It’s like Sisyphus. We rolled the rock all the way up to the top of the mountain…and it rolled right back down on us.
—PAT BUCHANAN, 1973
Pat Buchanan will survive in the footnotes of history as a kind of half-mad Davy Crockett on the walls of Nixon’s Alamo….
—HUNTER THOMPSON, January 1, 1974
Because of Nixon’s crucial role in saving Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the Saudis had imposed an oil embargo that was both economically damaging to the United States and politically damaging to the President. In June 1974, Nixon flew to the Middle East, first to Egypt, then Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Israel. On his train trip from Cairo to Alexandria, two million stood by the tracks to cheer the first American president to visit their country. Back in Washington, we borrowed the defiant line of the Goldwaterites after they had won 27 million votes to Lyndon Johnson’s 40 million: “Twenty-seven million Americans can’t be wrong!” Our echo in those final days was, “Two million Egyptians can’t be wrong!”
There was one tense moment in that penultimate trip of the Nixon presidency. As Air Force One entered Syrian airspace, a MiG jet suddenly appeared off one wing. Colonel Ralph Albertazzie slammed on the air brakes and took Air Force One into a dive. Staffers thought it was all over. Other MiGs appeared, and our pilots realized this was an honor escort for the arriving US president. In Damascus, Nixon was deeply impressed with President Hafez al Assad. He has, wrote Nixon in his diary, “a great deal of mystique, tremendous stamina and a lot of charm. He laughs easily and…will be a dynamic leader if he can just maintain his judgment.” Then Nixon, who was traveling with the First Lady, made an odd reference to me in his diary:
Pat [Nixon] noted that [Assad] had a flat head in the back which she said was probably because he hadn’t been turned when he was a baby. What he reminded me of, curiously enough, was that he had a forehead like Pat Buchanan’s, and my guess is that he has the same kind of brain and drive and single-mindedness that Pat has. The man really has elements of genius, without any question.
Apparently, cradling flattens heads in the Levant. But that the future butcher of Hama would, in his features and mental agility, remind the President of me, is, I suppose, a compliment, even if rooted in Nixonian phrenology. And while the press was now on the “death watch” of his presidency, Nixon had, between the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 and the trip to Egypt in June 1974, converted the largest Arab nation from a virtual Soviet satellite since Nasser came to power in the 1950s, into an ally. An extraordinary diplomatic coup, Nixon’s achievement would pave the way for Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin.
Mount Vernon
In May 1974, Shelley and I moved out of Watergate into a home in Northwest D.C. near Spring Valley. With boxes still piled high in the front hall, the doorbell rang. Welcoming us to the neighborhood, a bottle of champagne in hand, was the chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush, wife Barbara, and their blond cocker spaniel, “C. Fred Bush.” Running against President Bush fifteen years later, I still never forgot the graciousness of the gesture, which was so typical of the Bushes.
On May 27, 1974, Nixon invited Shelley and me to join him, the First Lady, and Rose on a cruise on the presidential yacht Sequoia. When we got aboard, Nixon left Rose, Shelley, and Pat Nixon, friends since vice presidential days, in the main cabin. He and I climbed to the top deck, where he ordered drinks for us both. We began to talk and drink. It was still daylight. Nixon sat facing the bow. I was facing the stern. After the Sequoia had moved out onto the Anacostia River and started down to the Potomac, Nixon’s face suddenly darkened into a scowl, his mood changed, and he seemed about to explode in rage. I wondered: Did I say something? What’s happening?
Then I noticed he was not looking at me, but above my head, and I turned and saw that we were approaching a bridge over the river on which stood two photographers, snapping shots of the embattled President drinking on his boat at day’s end. From Nixon’s expression, those photographers were lucky he did not have a shotgun. Our conversation was over. An angry President directed me to follow him down off the top deck and back inside the boat. His scatological remarks about a press that would not leave him even a few private moments were understandable.
After a leisurely trip downriver, during which we were served a sumptuous dinner, the Sequoia arrived off Mount Vernon. The engines were shut off. The boat began to drift. The Secret Service and Navy crew came to the starboard side, stood silently, and saluted, as we held our hands over our hearts, drifting past a brilliantly lit Mount Vernon and the graves of our first president and Martha Washington. Over the still waters we heard the sound of “Taps” coming from the Sequoia, and then “The Star-Spangled Banner.” An unforgettable moment.
