RN

by Richard Nixon

  I began to think really about the whole impeachment process and very objectively and coldly. All in all, it appears very possible although not probable, I would have to say that O’Neill’s bunch is going to be able certainly to get a majority vote out of the committee and a very damn close vote in the House. This completely leaves out the thing that has been worrying me earlier in the week—the Supreme Court thing.

  The problem we have here is trying to hold the line with the Southerners in the House and that means trying to get at least two of them of the committee, and hopefully, for sure, one. We think we have Flowers.

  A climactic struggle: that is what we have entered now and I think I have gotten that through to everybody, although I must say that Haig and St. Clair are thinking along these lines themselves.

  Haig has agreed that we have got to get the Cabinet out just as soon as St. Clair gets back. In fact, as he said, we have got to push every button and mobilize every asset that we have got. Haig thinks that at a minimum that we should get fourteen votes in the committee. We would hope we could end up with sixteen; of course if we got eighteen that would be a great victory. Sixteen would be manageable (Haig’s term), fourteen would be a bit tough, but he thinks still not beyond the point where we could still win on the floor.

  Basically, it is like a campaign. We have got to take some risks when everything is on the line.

  On July 19 John Doar stood before the members of the House Judiciary Committee and delivered a passionate and, by all accounts, masterful argument calling for my impeachment. The committee had continued its media blitz, releasing mounds of material on different subjects, designed to crescendo toward the public televised hearings to begin on July 24. Everything was moving quickly now, as we approached the time when the hearings would be ended and the vote would be taken.

  Diary

  I intend to live the next week without dying the death of a thousand cuts. This has been my philosophy throughout my political life. Cowards die a thousand deaths, brave men die only once.

  I suppose it could be said that this is our Seventh Crisis in spades. Because the next month will be as hard a month as we will ever go through, but we can only be sustained by two things: one, in the belief that we are right—we are fighting, as all agree, an assault on our entire system of government.

  And second, we will be sustained by the fact that at the end it will be over and even if it is over in the terms of an impeachment, we will just have to live with that.

  By this time next week we may have both the Court and the committee vote. We can only hope for the best and plan for the worst.

  The weekend of July 20 was the last time there was any real hope. On the night of July 21 we all went to a party for some of our old California friends at Roy Ash’s house in Bel Air. Tricia’s description of the evening in her diary said it all:

  At times it is like being in the eye of the hurricane. It is quite calm, quite still and if your eyes are closed you don’t notice the unnatural darkness which surrounds you. You recall moments isolated in time. Yet they exist in the present. You recall a time without “Watergate” or when Watergate simply meant a rather extravagant place to live. An isolated moment. But then your eyes open and the darkness you see is the darkness of the storm.

  The sun last shone at the Ash dinner. Their home in Bel Air was a million light-years away from the turmoil. There was a glow of old about the entire evening. The guests, composed of old friends and others that the Ashes felt could be helpful, were in high spirits.

  Ever since the Roy Ash party, dating from the day following it, something was lost. Some support. The straw became so brittle and worn that you could almost hear it breaking asunder.

  By the beginning of the week of July 22 there had been no new evidence introduced since late June, when it had been generally acknowledged that the evidence was not sufficient to justify impeachment. Nothing factual had changed, but the political ground began to shift. We heard that John Rhodes was going to help us; and that he was not. We were told that Goldwater had said that he was going to ask me to resign; but when Haig called him, Goldwater laughed and said in absolutely no circumstances had he ever said that, nor would he. Perhaps most disturbing, because it was apparently true, we heard that we were in trouble with the three Southern Democrats on the committee: Wilbur Mills was said to be getting to his fellow Arkansan Thornton, while Rodino was reportedly having private sessions with Flowers and O’Neill was rumored to be putting a strong arm on Mann. Most people don’t recall it, but long before the new “evidence” of the June 23 tape was produced, the political consensus had already been reached, and the political consensus was to impeach.

  “LOWEST POINT IN THE PRESIDENCY”

  On the morning of Tuesday, July 23, the day before the House Judiciary Committee’s televised hearings were scheduled to begin, Lawrence Hogan, one of the committee’s conservative Republicans, called a press conference. In emotional tones he announced that he had decided to vote for my impeachment. Many of his colleagues, and some news commentators, said that Hogan’s effort to jump the gun and thereby gain maximum publicity was an effort to shore up his faltering campaign for governor of Maryland. In San Clemente we tried to minimize the damage Hogan caused by concentrating on the many people who criticized him and his motives. But the fact was that he had dealt us a very bad blow. Later that same day, July 23, Timmons called from Washington. He said it was now certain: we had lost all three Southern Democrats on the committee.

  I was stunned. I had been prepared to lose one and had steeled myself for losing two. But losing all three meant certain defeat on the House floor. It meant impeachment.

  I told Haig bitterly that if this was the result of our hands-off strategy, we could hardly have done worse by outright lobbying. I said that we had to do something to try to get at least one of the Southerners back.

