RN

by Richard Nixon

  I think of myself worrying as I have from time to time—what was going to happen next—and you get that sinking feeling in the bottom of your stomach and sometimes there are nights that are sleepless. I think of people like Kalmbach and Porter and others who are threatened with being sent to prison for fifteen to twenty years and so forth.

  Perhaps as years go on attitudes may change, but they have left some deep scars, as I pointed out to both Ziegler and Haig on the plane coming back from Russia. Scars that will remain in the public mind and will not go away. Our only course of action is to keep fighting right through to the last and not to die a thousand deaths in the meantime.

  I talked to Bebe too about this situation. Pat had pointed out that Bebe had been almost—she said that he had been really depressed. The whole purpose of course is to discredit, destroy, harass everybody around the President.

  Both Pat and Bebe spoke of Rose and that she was really a fighter. I am glad that Pat sensed that from her talk with Rose coming home on the plane because Rose has gone through hell on this whole eighteen-minute business and she certainly has stood up with great character and great courage.

  Bebe makes the point when I tell him how regretful I am that he and other decent people have to go through all this hell, he says that my own strength has inspired them all. I am inclined to think that I have not been as strong as I could have been or should have been, but I must say when we have such people like this we can’t let them down, and I have got to fight every inch of the way.

  In any event, if we can get through the Court and by the impeachment vote we will then have a couple of years to do as many good things for the country as we possibly can. What we have to do is to hold ourselves together through this next very difficult two-month period.

  On June 27, 1974, Peter Rodino told a group of reporters that all twenty-one Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee were going to vote for impeachment. With this statement he confirmed what no one had dared say publicly before: the votes were in even before the witnesses had been heard or a defense had been made. Rodino was reprimanded by members of both parties. His first reaction was to try to cover up; he even went before his colleagues in the House and insisted that he had not made the statement. But reporters from the Los Angeles Times and ABC who had been there and had heard him confirmed the accuracy of the story.

  By this time there was no question in my mind that the House Judiciary Committee was going to vote to impeach me. It was the margin of that vote that would assume a vital importance, because it would have a direct effect on the vote of the full House. The critical votes were still the six swing Republicans and the three Southern Democrats. The way these nine men voted would tell me whether I would be impeached by the House. Timmons had reduced it almost to a science: it was a straightforward example of a multiplier effect. He calculated that each vote we lost in the committee would cost us five votes from our supporters on the floor of the House.

  In the first week of July, after we returned from the Soviet Union, Timmons felt we would win at least one of the three Southern Democrats and lose at least two of the six Republicans. If we could hold our losses to these numbers in the committee, then we could be optimistic about beating impeachment in the full House. This analysis found reinforcement from several sides. Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor wrote that although Watergate was not worn out as an issue, it appeared to be receding from public conversation. Hugh Sidey, Time’s White House correspondent, told Henry Kissinger that his editors had decided that I was going to weather the impeachment storm. John Osborne, The New Republic’s White House watcher, told Ron Ziegler that he thought the House would not vote to impeach.

  There were other hopeful signs of the sort that political pros might be expected to appreciate: RNC Chairman George Bush called the White House to say that he would like to have me appear on a fund-raising telethon; Don Rumsfeld called from Brussels, offering to resign as Ambassador to NATO and return to help work against impeachment among his former colleagues in Congress; and John Rhodes said he was for me unless he was presented with overwhelming evidence he should not be. Haig told me that his talks with the Cabinet members also indicated that the tide had turned. I was encouraged but not overly optimistic as I heard these reports.

  Diary

  Whatever the case may be, the big battle now is to try and hold the committee as well as we possibly can during the next couple of weeks. Obviously, the Democrats are going to pull out all the stops.

  Dean will come again pretty soon and probably slap me around some more, but we don’t think there are any other shoes ready to drop, although from the past track record no one can really be sure.

  Getting back to Washington always gets you back into really the depths, although Ziegler says that the press is not nearly as hostile. But there is a depressing atmosphere here, and, of course, when you compound this with the family problem it makes it pretty tough. On the other hand, having survived this long I am convinced that we can see it through to the end—however the end comes out.

  On July 12 I signed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, a bill that I considered both a personal and a national triumph. After five years of nagging, urging, and pleading, and despite my weakened position because of Watergate, we had finally pushed through legislation that would make Congress face its responsibility for keeping the federal budget at agreed-upon levels.

  After the ceremony Jerry Ford came over to me with his big, confident smile. “Don’t worry, Mr. President,” he said, “you’ve got this beat. We have a solid fifty-vote margin in the House, and we can build from there.” Bryce Harlow, a man who knew Congress as well as any congressman, was also at the ceremony. He added, “Boss, you’ve got it won.”

  I wanted to believe these enthusiastic reports, but I knew Washington too well to think that the forces ranged against me would quit or forfeit the battle so easily. Twenty-five years of political instinct told me that despite the superficial appearances, things were not good; in fact, my instinct was stronger than ever that somehow, on some subsurface level, the political tide was flowing fast, and flowing against me.