As the Sequoia started back upriver, Nixon ordered it to shore on the Virginia side, and we boarded Marine One for a five-minute flight back to the White House. A memorable evening, abruptly over. I had been with Nixon now for more than eight years, from the first days of his comeback to these, the lowest and last days of his presidency.
Final Summit
In late June 1974, I was in Munich with a delegation of the American Council of Young Political Leaders (ACYPL) on a tour of NATO bases. Shelley was with me when a call came from the White House. It was Al Haig. The President, on his upcoming summit with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, had decided to hold a press conference in the Soviet Union and he needed me there to do his briefing book. I met Air Force One in Brussels. Shelley returned to Washington on the C-17 carrying the White House switchboard and support staff.
While we were put up at the Kremlin’s Grand Palace and Rossiya Hotel, a reception was held for the President and his staff in the magnificent St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin. There it was that “Edward,” my Soviet contact from campaign days in the late sixties, appeared and pressed me on whether Nixon would survive the impeachment drive in the House. I assured him we would. Even if the House impeaches Nixon, I said, the Senate would not convict.
I asked Edward to introduce me to Sergei Gorshkov, the Russian admiral who had done for the Soviet Navy what Admiral Von Tirpitz had done for the Kaiser’s. Out of a coastal fleet and some riverboats in 1956, Gorshkov had built an oceangoing navy of hundreds of missile and attack submarines and warships that was now a global challenge to the US Navy. Edward interpreted. Gorshkov was a pleasant, avuncular man who had commanded the Soviet Navy for eighteen years, and while he said little, he seemed pleased with my compliments and comparisons of him to the legendary Captain A. T. Mahan, who had authored The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Gorshkov had written a similar book. One thing puzzled me. The admiral was not drinking, but stood spooning a bowl of ice cream while he listened. When I explained this to a Russian expert on the US staff, he told me this was a tradition of the czarist nobility.
Suddenly, from photographs I had seen, I recognized a tall, broad-shouldered, light-haired, older Russian moving across the hall, followed him out onto a balcony, and stood beside him as he lit a cigarette. I thought of introducing myself to Mikhail Suslov. Born in 1902, Suslov had joined the Young Communist League during the revolution and, at nineteen, during the Civil War between Reds and Whites, had joined the Party. By the early 1930s, he was on the control commission supervising Stalin’s genocides in the Urals and Ukraine. During the Great Purge, which began in 1937, Suslov had risen rapidly in the party hierarchy. During World War II he had supervised the deportations of ethnic minorities from the Caucasus and, after the war, rounded up dissident Lithuanians for deportation to Siberia. Before Stalin’s death, he had become a member of the Politburo and rose to chief ideologist of the Party and organizer of the coup that ousted Khrushchev and brought Brezhnev to power. This figure of history was now staring down at me with withering contempt. He did not seem to be a man taken with our détente. Wordlessly, I turned around and went back into the great hall.
While we were put up briefly at the Kremlin, I got the White House Communications Agency to put through a call to my father’s accounting firm and told Pop, a Pius XII Catholic and admirer of Joe McCarthy, that his son was calling from inside the Kremlin.
The Boating Party
From Moscow, we flew south to Yalta, the Crimean city on the Black Sea where FDR had met with Stalin and Churchill in the infamous summit of February 1945. To conservatives, Yalta was a second “Munich,” where the President and the British prime minister cravenly capitulated to the Soviet dictator’s demand for all of Eastern and Central Europe, including Poland, for which Britain had gone to war. “Yalta” had become a synonym for a betrayal of America’s values and the sellout of 100 million Christians who had been consigned to the mercies of the greatest mass murderer in history. Within six months of that Yalta summit, FDR was dead, Churchill had been voted out, and Harry Truman was left to deal with its consequences.
As we did not want any Yalta datelines, our folks collaborated with Brezhnev’s, and the Nixon party was put up in a suburb of Yalta called Oreanda, which was declared a town for the summit. Oreanda is where Nixon and Brezhnev would negotiate, not at the Livadia Palace of the czars, where the 1945 Yalta summit had been held.
