But as the Watergate story exploded in the morning headlines and on the evening news, Nixon seemed a prisoner to past intrigues, listening to Dean’s sycophantic talk of catching Judiciary Committee member Kennedy in a “bear trap.” Dean believed that the Judiciary Committee’s digging into “dirty tricks” would showcase the Nixon team’s own favorite dig: Chappaquiddick. Nixon told Dean that “hush money” for the Watergate burglars could be laundered through a “Cuban Committee.” Nine months after the June 1972 break-in, he was still vainly attempting to tie the Watergate burglary to the Bay of Pigs, still trying to conceal Watergate in the shell of silence he saw protecting the true events of April 1961.
But the cover-up was unraveling. Two days after the president gave the orders to maintain the Cuban Committee as a laundry for hush money, Watergate burglar James McCord told Judge Sirica that he was under “political pressure to plead guilty and remain silent.” The story was a bombshell, blasting aside nine months of intricate damage control. The president had said that the White House was not involved in Watergate. The top burglar was now saying differently. Desperate to save himself, Nixon announced the resignations of chief of staff Haldeman and domestic policy adviser Ehrlichman. He fired John Dean outright, leaving the clear suggestion that his counsel, who was cooperating with prosecutors, was the prime cover-up culprit. To set a higher tone for his administration, the president announced the nomination of Defense Secretary Elliot Richardson as attorney general.
Richardson, a patrician with an impeccable public record both in Massachusetts and Washington, understood the peril facing both president and country. Meeting with Nixon on a balmy spring day at Camp David, a day embittered by the senior staff dismissals, Richardson gamely sought to dispel Nixon’s bunker mentality. “Mr. President, I believe your real problem is that you have somehow been unable to realize that you have won—not only won but been reelected by a tremendous margin,” he told an embittered Nixon. “You are the president of all the people of the United States. There is no ’they’ out there—nobody trying to destroy you.” But this well-meaning denial of any lurking danger was as poorly addressed as it was badly founded. Not only was the Orthogonian Nixon unlikely to accept the counsel of a Franklin, even one he employed, but events would soon prove that there were any number of people out to get Richard Nixon.
Heading the list, of course, was Ted Kennedy. Just as Nixon had once pushed for a special prosecutor in the second Hiss trial, Kennedy wanted one named now. More than that, he wanted the Watergate special prosecutor to have full authority. Until he was assured of this, he intended to use his clout on the Judiciary Committee to bar Elliot Richardson’s confirmation. According to Kennedy counsel James Flug, there was no obfuscation. “When Richardson was nominated, Kennedy told him he could not be confirmed unless he had a special prosecutor mandate that was acceptable to us,” Flug recalls. Also a special prosecutor who passed Kennedy’s muster.
When Richardson, not yet confirmed, tried recruiting two possible candidates for special prosecutor, both rejected the offers. Kennedy was not yet satisfied with the special prosecutor’s charter, and he was letting people know it. With Richardson’s nomination in limbo, he had no choice but to call on the senator, who described the sort of special prosecutor that would be acceptable. One name Kennedy mentioned was that of Archibald Cox, the former Richardson law professor who had worked for both Jack and Bobby. Richardson named Cox the next day.
Kennedy was not finished. Getting the right special prosecutor was only the start. Now he wanted to guarantee that Cox would have a clear avenue of pursuit against Nixon. “The original terms of the special prosecutor’s charter were my own,” Richardson recalled. “Its final terms were worked out between Archibald Cox, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and myself.” In other words, the terms had to be acceptable to Ted Kennedy. The Kennedy-approved charter would now grant “full authority” to the special prosecutor: Cox would have unlimited funds, unlimited time, unlimited authority to investigate, to grant immunity, to initiate prosecutions, to indict.
