I remember very well that in 1973, Yom Kippur War, [Buchanan] was totally pro-Israel all the way.
—PRESIDENT NIXON TO LARRY KING ON CNN, 1992
After my testimony before the Watergate Committee, Nixon invited Shelley and me to join him in Key Biscayne. We were there on Saturday, October 6, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, holiest day in the Jewish calendar, when the startling news came that the Egyptians had breached the 1970 cease-fire the United States had negotiated and attacked the Israelis all along the Suez Canal. The Syrians were attacking on the Golan. Egypt had rushed surface-to-air missiles to the canal to bring down the Israeli F-4 Phantoms they knew would be coming, and had crossed the canal in force.
That weekend, I pressed a senior military man in Key Biscayne on how the war was going and was stunned by his reply: “The Hebes are getting the shit kicked out of them!” What stunned me was not the language but that, to this US officer, an Israeli defeat was something we could live with. When I spoke with Nixon, I told him this war could not have begun without Soviet complicity, that it was Moscow’s Arab clients against our Israeli friends, that this was a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and we should go all out to see to it that our side won. A defeat for Israel, I said, would be a triumph for Moscow across the Arab world. As Nixon recalled to Larry King, twenty years later, I was strongly pro-Israel then, and had been since Nixon and I visited Israel in June 1967, just days after the Six-Day War.
We cut short our stay in Key Biscayne. Back in Washington, Nixon would order the airlift that saved Israel and allowed General Ariel Sharon’s armor to cross the canal to the western bank, strike north, and cut off the Egyptian Third Army, now in Sinai. This invaluable assistance in a time of desperate crisis for Israel would earn Nixon the accolade of Golda Meir that he was the best friend Israel ever had. I yet recall the words attributed by a magazine to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, the victor of the Six-Day War, who had been caught by surprise by the Yom Kippur attack: “This is the end of the Third Temple.” What truth there was in the reports I was hearing—that Israel was about to fit its fighter-bombers with nuclear weapons if the Egyptian army reached the Israeli border, or that Soviet airborne divisions were moving to their air bases, or that Soviet warships leaving the Black Sea had been detected carrying nuclear weapons—I do not know. But those were the alarmed reports going around in that second week of October, which would end with the resignation of the Vice President of the United States.
The End of Agnew
While there were rumors of an investigation of Vice President Agnew, dating to his two years as governor in Annapolis, I was unaware how grave his condition was until near the end. I recall going up to Room 450 in the EOB to hear Agnew give a spirited defense of himself before the press, and wrote him a note: “That was one hell of a press conference. Noli Illegitimis Carborundum.” (“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”)
“Thank you,” Agnew wrote back in a personal note on August 15. “I’ll watch out for the illegitimis.” But in the White House briefing room, Ziegler left the impression Agnew was on his own and would have to defend himself. Angry we were leaving him hanging, I called Haig. Why are we not standing by the Vice President, I asked, not disguising my disgust.
“Come on over,” said Al. When I walked into his West Wing corner office, Agnew’s office in 1969, he came straight to the point: “We’ve got him taking envelopes in the basement.” I was stunned. Haig related what US Attorney George Beall, with whom I had traveled eighteen days in the Soviet Union in the fall of 1971, had uncovered in Baltimore and had sent to Elliot Richardson at Justice. From what Al told me, Agnew was facing indictment, possible imprisonment, and could not survive. I had no idea he was this close to the end of the line. And, as the Twenty-Fifth Amendment had just been added to the Constitution, requiring the President to name a new Vice President in the event of the death, resignation, or removal of the incumbent, Nixon would soon be appointing a successor to Agnew.
In Key Biscayne that first weekend in October, Al had me write a speech for Nixon, and to include, at the close, the name of the individual whom the President intended to nominate to succeed Agnew. It was Senator John Stennis of Mississippi. I found this hard to believe and asked Al if the Old Man was serious. Though widely respected, Stennis was seventy-two years old, a Democrat who had a hearing problem, and during a recent mugging in Northwest D.C. had been shot twice and only recently returned to the Senate. I expressed astonishment. The President wants you to put Stennis’s name in as the new Vice President at the end of the speech, Al ordered. Which I did. The speech was never delivered. In Very Strange Bedfellows, his 2007 book on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, Jules Witcover relates what Al and I had talked about a third of a century before:
Among the Nixon aides in Florida that weekend was Pat Buchanan, the speechwriter for both Nixon and Agnew. He was busy working on a major Nixon speech on Watergate when Haig called him in and told him the president wanted a new tentative ending in which he would reveal that Agnew was resigning. Haig told him he should include the name of the man who would be nominated in Agnew’s place. It was not Connally or Gerald Ford, or Nelson Rockefeller or Ronald Reagan, Buchanan said later, adding that he was not at liberty to say who, except that it would have been a surprise.