From Moscow to the Crimea, Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig flew on Brezhnev’s plane, leaving me with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, who had a wonderful time having me photograph him sitting in the President’s chair on Air Force One. His wife was along and she had me take pictures of her as well. It was the time of détente. Yet, for all his conviviality, this was the same Dobrynin who had been Moscow’s man in Washington who negotiated the removal of Soviet rockets from Cuba with Robert Kennedy.
By now, it appeared there would be no SALT II with the Soviets on nuclear missiles, no press conference, and no need to prepare a briefing book. So I went into Yalta, visited Livadia Palace, went down to the waterfront, bought an ivory-inlaid chess and backgammon set from Vietnam for eighty dollars, sat at the bar, and watched the folks on the beach, few of whom belonged in bathing suits. Obesity seemed pandemic, more so than at any American beach I had ever seen.
At the bar in Yalta I ran into Kim Willenson, a classmate at Columbia with whom I had gotten into a fistfight at a Christmas party in front of the dean. Kim was with UPI. We talked, and deep inside his story he quoted some innocuous remark I made. This set off Henry, now secretary of state as well as national security adviser, who had ordered all White House aides to say absolutely nothing to the press.
On our last day in Crimea, after it was concluded that no arms deal was possible, Nixon’s and Brezhnev’s staffs boarded two matched 120-foot powerboats for an excursion on the Black Sea. Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and Ziegler were on the boat with Brezhnev. Price and I were on the staff boat with Haig’s deputy, Major George Joulwan, a Vietnam veteran, who that day was being promoted to lieutenant colonel.
Once out on the water and out of sight of the Nixon-Brezhnev boat, Joulwan decided to celebrate his promotion by standing on a table on deck and drinking a toast as the boat sped along. Everybody joined in, and we went inside to lunch, all of the Americans on one side of a long table and all the Russians on the other side.
After the usual toasts to peace and friendship, someone on our side of the table raised his glass, and bellowed, “F— the KGB!” and downed his vodka. We all laughed, then followed suit, and across the table some of the Russians laughed and shouted, “F— the KGB!” I looked up and down the Russian side and saw several not participating in the revelry. Then, from the Russian side of the table, someone held up a glass and yelled, “F— the CIA!” Everybody laughed and drank to that.
On the Russian side, our interpreter, the deputy chief of protocol for the Russians, who had been a prisoner of war of the Germans, was by now thoroughly inebriated and yelling “F— the KGB! F— the KGB!” None of the Russians seemed as amused at his antics as were we.
Down and down the liquor went until I felt my head spinning, a sure sign that it would be a matter of minutes before I lost my lunch. I stopped drinking, began sipping water, and went back up on deck. I could see the Brezhnev yacht passing by hundreds of yards away, back and forth along the coast of the Black Sea, with them closer to shore. Unless they were using a telescope they could not see the revelry aboard our boat.
After many hours, both boats returned to shore and ours berthed maybe a hundred yards north of the Nixon-Brezhnev boat. Looking down the boardwalk, I could see Nixon, Brezhnev, Haig, and Kissinger all jovially parting company. Nixon was getting aboard an elevator to take him from the beach up to street level. As our party was totally out of it, I told our guys that we should avoid the President, remain where we were, and not take the elevator, but walk up the paved path to Brezhnev’s dacha, then arrive at the motorcade late, after Nixon and Haig had departed.
While discussing our departure strategy, I saw a figure approaching, grinning up a storm. It was the czar of all the Russias, Leonid Brezhnev. And he was tanked. As he approached, babbling in Russian, he threw out his arms and gave me a big hug and started hugging the other Americans from Yacht No. 2.
Then Brezhnev moved on. With everyone in our party drunk or close to it, we watched Nixon, Haig, and Kissinger get on the elevator and start up to the motorcade. We started up the paved path. Somehow, and I yet do not know how, we intercepted the Nixon-Haig party near the top. As we stopped to let them pass, Haig, once an aide to General Douglas MacArthur, looked over and said, “That’s a fine-looking outfit!” and soldiered on.
By the time we got to our cars, Nixon and Haig were gone. We then were driven back to our lodgings, where I repaired to the cafeteria and sat immobile, shaking, sipping water and coffee. Suddenly, Major Jack Brennan, USMC, the President’s military aide, was in front of me, “I see you bastards don’t retrieve your wounded,” said Brennan.