But the key point was Cox’s own immunity from Nixon. “The Attorney General will not countermand or interfere with the Special Prosecutor’s decisions or actions.” The only person who could fire Cox was the man who had named him, Elliot Richardson. And he could only do that, by the terms of the Kennedy-approved charter, by accusing Cox of “extraordinary improprieties,” a charge so unseemly that it would cost Richardson his own reputation. Thus, as the attorney general saw it, a “no-man’s-land” had been created between the Watergate prosecutor and his ultimate target. That no-man’s-land was in the person of Elliot Richardson. The new U.S. attorney general could not hinder Cox, nor could he fire him. The only way Richard Nixon could stop Cox was to fire Richardson, the very man whose dignity he had enlisted in the effort to salvage his administration’s authority. To seal the deal, Richardson gave Kennedy a letter outlining the Watergate prosecutor’s charter. After receiving the written guarantee, Kennedy and Judiciary Committee pal Tunney, an old University of Virginia law school mate, left for a jaunt to Europe.
Richard Nixon’s presidency was now booby-trapped. To hinder the prosecution in any way would require that he fire Elliot Richardson, cutting the last thread of credibility holding him from the abyss. To allow Cox to exercise his unlimited authority, on the other hand, would take the Watergate probe on an even more perilous route.
While Richardson viewed Cox’s political orientation as “unimportant,” Nixon’s more partisan loyalists were stunned by the selection of a special prosecutor who had run as a Muskie candidate for delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention and served as solicitor general under the Kennedys. More ominous was Cox’s stint as chief of the speechwriting/research shop for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, including preparation for the Great Debate between his boss and the man he was about to be sworn to investigate. Cox had watched the famous television encounter with Jacqueline Kennedy. “Cox will be a disaster,” his ex-Harvard colleague Henry Kissinger predicted. “He has been fanatically anti-Nixon all the years I’ve known him.” To speech-writer Ray Price, Cox was the “high guru of the Cambridge chapter of the Kennedy government-in-waiting.” The odd appointment spread gallows humor in the Nixon camp. At one late-night White House meeting, a group of punchy aides tossed around the imagined scene of Nixon confronting Richardson over his hazardous appointment of Archibald Cox: “Archie Cox? I thought you said you’d pick Eddie Cox.” The reference was to the president’s son-in-law, who had just graduated from law school.
Cox’s swearing-in ceremony was no laughing matter. Among the invited guests were Ethel Kennedy, widow of the man the new prosecutor had once served, and Ted Kennedy, whose specter had driven many of the dark deeds that the special prosecutor would be pursuing. “If Richardson had searched specifically for the man whom I would have least trusted to conduct so politically sensitive an investigation in an unbiased way,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “he could hardly have done better than choose Archibald Cox.” As Cox filled his staff with veterans of Bob Kennedy’s Justice Department and of his 1968 presidential candidacy, the worst fears were confirmed. Of the eleven senior counsels Cox hired, seven had been associated with either Jack, Bobby, or Teddy. The Watergate prosecution was going to be a Kennedy operation.
In June, Nixon enjoyed the respite of a far more enjoyable ceremony: the arrival in the United States of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. After meetings at the White House and Camp David, the two men flew to Nixon’s California home in San Clemente. That night, after many drinks, the American host had to help his Russian guest up the stairs to his daughter’s room, where he had been put up for the night. Twenty-three years after helping an intoxicated Sen. Joe McCarthy, the country’s most bellicose anti-Communist, home to bed, the U.S. president was doing the same for the world’s reigning Communist leader.
In July, Nixon received the blow that would prove fatal to his presidency, and it was delivered by one
of his own. Under questioning by the Senate Watergate Committee, Haldeman aide Alexander Butterfield divulged the existence of the audiotaping system that had been installed two years earlier. Richard Nixon would spend the rest of his days trying to keep the tapes from enemy ears.
Meanwhile, the daily focus on the moral failings of Richard Nixon eventually had the effect of dragging Teddy Kennedy back under the media’s microscope. Endeavoring to assay the weight of Nixon’s crimes, the country instinctively balanced in its other hand that of his chief rival’s. In September, former Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater argued in a New York Times article that “the Democrats who want to make the most of their opportunities to capitalize on a ‘Mr. Clean’ image will find Teddy Kennedy a hard product to sell.” At a terrible price to their patron, the Nixon operatives’ effort to exhume the issue of Chappaquiddick had succeeded.