It was Stennis, Jules.
Ford for Vice President
On October 10, 1973, Agnew resigned. Two days later, I sent the ex-vice president, whom I considered a good friend, a personal letter:
There have been few moments in my lifetime of greater enjoyment than the campaign trail of 1968 with Governor Agnew, the heady days of November 1969 [the Des Moines and Montgomery speeches] and the “You-May-Fire-When-Ready-Gridley” campaign of 1970. In your four-and-a-half years as spokesman for the values in which we believe, you have set a standard of political candor and moral courage against which they will measure future Vice Presidents.
A handwritten note came back that same day in the familiar scrawl of the Vice President of the United States: “Thanks for your generous note. I enjoyed our connection and will watch as you continue to ‘give ’em hell.’ Good luck! Ted Agnew.” Had he left the practices of Annapolis back in Annapolis, Spiro Agnew would have been President of the United States.
He is a forgotten man today, but there has never been a vice president like him, who came to national politics an unknown, ascended to the heights in the esteem and affection of half his countrymen, then fell so low and so hard. Yet, even before writing this note to Agnew, I sent the President an October 11 memorandum on his successor:
Of the names bandied about, including that of the junior Senator from Mississippi, let me argue strongly for the choice of Congressman Ford of Michigan.
A) First, he is a strong, tough individual, if not brilliant, whose foreign and defense policy views mirror those of the President….
B) Second, he has the capacity, the integrity, to be a good President, should something happen.
C) His choice would unite the GOP, not divide it as would the selection of Rockefeller, Reagan, or JBC [Connally]. If one of the latter three would be chosen, the other factions of the Republican Party would be angered, and the race for the 1976 nomination would begin.
D) Ford, unlike Stennis or [Scoop] Jackson, could work the Republican vein on behalf of the President and could fulfill this traditional role.
E) We cannot afford to have a political neuter in the Vice Presidency; to do that is to surrender one of the most precious assets we have, voluntarily.
F) The choice of Ford would not disserve the constituency that chose the President last fall; it would be consistent with the national mandate given last November.
After I sent the memo to Nixon, an immediate call came from Haig. “The Old Man wants Connally!” barked Al.
“Well, tell the Old Man if he wants Connally, then he should take Connally,” I told Al, but “tell him he’s gonna have a helluva fight on his hands to get him approved.”
The President went to Camp David with the recommendations of his Cabinet and staff, and from the party nationally and on the Hill. As Nixon wrote in his memoirs:
Rockefeller and Reagan were in a virtual tie for first choice; Connally was third; Ford was fourth. Ford, however, was first choice among members of Congress, and they were the ones who would have to approve the man I nominated.
John Connally had been my own first choice. As early as Oct. 6, I had asked Haig to call him and see whether he would take the position if it were offered to him. I had also wanted to know Connally’s own assessment of his chances of confirmation. Over the next few days we did some quiet checking, and the reports were all the same. Connally simply could not make it.
Looking at the other choices, I concluded that nominating either Rockefeller or Reagan would split the Republican Party down the middle….This left Jerry Ford.
Nixon’s thinking mirrored my own. Thus was Jerry Ford put first in the line of succession to become President of the United States. Though I would break with President Ford to back Reagan in 1976, I still believe this was the right call in October 1973.
“The Saturday Night Massacre”
The origin of the Saturday Night Massacre lay in Nixon’s desire to accommodate a subpoena from Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox for tapes of his Watergate-related conversations—and to bring an end to future subpoenas.
Fred Buzhardt and the White House lawyers had worked up a compromise to accommodate Cox. The White House would write up summaries of Nixon’s subpoenaed conversations, all relevant Watergate material included, then submit the tapes to a respected authority, who would confirm the accuracy and completeness of the summaries, and send these to Judge Sirica. The man we chose to validate the summaries was Senator Stennis, a former judge and one of the most respected men in Congress, whom Nixon had considered as Agnew’s successor. Stennis agreed to listen to the tapes.