What are you talking about? I asked him. It was after dark. Brennan explained that one of our party in the line of march up the hill had stopped, stretched out on a bench, passed out, and been discovered on Brezhnev’s estate by his KGB security detail, who had retrieved and returned him to us.
Who was it, I asked. Brennan told me. I would next see that aide back in the White House mess. When he saw me, he had a sickly grin and his face was beet-red. Your secret is safe with me, I told him.
The next day, at the lunch in Minsk, we ran into the deputy chief of protocol, who seemed red-faced to the point of humiliation. We got the sense he had been severely reprimanded for his performance on the boat, and felt badly for him, as we had goaded him on, and he had seemed among the most genuinely friendly of all the Russians aboard.
A White House Defeat—and a Leak
On May 24, Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski had asked the US Supreme Court to rule on his subpoena for sixty-four tapes Nixon had refused to turn over. Judge Sirica had already ruled in his favor. On July 8, Jaworski went before the full Court. Nixon’s lawyer, Jim St. Clair, defended the President’s right, under executive privilege, not to turn over the tapes.
On July 24, with Justice William Rehnquist recusing himself, the Court, in United States v. Nixon, ruled the special prosecutor had the right to sue the President and that the subpoena for the sixty-four tapes was justified. Chief Justice Burger read the opinion, which was joined in by two other Nixon appointees, Blackmun and Powell.
That same day, the Atlanta Constitution ran an eight-column banner atop page one, TAPES DESTRUCTION URGED BY AIDE IN ’73. The Constitution reprinted the text of my memo to the President of July 1973 urging him to burn the tapes and to fire Archibald Cox. Picked up and run nationwide, the Constitution story began:
Washington.—A top adviser urged President Nixon more than a year ago to destroy tapes of the private conversations before their existence became known publicly and Watergate investigators subpoenaed them, it has been learned.
Then, just nine days after the startling public disclosure of the elaborate White House taping system, presidential adviser Pat Buchanan recommended in writing to Nixon the burning of at least some potentially embarrassing tapes and the muzzling or outright firing of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox.
A copy of Buchanan’s extraordinary memo—dated July 1973 and labeled “administratively confidential”—has been obtained by the Cox Newspapers. Five pages long and addressed to the President, it lays out in graphic language a political battle plan for blunting the impeachment drive and reversing Nixon’s steady decline in popularity.
In the memorandum Buchanan branded Cox a “known Nixon-hater” pandering to “Kennedy-McGovern types” who were out to “castrate the President.”
Instead of relying on mainly a legal defense against the Watergate investigation, Buchanan urged a major political counter-attack against “Cox’s army” and like-minded liberals.
“Break it off,” he implored the President. “Who will govern America, them or us?”
My memo had been leaked by someone in the White House, almost surely the “ranking official” cited in the piece by David Kraslow and Eugene Risher.
Nixon rejected the advice to destroy the evidence which now threatens to bring his downfall on several grounds.
“For one thing, he knew there were a number of people around here who would not have stayed on if that had happened,” one ranking official said. “Those tapes could be evidence in an investigation already underway. The President understood this. We all understood that.
“The President finally agreed it would be wrong—ethically, politically, legally. In fact, the mere act of destroying the tapes might have been considered by many people enough to warrant impeachment.”
These are almost surely the words of a lawyer, and the leaker of my memo. Such counsel and Nixon’s acceptance of it cost him his presidency. What was hard for me to understand was the indecisiveness, the paralysis of a president who could act so boldly. As I had tried to drive home in my memo, the tapes could destroy not only his presidency, but him. Cox would be coming after those tapes, and there was no guarantee, none, that the Supreme Court would deny him. Why not act—and moot the issue?
But the moment had passed, Nixon had not acted, and the tapes had been turned over to the special prosecutor and House Judiciary Committee, considering impeachment. Transcripts of the subpoenaed tapes had been made public. The Nixon presidency had been broken. He was down to 25 percent approval. And the release of one more incriminating tape would prove fatal. On July 27, the House Judiciary Committee voted the first article of impeachment of the President—obstruction of justice.