The same day as Goldwater’s partisan conjecture, Ted Kennedy warned that if President Nixon dared to defy a Supreme Court order to turn over the tapes, “a responsible Congress would be left with no recourse but to exercise its power of impeachment.” New York Times columnist Tom Wicker called Kennedy’s words “about as strong a statement on the substantive question of impeachment as any leading Democrat has been willing to make.” The problem, he wrote, lay in Kennedy’s own past. “The real crunch would come if Mr. Nixon, in fact, did defy a clear ruling of the Supreme Court, and the question implicit in Edward Kennedy’s statement is how the country would react to the man of Chappaquiddick leading an impeachment battle against the man of Watergate.”
In October, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. As the war and the attendant danger of a U.S.-Soviet conflict monopolized the headlines, the Justice Department found Vice President Spiro Agnew indictable for taking kickbacks from Maryland contractors. His downfall threatened to speed the president’s as well. The volatile, blunt-thinking former governor had served, in the parlance of Capitol Hill, as Richard Nixon’s “impeachment insurance.” To the president’s foes, it was ghastly enough to have Nixon in the White House. Having Agnew—Nixon’s Nixon—was beyond bearing.
Nixon’s “insurance” was now being revoked. To save himself, Agnew asked Speaker Carl Albert to claim jurisdiction over his case in the House under the same constitutional procedure as that provided for the president. Agnew hoped this would preempt the Justice Department from indicting him, letting the case die in the Judiciary Committee. Listening to the vice president’s complaint of political harassment by the U.S. Attorney in Maryland, the Democratic Speaker was inclined to accept. He and the House parliamentarian were drafting the appropriate resolution to protect the vice president when Majority Leader Tip O’Neill realized what was afoot and stopped the effort cold. Agnew had sought sanctuary at the wrong door, it turned out. O’Neill, not Albert, had the power of the Democratic rank and file behind him and knew it. Facing indictment, trial, and imprisonment, Agnew pled nolo contendere to a criminal tax charge and resigned.
Agnew’s departure left Albert next in the presidential succession, just as his predecessor and he had been between the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 and the swearing in of Vice President Humphrey in January 1965. This time, Albert’s tenure was far briefer. President Nixon became the first president to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Passed in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, it allows a president to fill a vice-presidential vacancy, subject to congressional approval. Within a week of Agnew’s resignation, Nixon had named his old colleague Gerald Ford, House class of 1948, to succeed him. Before making the historic announcement, Nixon told the appointee his intention to back party convert John Connally for the Republican nomination in 1976. Under siege by the press, the Congress, and Archibald Cox, Nixon retained his grand hopes for the succession and the great bicentennial struggle with Ted Kennedy he figured would decide it.
Some of Nixon’s adversaries entertained notions of a brisker change in power. With Albert now next in succession, several Democratic zealots in the House flirted with a bold scenario: First, they would deny Gerald Ford confirmation; second, Congress would impeach and convict Nixon; third, Albert would take the presidential oath; fourth, the Congress would use the Twenty-fifth Amendment to pick as vice president a man the Democrats wanted to run the country; fifth, Albert would resign. Though only a few firebrands embraced this fanciful scheme, Nixon would point to a basic contingency plan for Albert’s use in the event of a succession by New Frontiersman Ted Sorensen as sufficient evidence of a Kennedy-driven coup attempt.
Ted Kennedy, thinking more clearly, called for Gerald Ford’s speedy confirmation. He wanted a Republican vice president in place before any dramatic steps were taken to oust Nixon. The Democrats could not afford having the American people suspect the whole Watergate probe had been aimed at recouping what the party had lost in the past two elections. But impeachment was clearly on the Democrats’ minds. At a White House reception honoring Ford’s ascension, Nixon cabinet member James Lynn mentioned to fellow guest Tip O’Neill the novelty of witnessing the oath taking of the first unelected vice president. The House Democratic leader could not resist retorting that another such transition was not far away.
O’Neill was not the only politician to spot the opportunity afforded by Agnew’s departure. “Now that we have disposed of that matter,” Richard Nixon told Attorney General Richardson, “we can go ahead and get rid of Cox.”