The key was to get Attorney General Elliot Richardson to agree to the compromise and convince Cox to accept it. Richardson agreed to propose the plan to Cox. Cox rejected it outright and demanded unrestricted access to all White House documents and tapes. Even Elliot thought this excessive. The White House then decided to go around Cox. We would provide the summaries. They would be verified by Stennis, and given to the special prosecutor and the Ervin Committee. If Cox objected, he could resign, or be fired by the attorney general for refusing a reasonable compromise. And should Elliot fire him, he would not be violating his pledge to the Senate that confirmed him, that he would not dismiss Cox for other than “extraordinary improprieties.”
Nixon announced the compromise Friday night, October 19. Early Saturday afternoon, Cox held a press conference, where he declared that he did not accept the compromise, would not be satisfied with summaries, would accept only the tapes themselves, and would not be restricted in his future subpoenas and demands.
Friday night, Haig had called me and told me we were moving to climax in the crisis. I had just one question: “Is Elliot aboard?”
“Yes,” Haig said. Then go with it, I told Haig. Thus, whatever Cox did—balked, resigned, or had to be fired by Richardson for insubordination—we were fine with it. And as Elliot had chosen Cox, and had a sterling reputation, his decision to fire Cox would be seen as principled and not part of some cover-up.
Soon came word that all was coming unstuck, that Elliot was no longer aboard, that he was balking, that if Cox rejected the plan Richardson had accepted, Richardson would stand by Cox’s defiance and refuse to fire him.
I met with Nixon around three in the afternoon. He had called me over to the Oval Office that Saturday after he received my memorandum saying that, if Richardson refused to fire Cox, he, the President, had to fire his attorney general. Nixon was somber and reflective and began to explain the imperative of his doing what he was about to do—fire Elliot Richardson if he refused to obey his orders. I can’t have Brezhnev watch my attorney general defy an order from the President of the United States, Nixon said, when I am trying to convince him we mean business in the Middle East when I tell him not to intervene in the Israeli-Egyptian war. Kissinger was in Moscow negotiating a cease-fire.
We talked a long time. Nixon was resigned, almost fatalistic. There was no castigating of Elliot. The attorney general was making his choice. That forced Nixon to make his. This is what I have to do. This is what I am going to do. Elliot is coming over. I have no choice. There was no anger, no anguish, no agonizing. Nor was there any enthusiasm. This was like an amputation that had to be done. If he had to, Nixon told me, he would go through the Justice Department down to some GS-7 if necessary to find someone who would step up and fire Archibald Cox.
I was told by Nixon that Elliot was coming into the Oval Office from his private office. So I went out through the other door, and ran smack into Elliot. He had a forced fixed grin on his face. Haig was beside him, looking down and grim as though leading a prisoner to execution.
“How are you, Elliot?” I said and passed by, and they went on into the Oval Office where this icon of the Liberal Establishment, who had served President Nixon as deputy secretary of state, secretary of HEW, secretary of defense, and attorney general, was terminating his public service.
My view then was that Cox had hit a stone wall, that he did not have the evidence to implicate the President, that he was determined to rummage through every tape in the White House to get what he needed to bring Nixon down. With Teddy Kennedy present at Cox’s swearing-in, as an invited guest I had zero faith in the objectivity of the man.
Elliot would defend himself by saying he had appointed Cox. My view was that he had switched sides and gone against the President as he realized that keeping his friends and ensuring his future meant defying Nixon and playing the martyr to those who despised Nixon. His action did indeed earn him the approbation of the enemies circling us now.
By nightfall, Elliot had resigned, Deputy Attorney General Bill Ruckelshaus had been fired for refusing to fire Cox, and Robert Bork, the solicitor general, had become acting attorney general and, on Nixon’s orders, fired Cox. The office of the Watergate special prosecutor had, in a Ziegler phrase I wrote, “ceased to exist.” The FBI moved in to ensure no documents were removed. The networks labeled it the “Saturday Night Massacre.” There was hysteria. “People hugged each other wordlessly,” said UPI; “men cried.” Cox’s “press spokesman unashamedly let the tears roll.” NBC’s John Chancellor said it “may be the most serious constitutional crisis in [US] history,” passing over the secession of eleven southern states and the Civil War. The London Times’ Fred Emery wrote, “Washington had the smell of an attempted coup d’etat….[T]he whiff of the Gestapo was in the clear October air.” Sober-minded men, said Emery, were wondering whether the military would move in, and on whose side.