The Sperling Breakfast
On Wednesday, July 31, I was scheduled to appear at “the Sperling Breakfast,” a gathering of two dozen reporters and columnists who met regularly with newsmakers in an on-the-record setting. Hosted by Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor, the breakfast was a Washington institution. Before I left for it, I got an urgent call from Bill Timmons of the congressional relations office. Haig and the President were considering a plan that had been bruited about in the White House—to call on the House of Representatives, where the Judiciary Committee had already voted articles of impeachment, to send the matter, without a floor fight, over to the Senate for trial and resolution. White House lawyers believed they could make the case in a Senate trial that there was no conclusive proof the President was guilty of impeachable acts. I was told by Timmons, who invoked Haig and the President, that I was to float the idea of bypassing the House at the Sperling Breakfast.
I balked. I did not like the idea. I had opposed it in the White House and felt we ought not surrender any forum, but fight in them all. We know that, Timmons told me, but float it anyway. To my regret, I did. I told the stunned assembly of journalists that the White House was considering bypassing the House and moving straight to the Senate for trial. This was major news. And, as Woodward and Bernstein wrote, it backfired:
Buchanan’s “news” was on the wires by 10 a.m. On Capitol Hill, it was received with anger and disbelief, particularly by the President’s supporters on the House Judiciary Committee. [Congressman Charles] Wiggins was infuriated. “I don’t care if Nixon called me and said that’s what he wanted. I don’t think it’s right.” By early afternoon, Buchanan was puncturing his own trial balloon. “The Old Man’s people on the Hill are appalled,” he reported back to Timmons. As the fallout worsened, [political counselor] Dean Burch got word from the President, “Kill the plan.”
By the next morning, editorials in pro-Nixon newspapers were accusing me of cowardice, of bugling retreat, of urging the White House to run from a battle Nixon loyalists wanted to fight on behalf of their leader. I had been given and carried out a rotten assignment that damaged my reputation as the President’s conservative loyalist.
Last Sunday at Camp David
On Sunday, August 4, Price and I helicoptered to Camp David to join Haig, Ziegler, and Jim St. Clair at Laurel Lodge. Before the 12:30 p.m. liftoff from the Pentagon helipad, I had run my three miles—down Constitution Avenue, around the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, up the Fifteenth Street side of the Washington Monument, around the East Ellipse, where we had played CYO football in the early 1950s, and back into the White House.
When we reached Camp David, there was a single crucial issue to be decided. The tape of June 23, 1972, had revealed Nixon in a discussion with Haldeman about using the CIA to contain the FBI investigation of Watergate. But this was not the problem. That the White House had sought to restrict the FBI’s Watergate investigation to the break-in in the days immediately following was known, but it was also known that the President had told acting FBI director Pat Gray to proceed.
The crucial question went not to complicity but credibility. After talking with Steve Bull, Nixon’s personal aide, who was back at the White House and had the President’s calendar, we pieced together the sequence of events. Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, who had succeeded Cox, had subpoenaed sixty-four tapes. He had confidentially offered to settle for eighteen, among which was the tape of the June 23, 1972, Nixon conversation with Haldeman. On May 6, 1974, that tape of June 23, 1972, we had learned, had been checked out to Nixon. After listening to it, Nixon, on May 7, 1974, had spurned the Jaworski offer and refused to turn over the requested tapes. From then to August, the President had continued to speak of his noninvolvement in the Watergate cover-up in ways that seemed contradicted by the tape to which he had listened on May 6.
To me, this seemed almost conclusive proof that Nixon had known, at least for three months, that the case he had made to his allies in Congress and loyalists in the country was not entirely true. My conclusion: the President could not continue to lead a country he had asked to believe him, if he knew he had not been telling the truth. Put starkly, it appeared to me that Nixon had discovered what he feared was a smoking gun, refused to surrender it, then continued to deny that any such gun existed.
Given our weakened condition, we could not survive this. While I did not speak with the President at Camp David—he spoke through Haig—I did advocate the “two-track” strategy that was adopted. Rather than have the President resign, which would startle and enrage his still-substantial following in the country, and his allies in the impeachment battle, Nixon should, on Monday, August 5, release the June 23 tape to the nation. Just drop it. The reaction to that tape, the final firestorm, would persuade the President to do what I did not think his aides should try to persuade him to do: resign. Release of the tape would blow so large a hole in the hull of the ship that even last-ditch Nixon aides would accept his resignation.
