nixon

  The Democratic majority chose John Doar as their counsel. Renata Adler, who served as one of Doar’s aides, has since written in Atlantic Monthly that he had advocated my impeachment “months before he became special counsel, long before the inquiry began.”

  In March, James St. Clair wrote to Doar asking to participate in the hearings and to cross-examine witnesses. The committee finally and reluctantly agreed to allow St. Clair to participate in the closed sessions and to question witnesses, although it would not allow him to cross-examine them. When St. Clair wrote asking if he could see the grand jury material that Sirica had sent to the committee, he was refused.

  On March 7 I dictated a memo to Haig in which I said that as far as the impeachment inquiry was concerned, “the law case will be decided by the PR case.” That was what I felt we had to get across to St. Clair, Buzhardt, and our supporters in Congress. On March 15 I wrote another note: “St. Clair sees it too much as a trial, not a public relations exercise. We must work on him to get him to understand what we are up against.”

  My failure to use the State of the Union speech to draw the line firmly once and for all as far as providing more tapes was concerned proved to be the error I had feared it would be. Jaworski on one side, and now the House Judiciary Committee on the other, kept pressuring us for more and more. The Ervin Committee, whose initial request for five taped conversations had been rejected by the court, issued a new series of subpoenas for some 500 tapes and thousands of documents.

  We had voluntarily turned over tapes in a civil case brought by Ralph Nader. Nader’s lawyer, William Dobrovir, took a copy of one of these tapes and played it, as he was later quoted, “just for fun,” at a cocktail party in Georgetown. The Special Prosecutor’s office was outraged, but Dobrovir excused himself by saying that it had been an impulsive mistake. He was contradicted by his hostess, who said that he had told her in advance of his plan to bring the tape and play it and that she had told at least one of the guests about it beforehand. Dobrovir had also played the tape for a CBS television news reporter.

  In December Jaworski came to us with a plea for access to another group of tapes. Haig told me that Jaworski had assured him that this would be his last request for tapes relating to the break-in and cover-up, and, on this assurance, we yielded. Thus, as of January 8, 1974, every request for tapes or documents that Jaworski had made had been met.

  On January 8 and 9 St. Clair received letters asking for more than forty additional tapes—twenty-five of them relating to the break-in and cover-up. Haig was surprised, shocked, and disillusioned by Jaworski’s action.

  St. Clair wrote Jaworski and reminded him of the specific narrowness of the court ruling requiring us to surrender the nine subpoenaed tapes. Nor could Jaworski maintain that he needed these new tapes in order to obtain Watergate convictions: the year-end report of the Special Prosecution Force stated that enough evidence had been received to consider major indictments, and a prosecutor is not supposed to recommend an indictment unless he feels he already has the evidence needed to get a conviction. Two weeks later Jaworski trapped himself with his own words. In an interview he thought was off the record he revealed that as far as he was concerned, his office already “had the full story of Watergate.” St. Clair told Jaworski that I would not give up any more tapes. Jaworski met with St. Clair and seemed to give him yet another assurance that this one additional request would be the last. Haig also met with Jaworski and reported that he was being very expansive and cooperative in evaluating the situation. My notes on Haig’s report show these as the major points made by Jaworski:

  1. Jaworski had told Haig that the staff he had inherited from Cox had a number of “fanatics” on it and that he was having great difficulty in keeping them under control.

  2. Jaworski told Haig that Haldeman was worse off than Ehrlichman. He told him that he was prepared to let Ehrlichman off easy, but that Ehrlichman’s attorney had taken too tough a line and, consequently, he had no choice but to proceed against Ehrlichman in the same way that he was proceeding on the charges against Haldeman.

  3. Jaworski made what Haig and I considered to be a very interesting comment that “Sirica was really a friend of the President.” Sirica, he felt, would not like the attitude of the members of his, Jaworski’s, staff who were, in his view, more interested in “getting the President” than in getting the facts.

  4. Jaworski disliked Rodino and considered him “publicity mad.”

  5. Jaworski liked St. Clair.

  6. With regard to the additional tapes and documents that Jaworski had just requested, he urged Haig to give him “the softest possible turn-down,” and Haig said that we ought to “use Vaseline” in responding to these requests and in handling Jaworski.

  On February 13 St. Clair wrote to Jaworski again, saying that he hoped he would have reconsidered the broad scope of his request, and, for the second time, respectfully declining the request for more than forty additional tapes.

  Jaworski immediately wrote to Senator Eastland, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, acknowledging that he could bring indictments on the evidence he had, but arguing that new tapes “may contain” evidence necessary for future trials. This kind of reasoning could be applied to any and all documents in the presidential files. It was hard to see where, if anywhere, Jaworski would ever draw a line.