“There will be resolutions of impeachment in the House by Tuesday,” I told Shelley and Rich and Pat Koster, friends from St. Louis days, when I joined them at La Nicoise in Georgetown, where the waiters served on roller skates. By October 23, there were twenty-one resolutions for Nixon’s impeachment floating on Capitol Hill and the President had buckled and agreed to comply with the subpoena and turn over the tapes. On November 1, Leon Jaworski was named to succeed Cox as special prosecutor. The firestorm we had ignited with the Saturday Night Massacre had burned us horribly—and accomplished nothing. On November 15, the House voted to begin the process of impeaching the President of the United States. As Bob Haldeman wrote:
In this case, as in the past, Nixon did just enough—by firing Cox—to infuriate the nation, but not enough to save himself. Instead, he was soon appointing another Special Prosecutor [Jaworski], giving up his first batch of tapes, and resuming his slide into a very special niche in history….
Again, courage and hesitation.
Years later, when Elliot was a guest on CNN’s Crossfire, I asked him if he was going to run for governor of Massachusetts, where he had served as lieutenant governor and become a hero for defying Nixon. No, he said, I have only so much time left in public life and I don’t want to spend it awarding sewer contracts. Elliot said he wanted to fight for the Law of the Sea Treaty, which President Reagan opposed. He ran for the Senate in 1984, and lost in the primary. Elliot had gone ashore on Utah Beach on D-Day, crossed a minefield to rescue a comrade, and won a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
Nixon vs. the Editors
In mid-November, I flew with the President from Key Biscayne to Orlando, where he was to be questioned by the Associated Press managing editors. It was not the kind of Q&A any president would want to undergo. The Arab oil embargo was in effect and the gasoline lines were long. Nixon sought to make a joke of telling the editors that, to save fuel, he had ordered his backup plane not to follow him to Orlando. Referring to Air Force One, Nixon said, “If this goes down, they don’t have to impeach.” The Post story of his appearance reflected the character and content of the exchange:
Orlando, Fla. Nov. 17—Declaring that “I’m not a crook,” President Nixon vigorously defended his record in the Watergate case tonight and said he had never profited from his public service.
“I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life I have never obstructed justice,” Mr. Nixon said.
“People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”
In an hour-long question-and-answer session…Mr. Nixon was tense and sometimes misspoke.
During our return to Key Biscayne, Nixon called me up to his cabin on Air Force One for drinks and a discussion of his appearance. He thanked me for his briefing book, on the cover of which he wrote, “Buchanan—Many thanks—RN—11/17/73.” “I’m not a crook” was not in my book. Nixon decided on his own to say that. That the President felt compelled to do so testified to how far we had fallen in the year since Nixon received one of the greatest expressions of national confidence any president had ever received.
The hour had been one long wallow in Watergate. Questions were asked regarding when Nixon learned about the missing tapes, when he learned of the Ellsberg break-in, whether he had ordered Special Prosecutor Cox not to investigate it, if he still believed that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were “two of the finest public servants” he had ever known, why he had paid only a few hundred dollars in taxes in 1971 and 1972, whether he had had his brother Don wiretapped, and, if so, why? At the close, Nixon denied allegations that he had signed on to higher milk prices for campaign contributions.
Still, he felt good about the depth and breadth of his answers, at having met every question head-on and dealt with them with candor and in almost exhausting detail. Still, there was truth in John Osborne’s depiction, which suggested the emotional toll that the vice presidential crisis, the Watergate revelations, the Middle East war, the face-off with Brezhnev, the Saturday Night Massacre and subsequent firestorm, all hitting in a matter of weeks, was taking on him:
[T]he President appeared to be tired, and, at times, very tired. The familiar stoop of his shoulder and droop of the mouth were more noticeable than usual, and, in a few moments of extreme weariness, his face went slack and gray. The President’s joking remark at the editors’ conference that if his plane goes down “it goes down and then they don’t have to impeach” was laughed at and applauded, but it seemed to me to be horribly unfunny. His habit of misusing words was much in evidence.
“A grueling exchange,” Osborne called Nixon’s appearance before the editors, one that “had both elated and tired him.”
During this time, Nixon’s mood shifted back and forth. At times, he was full of fight; at others, he was not unlike a stage 4 cancer patient who has come to accept the inevitable—that he is not going to make it.