  I tried to pinpoint the reasons for my apprehension. One was the report of the numbers on my side. According to almost every report, there were approximately a hundred members of the House definitely committed to me, about seventy-five openly against me, and the rest were “undecided.” I knew from experience that, more often than not, when a congressman tells someone from the White House that he is undecided on a particular question, he is probably against it and is only trying to be polite in declining to state his opposition before the vote is taken.

  Another reason was my knowledge of how forceful, organized, and powerful the Democratic congressional leadership was, and how desperate they would become if it looked as though impeachment was actually going to be voted down. Having brought things this far, they would rightly fear the risk of a backlash if the impeachment drive failed and voters began to feel that the agony of Watergate had been prolonged for partisan motives.

  Another major unknown was the Supreme Court, which would soon be handing down its ruling on Jaworski’s petition for the sixty-four additional tapes. St. Clair was optimistic, but even he conceded that the Court would probably end up voting along political lines, despite the fact that we had the stronger legal case. In the event that the Court ruled flatly against me in the tapes case, I could decide to defy the ruling. But that would almost certainly bring about impeachment and therefore could not realistically be considered. Another choice was to abide by the Court’s ruling without actually complying with it. This would involve some plan to turn over the tapes only in an excerpted form. In fact, I knew that even this approach would not take care of the real problem. I had not heard all the tapes, but I was concerned that in those thousands of hours of conversations there might be material that would be so damaging that I would not want to turn it over. There was already the June 23 tape, which still wor
ried me. As I had noted in my diary on July 21, “Of course, how we handle the 23rd tape is a very difficult call because I don’t know how it could be excerpted properly.”

  The Supreme Court ruling was going to have a tremendous—and almost certainly a detrimental—influence on the course of my impeachment hearings.

  Diary

  At this time, I must say, I am not particularly optimistic, although I would not be surprised about anything. If only [Burger] and his colleagues can look at the terrible impact if they are coming down in a way that totally destroys executive privilege—the impact that it will have in the future on Presidents. If only they can see that we may come up with a reasonable approach.

  In any event, if only we could get over this hurdle without tripping and falling and giving the House some ground for impeachment we can then insist on a vote in the House and then move on to other things.

  If they leave any air in the balloon at all, if we could find a way to comply or abide, this would be the best of all worlds for us because then they could go on with their vote in the House and then we could in the last two years make up for the time that has been lost over the past year and one-half in doing what we were elected to do, the nation’s business.

  I also felt that the optimists among my supporters had not taken into account the political realities that would come into play when the full House of Representatives was faced with having to vote on an impeachment resolution. In addition to the partisan Democrats who were sure to vote for impeachment regardless of the evidence, an increasing number of Republicans would become concerned that if I were still in office during the November elections, I would be like an albatross around their necks.

  If my support in Congress was halfhearted and disorganized, the White House staff was not in much better shape. Haig’s eleventh-hour efforts to organize a group that would lead the fight from within the White House was handicapped by the “arm’s length” requirement that our congressional supporters had put on their contacts with us. I knew, too, that they were handicapped psychologically by their own uncertainty about the case, by their fear that there might be still another bombshell—and that they might be out on the front line when it hit.

  I was also concerned because the economy, which most voters still named as the issue of number-one concern to them, was standing on wobbly postembargo, postfreeze legs. The Dow Jones average had just hit a new four-year low. To the considerable degree that the economy affected national confidence and that national confidence would affect attitudes toward impeachment, this was a cause for the most serious concern. Unfortunately there did not seem to be much that I could do about the problem. I had convened and attended a number of meetings focusing on it, and there was general agreement that the best course was just to wait and ride it out.

  Finally, there were the media. I felt that, consciously or subconsciously, they had a vested interest in my impeachment. After all the months of leaks and accusations and innuendo, the media stood to lose if I were vindicated. The defenses never caught up with the charges. For example, after all the damaging press and television coverage of alleged abuses of the IRS, when IRS Commissioner Donald Alexander announced the conclusions of a report that found no one had in fact been harassed as a result of White House intervention—a conclusion later supported by the findings of a joint congressional committee investigation—it was run on page thirty-nine of the New York Times and received scant coverage elsewhere. Most of the reporters and commentators were still filtering everything through their own Watergate obsessions. For example, Douglas Kiker of NBC reported that the White House was seeking to create the “impression” of a “busy President, back from an important and exhausting peacemaking mission, trying to do his job” despite harassment from the House Judiciary Committee. Months later, House Judiciary Committee impeachment firebrand Jerome Waldie said he doubted that I would have been forced from office “if the press had not desired it.”

  These were some of the reasons that my own instincts about the outcome of the impeachment effort were more pessimistic than those of most of my advisers. I often thought of something Tricia had observed several months earlier that seemed to me to be a perfect description of our problem. She had said that trying to explain something like Watergate was just like engaging in trench warfare: despite all the effort and all the blood expended, it was simply impossible to advance.