  The escalating pattern seemed never ending. Because of the original Special Prosecutor’s request we had turned over eight conversations; we had also given the prosecutors more than 700 documents. We had voluntarily provided access to seventeen additional tapes since the first court ruling. Now they were back asking for more than forty more.

  The House Judiciary Committee would prove no different from the Special Prosecutor in its insatiable demands for tapes and other materials. On March 6 I announced that we would turn over to the committee all the materials we had given to the Special Prosecutor; these comprised some nineteen tapes and more than 700 documents. I also agreed to provide literally boxloads of documents requested by the committee from departments and agencies, ranging from meetings of the Cost of Living Council to high-level sessions on import quotas. I agreed to answer in writing and under oath any question from the committee. I also indicated that I was willing to be interviewed under oath, if that was deemed necessary.

  At this time the committee’s range of investigations covered scores of policy and political areas—from the secret Cambodian bombing in 1969 to the Cost of Living Council’s decisions about the price of hamburger. And the list was still growing.

  Before the committee had narrowed down any of its areas of investigation into anything like specific charges against me, and before it had even looked at the 700 documents or listened to the nineteen tapes, a letter was sent demanding over forty more tapes.

  I met with House Republican Leader John Rhodes, and he agreed that the committee’s request was extremely broad. He confided that some of the committee members had not even known all Doar was doing. But Rhodes was emphatic when he said that, as unjust as it undoubtedly was, no Republican congressman could afford to defend a refusal by the White House to produce any additional evidence the committee requested.

  I had to face the fact that we were over a barrel and that my weakened political situation gave the Judiciary Committee license for an unrestrained fishing expedition. I had no practical choice but to comply with their demands. If I refused, they would vote me in contempt of Congress. I made a note on March 22, 1974, at 2 A.M.: “Lowest day. Contempt equals impeachment.”

  Since the first of the year impeachment had been like a shifting sea. One day it would be calm, and there would seem to be a chance we could survive. The next day it would turn stormy and survival seemed unlikely. By the end of March almost every day was stormy. In New York, John Mitchell and Maury Stans were on trial in the Vesco case. Some news reports from the trial implied that John Dean had been unrattled in his testimony, whereas Stans and Mitchell had seemed shaken and had not been v
ery effective. Ultimately, both Stans and Mitchell were found innocent, and the jurors told the press that it was Dean they had not believed. But we did not know that in March when the impeachment hearings were gearing up.

  The bombshell of my having to pay $400,000 in new taxes because of the disallowance of the deduction for my donation of my papers was still reverberating, and we had just been hit with the leaks that Brooks’s subcommittee was charging that $17 million of government funds had been spent on my personal property. The court-appointed tape “experts” had also recently issued one of their series of reports on the 181/2-minute gap. In California, John Ehrlichman, on trial for the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, asked and obtained a court subpoena for me to appear at the trial.

  We had also received word that John Connally was about to be drawn into a grand jury investigation over illegal contributions alleged to have been made to him from milk producers’ organizations. In normal times the Justice Department would not have considered moving against a former Secretary of the Treasury, three-term Governor, and Secretary of the Navy solely on the basis of a highly unreliable informant who succeeded in having the Special Prosecutor’s office drop serious charges being brought against him in a totally unrelated matter. But these were not ordinary times. Whenever I met with Connally, he would brush off his own troubles. He was innocent, he said, and there was no way that he could ever be found otherwise. He turned out to be right: in 1975 he was ultimately acquitted on all charges. But in the meantime this was another numbing blow. “Just one time,” I said to Ziegler, “will we ever just one time get a break in this long, tortuous year?”

  On April 13, for the first time, the Harris poll reported a bare majority, 43 percent to 41 percent, was now in favor of my impeachment.

  Haig, Buzhardt, St. Clair, and I decided that because of the political realities of the situation, we had to compromise on the House Judiciary Committee’s request for more tapes. We decided to supply the committee with written verbatim transcripts from which only material unrelated to Watergate had been excised. This ultimately became the “Blue Book,” a massive, 1,300-page document officially titled Submission of Recorded Presidential Conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives by President Richard Nixon. Our hope was that this response might, through its sheer bulk, bring home to the public what was being asked of me.

  It soon became clear that there were many gray areas in the conversations—material not entirely unrelated to “Watergate,” as that term had constantly expanded in meaning—but unrelated to my knowledge and action on the cover-up, which were the issues actually before the committee.

  Buzhardt suggested the phrase “Material Unrelated to Presidential Action Deleted,” which was typed in the Blue Book transcripts wherever such a deletion was made. In order to verify our decisions in this regard, we offered to invite Rodino and the ranking Republican on the committee, Edward Hutchinson of Michigan, to come to the White House and hear any of the uncut original tapes they chose.