Deciphering the Dean Tapes
Among those in the White House with the least enviable assignments was Larry Higby, an aide to Haldeman, and one of whose jobs was to phone up other aides to demand to know when they would be completing their latest assignments from “H.” A memorable moment in that first term came when a friend called to report: “I’ve got some news. Higby’s got ‘a Higby.’ ”
“Higby” had become a noun. And late one afternoon, Ron Ziegler invited me over to his office, called in one of his assistants, and asked her to “fix the big fella a drink.” I was floored as this stunning blonde strolled in, opened Ron’s liquor cabinet, gave me a Scotch and a smile, and wordlessly walked out. This was former Junior Miss USA Diane Sawyer. As I sat in stunned silence at the amazing good looks of this woman still in her twenties, Ziegler quipped, “Beats the hell out of Larry Higby, doesn’t it!”
Diane would stay with Nixon through Watergate, help him with his memoirs in San Clemente, return to Washington, go to work for CBS, and eventually become the first woman anchor of ABC World News Tonight.
In December 1973, I got access to transcripts of the tapes of the conversations Dean had with the President, where they discussed Watergate. Dean had testified to the Ervin Committee that these were the conversations that implicated Nixon. Rose had transcribed the tapes, and copies had been sent to Judge Sirica for use at the coming Watergate trial. In a few months they would be made public. With Nixon’s approval, I had the transcripts sent over to me, got out a transcript of Dean’s testimony before the Watergate Committee, and closed the door.
Working with Diane, who proved to be a talented analyst and writer, we compared, line by line, what Dean had told the committee he and Nixon had said, and on which days, with what the transcripts revealed both had actually said. Dean had many Nixon quotes exact. But we were heartened by something we found. Some of the things that Dean testified that Nixon had said did not occur on the days he had specified. And the seven transcripts seemed, in their totality, inconclusive. There were in those transcripts words and phrases where Nixon was saying we cannot do what they were discussing. Taken together, the transcripts of the Dean conversations seemed to show that Nixon was considering actions that crossed the line of legality; but they also showed him ruling out and rejecting such actions. Some excerpts might make a listener conclude Nixon was guilty. Other excerpts showed Nixon having doubts and second thoughts and dismissing actions as wrong. Nixon had been tempted, had entertained the temptation, but had he sinned mortally?
We concluded the answer was no. While the Dean tapes, as I would later tell the press, were not “spiritually uplifting,” neither did they convict the President conclusively of any crime. I felt the work Diane and I had done could get us a hung jury with the American people. We had the transcripts of the Dean tapes retyped for release, along with our separate analyses and commentary on each tape. Based on what we produced after days and nights of labor, I felt no jury would convict Nixon, nor would the House Judiciary Committee vote to impeach based on this evidence. I proposed to Haig that we release the Dean tapes, along with the Buchanan commentaries. In a memoir almost twenty years later, Haig described the scene:
During the waning weeks of 1973, without telling me what was afoot, the President started the wheels turning in a scheme to transcribe and publish the parts of the tapes in which Watergate was discussed. A confidential task force of editors, typists, and proofreaders working under Pat Buchanan, who shared Nixon’s ingenuous belief that release of the presidential conversations would answer all questions, prepared extensive excerpts. They carried out this heady task right under my nose in such absolute secrecy that it not only did not leak to the press but I had no inkling of its existence until Buchanan mentioned in a staff meeting that the transcripts of the tapes were “almost all typed up” and ready for release to the press.
After registering my surprise in emphatic terms (and also my admiration for the way in which Buchanan and his team had kept their mouths shut), I asked to see the typescript, closed the door of my office and began to read. This was my first exposure to the contents of the tapes.
Al at first seemed persuaded of the case we had made. He called in Bryce and had him read the transcripts of the conversations with Dean. Bryce reported back that the President could not survive their release. The Dean conversations were crude and disgusting and read like transcripts of Mafia meetings and would kill the President with the country and Congress.
On December 23, all of us met in the Roosevelt Room, and Bryce thundered that the President’s men could not put this poison out, as it would destroy him. He carried the day. My labor was wasted; my plan went down, as I recall, without a single supporting senior staffer.
I was angry. Did my colleagues think the tapes were not going to be leaked, or revealed, or released one day? Did we think they would be kept from the public forever? My point was basic: The tapes are coming out. Is it not better that we put them out, with our analysis, backed up by exculpatory citations from the tapes of what they reveal? Or should we let our enemies, who would cherry-pick the tapes for the most negative points, put them out?