  Haig mentioned that one of George Wallace’s aides had sent word that I had only to call on Wallace if there was anything he could do to help me. Here was the opportunity to take up Wallace’s offer: perhaps the Alabama governor would be willing to call his fellow Alabamian Walter Flowers and remind him that party loyalty need not include supporting the radical surgery of removing a President from office. I agreed that it was worth a try, and Haig said he would arrange the call.

  At 3:52 P.M. in my office in San Clemente I picked up the phone. George Wallace was already on the line.

  Diary

  When I got Wallace on the phone he played it very cozy. He said he couldn’t quite hear me at first, and then said that he hadn’t expected the call, that nobody had told him about it.

  He said he hadn’t examined the evidence. That he prayed for me. That he was sorry that this had to be brought upon me. That he didn’t think it was proper for him to call Flowers, that he thought Flowers might resent it and that if he changed his mind he would let me know. I knew when I hung up the phone that he would not change his mind.

  The call took only six minutes. When I hung up the phone I turned to Haig and said, “Well, Al, there goes the presidency.”

  Haig was not ready to give up. He urged that I call Alabama Senator James Allen and ask if he could help with Flowers. I reached Allen in Washington. He was concerned and friendly, but he was too honest to give me any false encouragement. I had to accept the fact that the committee’s Southerners were lost.

  I called Joe Waggonner, and he said that with the three Southerners gone, he could hope to hold only between thirty and thirty-five of the Waggonner group. This meant that I could not possibly have enough votes on my side when the full House voted. “My guess is,” I noted in my diary, “that the Democrats have made a command decision to get me out and Ford in and then tear him up and win in 1976.”

  That night I sat in my study trying to work on the speech on the economy that I was to give on national television in two days. I tried to organize and outline my thoughts for it, but my mind kept wandering back to the afternoon, and a sense of hopeless l
oss and despair kept welling up in me.

  My options had been reduced to only two: resign or be impeached. I had to decide either to leave the presidency voluntarily, or else confront the hard decision of whether the country could stand six months of having the President on trial in the Senate.

  Over the past few weeks I had talked with Haig and Ziegler several times about resigning. Haig argued that resignation would not only look like an admission of guilt, but it would mean a dangerously easy victory for the radicals—not just over me but over the system.

  There were also personal factors to consider. My family had already been put through two years of hell, but if I resigned I could expect an onslaught of lawsuits that would cost millions of dollars and take years to fight in the courts. I told Haig that the personal factors must not be the deciding ones. But it was difficult to separate personal considerations from political, party, and national interests.

  On the edge of my speech notes I wrote: “12:01 A.M. Lowest point in the presidency, and Supreme Court still to come.”

  I would not have long to wait.

  The next morning I overslept for the first time in several months. I had worked on the speech until 2:30 A.M., and it was after nine o’clock when I picked up the bedside phone. Haig came on the line, and I asked, “How are things going?” In a strained voice he said, “Well, it’s pretty rough, Mr. President. I didn’t want to wake you until we had the complete text, but the Supreme Court decision came down this morning.”

  “Unanimous?” I guessed.

  “Unanimous. There’s no air in it at all,” he said.

  “None at all?” I asked.

  “It’s tight as a drum.”

  This decision in the case of United States v. Nixon was widely heralded as one of the Court’s finest hours. As one television reporter described it, the United States had triumphed. While I understood the reasons for the decision, I thought that the United States had lost. I felt that the presidency itself was a casualty of this ruling.

  I asked Haig to come to my study. A few minutes later St. Clair came in, looking very dejected. The problem was not just that we had lost but that we had lost so decisively. We had counted on some air in the Court’s ruling, at least some provision for exempting national security materials. We had counted on at least one dissent. For a few minutes we discussed the option of “abiding” by the decision in the Jeffersonian tradition. But after checking with some of our strongest supporters in Washington, we concluded that full compliance was the only option.

  I asked St. Clair how long he thought we could take to turn over the sixty-four tapes covered by the decision. He said that with all the problems involved in listening to them and preparing transcripts, we could probably take a month or more.

  I thought that we should assess the damage right away. When Haig called Buzhardt to discuss the decision, I took the phone and asked him to listen to the June 23 tape and report back to Haig as soon as possible. This was the tape I had listened to in May on which Haldeman and I discussed having the CIA limit the FBI investigation for political reasons rather than the national security reasons I had given in my public statements. When I first heard it, I knew it would be a problem for us if it ever became public—now I would find out just how much of a problem.

  Buzhardt listened to the tape early in the afternoon. When he called back, he told Haig and St. Clair that even though it was legally defensible, politically and practically it was the “smoking gun” we had been fearing. Haig and St. Clair had often remarked that Buzhardt was an alarmist. So Haig called Buzhardt back and asked him to listen to the June 23 tape a second time. After Buzhardt had listened again and made a second report of his impressions, Haig put on a brave front and told me that the tape was apparently “embarrassing” but not completely “unmanageable.” “I think we can cope with it,” he said.