  Before we could even complete the Blue Book in response to the House Judiciary Committee’s request for 42 tapes, we received a letter requesting 142 more tapes and documents relating to Watergate, the Huston Plan, Daniel Ellsberg, wiretaps, and the visit of Judge Byrne to San Clemente. Not long after this, Peter Rodino warned that the committee might soon be asking for still more tapes and documents dealing with my income taxes, the San Clemente property, campaign dirty tricks, and other matters.

  Just before midnight on April 20 I made a note:

  D Day

  1. Any more tapes will destroy the office.

  2. Leaving the question open will only invite more unreasonable demands.

  3. Better to fight and lose defending the office than surrender and win a personal victory at disastrous long-range cost to the office of the presidency.

  At nine o’clock on the night of April 29 I made a televised address in which I announced that I was yielding the transcripts of the tapes requested by the House Judiciary Committee so that the committee could reach an informed judgment and because the American people were entitled to the facts and the evidence that demonstrated those facts. I said that I hoped that by violating the principle of confidentiality this once I could restore it for the future.

  I said that the transcripts I was releasing included all the relevant portions of the subpoenaed conversations, “the rough as well as the smooth, the strategy sessions, the exploration of alternatives, the weighing of human and political costs. . . . These materials—together with those already made available—will tell it all.”

  Then I continued:

  I realize that these transcripts will provide grist for many sensational stories in the press. Parts will seem to be contradictory with one another and parts will be in conflict with some of the testimony given in the Senate Watergate Committee hearings.

  I have been reluctant to release these tapes not just because they will embarrass me and those with whom I have talked—which they will—and not just because they will become the subject of speculation and even ridicule—which they will—and not just because certain parts of them will be seized upon by political and journalistic opponents—which they will.

  I have been reluctant because, in these and in all the other conversations in this office, people have spoken their minds freely, never dreaming that specific sentences or even parts of sentences would be picked out as the subjects of national attention and controversy . . . .

  I am confident that the American people will see these transcripts for what they are, fragmentary records from a time more than a year ago that now seems very distant, the records of a President and of a man suddenly being confronted and having to cope with information which, if true, would have the most far-reaching consequences not only for his personal reputation but, more important, for his hopes, his plans, his goals for the people who had elected him as their leader.

  In giving you these records—blemishes and all—I am placing my trust in the basic fairness of the American people.

  I know in my own heart that through the long, painful, and difficult process revealed in these transcripts I was trying in that period to discover what was right and to do what was right.

  It is not possible to describe what it is like to see long-forgotten conversations suddenly reappear as lengthy transcripts. We are conditioned to think of the written word as a form of planned communication, and when the words of an ordinary conversation are put on paper they acquire a rigidity that, despite a literal accuracy in terms of what was said, may completely fail to capture or reflect the nature of the meeting or conversation as it actually took place. An observation can seem like an intention; an offhand comment appears deliberate and premeditated; a passing thought can strike the reader as a prescription for action. Seeing the words there in lifeless type on a page, you realize that there is no way to explain how at one moment in a discussion one person is a devil’s advocate and the next moment the roles all shift. Outsiders reading only the words of those conversations about Watergate could know nothing of the torment, the spectrum of concern that lay behind them. More than for the substance, the transcripts would be criticized for the tone of the discussions.

  Much of the impact of Watergate throughout the past year had come from the fact that it was breaking new ground in the political awareness of the American people by introducing them to things like government-authorized wiretaps and break-ins, White House taping systems, and the political use of the IRS. As much as many may have suspected beforehand that such things took place, I had to bear the brunt of having revealed the particulars that confirmed those suspicions.

  And so it was with the Blue Book transcripts. The American myth that Presidents are always presidential, that they sit in the Oval Office talking in lofty and quotable phrases, will probably never die—and probably never should, because it reflects an important aspect of the American character.

  But the reality of politics and power i
n the White House is very different. It is a rough game, and the men I have known who have made it there reflect the ability to play rough when necessary and come out on top. There is noble talk in the Oval Office to be sure, high-minded and disinterested. But there are also frustration, worry, anxiety, profanity and, above all, raw pragmatism when it comes to politics and political survival.

  With the Blue Book transcripts, as with so many other Watergate revelations, I was in the position of telling the American people things that they did not want to know.

  The reaction to the Blue Book was oddly delayed. On May 3, four days after it had been released, I went to a rally in Phoenix. A crowd of 15,000 had gathered inside the auditorium, and when a group of about 150 demonstrators started yelling “Out now,” they were shouted into silence. Afterward, at a reception at Barry Goldwater’s mountaintop house, both he and John Rhodes came up individually to say how pleased they were with the reception and to assure me that I could continue to count on their support.