When everyone else walked out of the Roosevelt Room affronted that I would propose such a thing, all I could think of was the line from General MacArthur’s memoirs where he had said that his father, a Medal of Honor winner in the Civil War, had told him when he was a boy, “Doug, military councils make cowards out of soldiers.”
Al, as he later wrote, took the staff consensus to the President:
There was no point in preamble. I said, “Mr. President, there is no way you can release the transcripts Pat and his people have prepared. If you do, what they contain will destroy you.” Nixon wagged his head, thrust out his jaw, glared at me. “All right,” he said in a tone of real anger; and then, with a wave of his hand as if to make the offending transcripts, and me, vanish, he repeated explosively, “All right!”
Two minutes after leaving him, I gave orders that the [Buchanan] transcripts be destroyed.
At a Christmas party at Rose’s apartment, one floor above ours in Watergate East, I told staffers we had made a grave mistake in not putting out the transcripts of the Dean tapes, with my analysis. I told them I now believed our condition could be terminal, that we were on the Titanic. John Andrews, who had become Nixon’s speechwriter of the moment but had departed disillusioned, was there, and told the press that a speechwriter had listened to the tapes, transcripts had been made, and there had been a plan to release them, now mooted. Why he did this I do not know. Though not naming me, Andrews spilled this to the Post and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, quoting the “speechwriter” as saying, “It’s like the Titanic….When the iceberg hit, passengers up on deck barely felt the ship shudder. But down below, the damage control men computed the flooding rate, consulted their charts, and told the captain, ‘Never mind how things look now—she’s going down.’ ” I did not deny to friends in the White House that that was me, and, unfortunately, the quote was accurate. Nixon could not have missed it.
The Goldwater Dinner
By now, Senator Barry Goldwater, who had been indispensable to Nixon’s nomination and was indispensable to his survival, had begun to speak out. In April, he had told the Christian Science Monitor: “The Watergate. The Watergate. It’s beginning to sound like Teapot Dome. I mean there’s a smell to it. Let’s get rid of the smell.”
In December, he again spoke to the Monitor:
He [Nixon] chose to dibble and dabble and argue on very nebulous grounds like executive privilege and confidentiality when all the American people wanted to know was the truth….I hate to think of the old adage “Would you buy a used car from Dick Nixon?”—but that’s what people are asking around the country. General Haig doesn’t know anything about political matters….I just can’t believe that [Nixon] would listen to Ziegler. That…would be something disastrous. Again there is nothing personal but Ziegler doesn’t understand politics.
This was brutal stuff from a party statesman who had gone all out for Nixon after 1964. The day the Monitor story broke, Goldwater was invited to the White House for a private dinner with the President. Also invited were Rose; Bryce Harlow and his wife, Betty; Mary Brooks, who ran the Mint and was an old friend of the Nixons; Ray Price; Julie and David; and Shelley and me. Photographs of that dinner table still hang in my library. And what happened that evening has been variously described.
Drinks were served in the Yellow Oval Room, on the second floor of the mansion. From there we went across to the family dining room, where Barry sat at one end of the table, President Nixon at the other. Nixon was garrulous, and dominated the conversation, which at times seem strained. He asked us all whether, with the energy crisis and long gas lines, he ought to set an example and take a train to Key Biscayne.
No one thought this a good idea, as it could require that every bridge and trestle on the thousand-mile trip be protected by Secret Service, troops, or police. Goldwater told Nixon to stop worrying about what people might say and fly to Florida. The depiction of that evening by Woodward and Bernstein seemed far over the top. As Price related in his 1979 memoir:
On the surface, it was a relaxed, convivial evening, pre-Christmas good cheer, shared with family and friends. But Nixon was working, hard. Goldwater—who arrived in pain and on crutches; he had fallen down a flight of hospital stairs that day and injured his leg—was one of the keys to Nixon’s support in Congress and Goldwater had been publicly voicing irritation with the way the White House was handling Watergate….
Price went on:
In The Final Days, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein prominently feature this dinner, but in a grossly distorted account, picturing Nixon as drunk, rambling, incoherent, repeatedly telling Harlow, “Bryce, explain what I’m saying to Barry,” then interrupting to talk about Watergate. Apart from the cast of characters I found their account virtually unrecognizable….