The special prosecutor was not as easily banished as Spiro Agnew. Cox was protected by the deal Ted Kennedy had demanded of Elliot Richardson as the price of admission to the office once held by his brother. Nixon knew, too, that Archibald Cox was determined to get his hands on the White House tapes that would reveal the president plotting to use the Bay of Pigs as a cover for Watergate. If Cox agreed to ask for no additional tapes, Nixon now proposed he would provide written “summaries” of the subpoenaed recordings. Those summaries would be verified as accurate by Mississippi senator John Stennis. “Judge Stennis,” as Nixon and his people came to call him in the next days of controversy, possessed appealing credentials for the job such as past judicial experience and a record of protecting presidential secrets, including the 1969 bombing of Cambodia. The seventy-two-year-old was also partially deaf.
The “Stennis compromise” was an offer Archibald Cox had no problem refusing. On Saturday, October 20, the special prosecutor called a one o’clock press conference at the National Press Club. There he issued his proclamation of war: He would demand tapes of any and every presidential conversation he decided was important. He would not relent. Asked about his job security, he said that Richard Nixon couldn’t fire him; only Elliot Richardson could.
Now from the White House came Nixon’s decision. At his command, chief of staff Alexander Haig called Richardson and said that the president wanted him to fire Cox. Asking for a meeting, Richardson reminded Nixon that he, the attorney general, could not carry out his orders because he had promised the Senate that he would “not countermand or interfere with the special prosecutor’s decisions or actions.” Richardson told Nixon that by asking him to dishonor his word, he gave him no choice but to resign.
Thus began the bloodbath. With Richardson’s resignation in hand, Nixon told Haig to order Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. When Ruckelshaus tried to resign, Nixon fired him. Nixon next asked the Justice Department’s third-ranking official, Solicitor General Robert Bork, to fire Cox. Bork, a strict believer in constitutional authority, did as ordered. An attorney general had resigned. The deputy attorney general and the Watergate prosecutor had been fired. “The Saturday Night Massacre” was complete.
Now it was Ted Kennedy’s turn. He called the firings “a reckless act of desperation by a President who is afraid of the Supreme Court, who has no respect for law and no regard for a man of conscience.” Hearing these words above the din, Nixon recorded them that night in his diary.
Yet Kennedy’s subsequent demand for an investigat
ion of the massacre was steeped in irony. The events of Saturday, October 20, resulted as much from the Massachusetts senator’s choreography as from any step improvised by Richard Nixon himself. Kennedy and his people knew the key players: Cox, Richardson, the president. Like a movie director, they could sketch each frame of the storyboard as the personalities of Nixon, Richardson, and Cox grappled. Cox would be relentless. Cox would protect his right to be relentless. To get Cox, Nixon would have to get Richardson first. That would mean destroying the one emblem of credibility the administration had left. It was a master’s handiwork of lawmaking and patronage. Ted Kennedy had dictated the special prosecutor’s charter and had lobbied for the appointment of Cox. As James Flug, chief counsel of Kennedy’s subcommittee, concluded, “The Saturday Night Massacre was born in Kennedy’s office.”
By Tuesday, the national uproar over the massacre had forced a Nixon retreat. A new special prosecutor would be named, and there would be no further attempts to resist subpoenas to release White House tapes. Hearing of the reversal, Archibald Cox, now using a desk at the nonpartisan Library of Congress, went straight to Senator Kennedy’s rooms in the Old Senate Office Building. “I don’t have any office anymore,” he explained to the press. That evening, he was a guest at the Kennedy riverside house in McLean, Virginia, invited there by Sen. Philip Hart, a Kennedy ally on the Judiciary Committee.
The new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, kept in place the entire staff of lawyers recruited by Archibald Cox, further hardened in their attitude toward the case’s ultimate defendant. Informed over dinner one evening that President Nixon had requested money from Congress to pay for twelve additional White House lawyers, Jaworski told Kennedy aide Melody Miller, “He’ll need every one of them!”
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 144