  On July 12 we left Washington to spend two weeks in California. We received word aboard Air Force One that John Ehrlichman had been convicted of perjury and of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. I was deeply depressed by the tragic irony of this development. Ellsberg, who had leaked top-secret documents, had gone free. Ehrlichman, who was trying to prevent such leaks, had been convicted.

  When Pat, Ed, Tricia, and I arrived in San Clemente on the afternoon of July 12, everything seemed to be the same as it had been on every other California trip. We all went for a swim in the pool and then had an early dinner. It was a cool, clear night, and Ed and Tricia decided to take a walk before going to bed. They went through the garden and around the pool out to the golf course. When I bought the house in 1969, some local supporters had formed a group called Friends of the President and had raised money to build and maintain a three-hole golf course on Bob Abplanalp’s property, adjacent to mine.

  In the diary Tricia kept during this period she recorded the shock she and Ed experienced when they saw the golf course that night:

  Wasted, neglected, ugly, dead. The golf course of “Friends” of the President is no more. The sight is sickening, not because it is a sickening sight, but because of what it signifies. Deserted. Killed. The golf course. The man for whom it was created.

  Ed and I came upon it on our first stroll around the grounds, and its quality of finality, of hopelessness, smote us with an almost physical intensity. Ed tried to overcome this feeling with nervous levity. He said, “Looks like someone forgot to water the golf course.” Of course we both knew someone had remembered not to water it. We made light of it to Daddy by saying we like to see it wild as it was when we first saw San Clemente. He was not fooled, but politely agreed. He trying to spare us. We trying to spare him. No one was spared.

  Despite these dark counterpoints, during the first days of our stay the reports from Washington continued optimistic. I tried to be skeptical and detached, but almost irresistibly I found myself charting out in my diary plans for the future.

  Diary

  I think what we have to do is to remember that once we get past this election then we have just got to call them as we see them and ’75 is the year to do it. ’73 would have been the year to do it, as we thoroughly expected to do it when we first began ’73, but then with the Watergate thing we lost that whole year and now we are in the election year, but ’75 will be our last shot at doing the responsible things that need to be done to get our economy back on the right kind of a track and also to deal philosophically with some of these great issues where this may be the last opportunity for a conservative viewpoint to prevail over the radical leftist viewpoint, which McGovern and his colleagues fought for and lost.

  We shall always have to keep in mind Tricia’s philosophy, that we have got to look down to the end of the road to see that we will come out all right, whatever may be and whatever way it is, and then remember that we will look back and see that we shouldn’t have been worried about things all along. This is very hard to do, but it is the only thing that can sustain us through these other critical and difficult times. It is the only thing that has sustained us as a matter of fact through the enormous blows that we have been getting from all sides for such a long time.

  As I sit here in my upstairs library, I am looking at a really beautiful portrait, hanging over the fireplace. I don’t know whether it is a portrait or probably a photograph touched up of my mother when she was twelve years old. She was born in 1885, which would have meant that she would have been ninety years old now. But her face looked
somewhat like Julie, I would say, or a combination of Julie and Tricia (very serious, very thoughtful, and very grown-up for a girl of twelve). She was truly a saint, as Helene Drown used to say. Someday I must write a monograph about her, which I think could be a very moving one.

  On July 15 there was a violent coup on the strife-torn island of Cyprus. Fighting between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot factions seemed imminent. I suggested to Kissinger that he send Assistant Secretary of State Joe Sisco over to monitor the situation at the scene. I noted in my diary, “The Cyprus thing brought home the fact that with the world in the situation it is, with the peace as fragile as it is in various parts of the world, a shake-up in the American presidency and a change would have a traumatic effect abroad and a traumatic effect at home.”

  On July 18, James St. Clair was finally, and very reluctantly, given a chance to present a summary of my defense to the House Judiciary Committee. He did a brilliant job, and the overall impact of his appearance was extremely positive. We heard that this impression heightened even further the panic that had set in among the committee Democrats. Soon thereafter the Democrats voted not to allow St. Clair to present a defense of me on television once the public hearings began.

  As these all-important hearings approached, Timmons’s reports became troubled. He picked up signs that the Democratic leadership was turning on tremendous pressure in preparation for a fight to the finish. Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss stated publicly that no responsible man could vote other than for impeachment. And we heard that Tip O’Neill was putting pressure on Rodino which Rodino was passing along to Doar to do something to get impeachment back on the track.

  On July 18 I tried to evaluate the situation.

  Diary

  It is a little bit foggy this morning and in a curious way, I think this is the day that I may probably have been preparing for in terms of really shaking up our own thinking to get prepared for the battle of August and perhaps even, if Timmons’s more pessimistic views prevail, the battle for the balance of the year in the Senate.