  Diary

  The 23rd tape we have talked over time and time again. Fred has listened to it twice, spoken to St. Clair about it. St. Clair wants to talk to Al about it and listen to it on Monday. When St. Clair and Al came up to see me in the Library to discuss what St. Clair should say about complying with the Supreme Court decision, St. Clair rather airily passed off the 23rd tape by saying—“but just two weeks later you told Gray to go forward with his investigation.”

  On the night that the Court’s ruling was handed down, the House Committee began its televised sessions. The Democrats postured shamefully, pretending that they had not made up their minds. My supporters were eloquent—but they were fighting a lost battle. And now, underneath it all, like slow-fused dynamite waiting to explode, was the June 23 tape.

  I was swimming in the ocean at Red Beach near San Clemente on July 27 when the House Judiciary Committee voted on the first article of impeachment. It charged that I had engaged in a “course of conduct” designed to obstruct the investigation of the Watergate case. The vote went exactly the way I had feared: all the Democrats, including the three conservative Southerners, were joined by six of the seventeen Republicans. The article was passed, 27 to 11.

  I was getting dressed in the beach trailer when the phone rang and Ziegler gave me the news. That was how I learned that I was the first President in 106 years to be recommended for impeachment: standing in the beach trailer, barefoot, wearing old trousers, a Banlon shirt, and a blue windbreaker emblazoned with the Presidential Seal.

  Our family dinner that night was not subdued, but it was more quiet than usual. Afterward, in my study, I made some notes about Pat.

  Diary

  I remember that Tricia said as we came back from the beach that her mother was really a wonderful woman. And I said, yes. She has been through a lot through the twenty-five years we have been in and out of politics. Both at home and abroad she has always conducted herself with masterful poise and dignity. But, God, how she could have gone through what she does, I simply don’t know.

  That night and the next I sat up very late trying to grasp the new situation I faced and decide on the best course of action to deal with it.

  Diary

  And so we will be back on Monday. They will listen to the tapes, and my guess is that they might well come in to me and say, “We just don’t think this is manageable.” I am referring to St. Clair, Haig, et al.

  If we do make that decision, then I have a hard call—that call being as to whether I decide to bite the bullet on resignation or whether I continue to fight it through the House and wait until the House vote and then resign on the basis that I can’t put the country through the months that would be involved in an impeachment trial.

  Al and Ziegler have been splendid in this period. Ziegler makes the point very strongly that if we ever connote the impression that we have given up, then everybody will run to the hills. Al points out that under no circumstances must we do this for another reason. That if we don’t get a third in the House that it would look as if we had run out and so forth.

  As a matter of fact, I have had a feeling of calm and strength during this period. This is due in part to the fact that after hearing of the total defection of the Southerners, I realized that we had lost the ball game and faced at least a six-month trial in the Senate.

  To a certain extent I think the calmness and strength may have come from somewhere back in my background—perhaps from my father and my mother.

  I now recognized in my own mind something that, totally deliberately, I did not convey to my closest associates: the country simply could not afford to have a crippled President for six months.

  Diary

  We have to try to work out what we can do to live out whatever life I have left as President and thereafter in a decent way.

  Looking to the future, I recognize that I would have to face up to the hard fact of how I could take care of our personal expenses in the time ahead. Whether I can sell a book or papers or what have you in order to have the funds that would be needed to maintain an adequate staff in the office and in the house. My present inclination is to sell t
he property in Florida and take what equity I have there so that I have some cash on hand. As far as the San Clemente house is concerned, I will simply have to make a determination as to whether we want to keep it. It might be that we would be better off to take a reasonably comfortable apartment at some place and live out our lives there.

  Needless to say, how we are able to handle our staff like Manolo and Fina—our household staff—and even the minimum staff of Rose and two or three secretaries to work with me on the book, God only knows. But I must not borrow trouble on this at this point. At the present time what I have to do is to recognize that we are in a battle for our lives. It involves the country. The sad thing, as Eddie says, is that the bad guys will have won. He means by that that this would be a very bad thing for the country should I go the resignation route.

  Henry came in to see me, very mournful but, bless him, he was thinking only with his heart. A very unusual approach for a man who is so enormously endowed with extraordinary intellectual capacity. He said that his wife had told him that history in four years would look back on the President as a hero. And Al, of course, has made the point that history will show me in the end to have been an outstanding President.

  We returned to Washington on Sunday, July 28. Tricia recorded the scene:

  In the hall of the second floor of the White House we said goodbye to Daddy and Mama before Ed and I departed for New York. Daddy came as close to outward emotion as he ever does when he said how much it had meant to him for us to be in California with him. Without further expression, I felt as if these words marked an end of an era. That this was a farewell. A chapter ended forever.

  Monday, July 29, was our first full day back in Washington. I was shocked to see the difference that just two weeks had made. Impeachment hysteria had taken over the city. The White House staff was cloaked in gloom. It remained to be seen whether anything could be salvaged of the shattered confidence of the tired men and women in the West Wing and the EOB.