Price, who had told Ziegler he wanted to resign—as did Bryce, who wanted to return to Procter & Gamble—felt boxed in by evening’s end. For Nixon discussed what Ray should put into his upcoming State of the Union address. Fifteen years after that dinner, Goldwater, in a memoir written with Jack Casserly, described his reaction in terms that suggest he was the source of the Woodward-Bernstein depiction. While the President was “amiable, even garrulous” at the beginning, said Goldwater, his words soon became “disjointed. The whole conversation was without purpose.”
It was like the babble at a Georgetown cocktail party, not the warm intimate conversation of family and friends at home.
Nixon continued his ceaseless, choppy chatter. I was becoming more and more uncomfortable. What’s going on? I asked myself. Why is Nixon rambling all over the map? Hunching and quickly dropping his shoulders, incessantly sputtering something, constantly switching subjects. Finally, searching for some reaction to the President’s erratic behavior among his family and other guests, I asked myself the unthinkable. Is the President coming apart because of Watergate?…
Dinner ended on a somber strained note with several stretches of silence—except for the President. He jabbered incessantly, often incoherently, to the end.
Goldwater says in his memoir that so great had been his concern at what he had witnessed that evening of December 13, he went home and dictated these words for his file:
I have reason to suspect that all might not be well mentally in the White House. This is the only copy that will ever be made of this; it will be locked up in my safe and Judy is pledged to secrecy.
I phoned Harlow the following day and bluntly questioned him about the President’s behavior. He said that Nixon had been drunk before and during dinner.
Later, Price lamely claimed that Nixon had been “working” each person at that table. Among his aims, Price said, the President was trying to keep him and Harlow from jumping ship….
To this day Pat Buchanan will not comment on the dinner.
The evening was a watershed for me. Nixon appeared to be cracking. The presidency was crumbling.
Watergate had taken a toll on Nixon. And while Rose, Ray, Bryce, and I had often seen Nixon unwind at day’s end with a few drinks, and were not at all taken aback, Barry was shocked at seeing the disciplined leader he had known ramble on. The President was under terrible stress, and, with no end to his torments in sight and impeachment hearings ahead, was showing it. A fatalism seemed to be setting in, an awareness, if not an acceptance, that there might be no way out.
By late December 1973, Nixon’s approval had fallen to 29 percent and his disapproval had risen to 60 percent. Three in five Americans did not like the performance in office of the president to whom they had given the largest landslide in American history a year before.
Pessimism permeated the nation. While 7 percent told Gallup they expected a resumption of prosperity in the new year, 85 percent saw a year of rising unemployment and economic difficulty ahead in 1974.
The Dumping of the Tapes
On March 19, 1974, I was jolted to learn that Senator James Buckley, brother of Bill, was calling on Nixon to resign, signaling conservatives it was time to abandon ship. On April 2, 1974, Georges Pompidou, De Gaulle’s prime minister who had succeeded the general as president in 1969, died. Nixon decided to attend the funeral. Two hours out of Paris, word came to us on Air Force One that Dwight Chapin had been convicted of lying to the Watergate grand jury about his knowledge of the Segretti operation. It was the first criminal case brought by the Watergate prosecutors. A pall settled over the plane. Many of us had been friends of Dwight for years.
On April 29, 1974, with Nixon making the announcement in a televised address to the nation, the White House released transcripts of the tapes of forty-six conversations dealing with Watergate that had been subpoenaed. With all the “[expletive deleted]” designations, the transcripts would finish Nixon with countless loyalists and do irreparable damage to his reputation and place in history. I did not understand then, nor do I now, why we did what we did. My colleagues had said that the transcripts of the Dean tapes were too toxic to reveal in December. Yet they had approved the dumping of those and scores more transcripts in April in a move no one had told me was coming. A feeding frenzy ensued for days. Old friends in politics and the press began to bail out. Al Haig described the reception:
The reaction to his speech and the transcripts themselves was far worse than anything that even I had anticipated. His enemies refused to believe him and excoriated him; his sympathizers were disillusioned and turned away from him. The fact that he was justified in saying that the transcripts exonerated him did not matter; what mattered was what always matters in politics: appearances.
The presidency of Richard Nixon was bleeding to death. On May 10, 1974, I wrote Haig:
This thing is hemorrhaging terribly. The Old Man cannot resign; that would be an admission of guilt. But he has to get out front and center, as there is no sign that the bleeding on the Hill, and among our residual supporters in the national press, is going to stop. If he doesn’t move soon, there is a possibility that, politically, he could wind up in the middle of next week with a handful of Congressional supporters at best, and his Swiss Guard here in the White House….
Surrogates cannot do the job for the President now. He has to get out there himself; let the nation see him fighting the uphill fight.
What should the Old Man do? came the response. On May 21, I sent the President an action plan to end the public’s conflation of Watergate with the President’s overall performance as national leader. As long as the issue is Watergate, where only a fourth of the nation supports us, I told Nixon, we lose. We have to move the battle onto other terrain, go over onto the attack, and elevate “national issues which divide the Democrats, and polarize the nation about liberal-radical and conservative points of view, where we have a majority or at least a good deal more national support than the 25% we get on Watergate.”
The five issues I suggested that we elevate and act on included abortion and busing—by vetoing the education bill with a presidential statement that “compulsory integration is a gross failure, and idiotic to pursue.” Beyond this the President should veto the legal services program, pick a fight with the post-Vietnam Congress over deep cuts in national defense, and wield his veto pen, publicly. Finally, I wrote:
[T]he President’s political survival would be better served by a declaration of political war against our opponents on these issues which we have won two-thirds of the nation, than on the issues of Watergate, where we have been consistently winning one-fourth of the nation.
The idea was to get Nixon up and fighting again, on the offensive rather than simply receiving blows, and to show that the survival of his presidency was indispensable to the success of the causes for which the New Majority had voted. Middle America had a stake in his presidency. The next day, Nixon vetoed the amendments Congress had attached to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, declaring:
I must state again my unequivocal opposition to forced busing for the purpose of achieving racial balance. The experience of the past 5 years shows that we can dismantle dual school systems without resort to massive forced busing.
Among the legal and judicial outrages in that scoundrel time was that Nixon’s men were all indicted and tried in the city most hostile to them and to the president they had served, a city marinated in anti-Nixon coverage and commentary for eighteen months. When word leaked that Nixon had been named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Watergate cover-up, I wrote an op-ed that got national coverage that asked: “[W]hat went into the production of that headline—so deleterious to the President—‘Jury Linked Nixon to Cover-Up.’…Who ‘linked’ the President to the Watergate cover-up…?”
I answered my own question. The grand jurors were drawn from the most anti-Nixon city in America, Washington, D.C., which gave 78 percent of its votes to George McGovern. Only one of twenty-three grand jurors was a Republican. Seventeen were black, from a minority that had voted 10–1 against Nixon, and whose leaders regularly smeared his White House as “bigoted and racist.” As for the special prosecutors who made the case against the President, seven of the first eleven senior appointees had close associations to the Brothers Kennedy. The deck in D.C. was as stacked against Nixon as it had been in the Deep South against Dr. King. And I made that point:
Had Martin Luther King been indicted for “sedition” by a grand jury in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, by prosecutors formerly associated with the late Leander Perez, the New York Times might have viewed that charge with the same skepticism, with which many greeted this particular grand jury’s naming of Richard M. Nixon.
The Washington Post decried my calling out the racial composition and political character of the grand jury, as well as the pro-Kennedy background and bias of the Watergate special prosecutor’s office. I wrote to the editor in reply, reasserting what I had charged the Post with—hypocrisy.
Certainly, the Washington Post Company, which helped make “all-white jury” a pejorative epithet in the salad days of the civil rights movement is on slippery turf in attempting to ignore or disguise the fact that seventeen members of the Watergate panel are from a minority that voted 10–1 against President Nixon.
John Sirica, the hanging judge who sentenced Gordon Liddy to twenty years for a break-in, said in his memoirs he had been “deeply” offended by my suggestion that there might be a bias against Nixon in a D.C. grand jury.
Yet, as Bob Woodward related in The Brethren, about the Supreme Court, after Ehrlichman was convicted, Justice Potter Stewart had said to Justice William Brennan that, as a white man, he would not want to be tried in D.C., where juries were predominantly black. To which that most liberal of justices, William Brennan, replied, “You bet your ass.”
I relished these exchanges with the Post. But that the White House was now reduced to writing op-eds and letters to the editor to answer war-type headlines and lead stories on the network news revealed the desperation of our situation. Besieged at home, Nixon, believing it was the one arena where he was, and could still be seen as effective, went abroad.
Air Force One headed for the Middle East—and Moscow.