As Ray Price related in his memoir, forty years ago, I told him of this “two-track strategy” when we met at the White House on Sunday morning:
I also called Buchanan at home Saturday night…and arranged to meet with him in his office the next morning at 9:00….
When I met Buchanan on Sunday morning, I found that he had shifted his own ground somewhat. He still thought Nixon was going to have to resign, but now thought it would probably be better to put out the transcripts first and let the reaction hit. Then there would be no question about whether it would be necessary—Nixon would not live the rest of his life thinking that perhaps he could have made it after all, if only he had not been pushed into quitting by alarmist aides. The more I thought about it, the more Buchanan’s argument seemed to make sense. It would be better both for Nixon and for the country if any doubts about the necessity of giving up were resolved. And, of course, there was the slim possibility that we were wrong—that, this, too, could be survived. But I had seldom been as sure of anything as I was that it could not….
Buchanan and I agreed that he should write a memo to Haig, making some of the points we had talked about. He drafted one quickly, addressed to Haig (“Confidential—eyes only”), and my secretary typed it before we left. Buchanan, Ziegler, and I shared a car for the trip to the Pentagon, and as we rode to the helipad I gave Ziegler my copy to read.
Monday morning at around nine, I was asked by our new political counselor Dean Burch to come to his second-floor office in the White House to brief the senior staff on what had happened Sunday at Camp David. I described how we had reviewed the transcript of the June 23 tape, and called Steve Bull to confirm that the Old Man had listened to it, before he had refused to send it to the special prosecutor. Nixon’s statements since he had listened to the tape—about what he knew and when, in the aftermath of the break-in—appeared to be contradicted by the tape.
We are going to release that tape today, I went on. When it hits, there will be a new firestorm, the final firestorm. Many who have stood by us will abandon us. Our support, already insufficient to block impeachment in the House, will plummet in the Senate. By midweek it will be evident we cannot survive. By week’s end Richard Nixon’s presidency will be over.
No one interrupted as I went through my disquisition. When I finished, Dean stared at me, raised his arms, brought them down on the armrests of his chair, stood, and said, “Get the Scotch!” Bill Timmons proposed a toast, “To the President!” We all replied, “To the President!”—and I left.
Twenty-four hours after the tape of June 23 became public, all ten members of the Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment had indicated they would now vote for impeachment on the House floor on Article 1, obstruction of justice—as did Minority Leader John Rhodes.
The Daughters
Once I had concluded that Nixon should resign, Al Haig sent me to persuade the die-hards that this was the necessary course. Most were bitterly opposed. One told me that Nixon must endure impeachment, trial, and conviction, so that at the end—the aide thrust out his arms—he would be like Christ crucified on the Cross. Ken Khachigian, known as “Onoda,” after the Japanese soldier who had just emerged from the Philippines jungle, having refused to surrender for twenty-nine years because he had never heard the order from his emperor, was full of fight. Ben Stein, son of Herb, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and who was a new speechwriter, came to my office and quoted Emperor Hirohito, after Nagasaki, when Japan had either to surrender or to be annihilated. Said Ben, “We must endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable.”
I was asked by Al to make the case for resignation to Tricia and Julie. When I got to the solarium on the third floor of the White House, they were there with David, Ed Cox, and Nixon friend Bebe Rebozo. Julie and David seemed resigned to the inevitable. Tricia, Ed, and Bebe wanted to know why the President should resign his office, even if he had not told the truth about what he knew was on the tape of June 23. They wanted to fight on. I did not so much argue that the President should resign as explain why I thought it necessary: the Old Man cannot lead the nation once the nation learns that he asked them to believe him, when he had not been telling the truth.
I had been with Nixon eight and a half years, from his wilderness days. Now, not two years after our forty-nine-state landslide, I was making the case to his daughters and best friend why he had to resign the presidency in disgrace. It was a rotten assignment for a loyalist and, leaving the solarium, I did not think I had carried it off well.
Historians have written that Nixon was persuaded to resign after the arrival at the White House on Wednesday, August 7, of a delegation from the Hill—Senator Barry Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona—to tell him he must go. This is myth. On Wednesday morning, when Nixon arrived in the Oval Office, he had on his desk a resignation speech written by Ray at Nixon’s request on Tuesday. As we had anticipated at Camp David, the firestorm, ignited by the release of the June 23 tape on Monday, convinced the President his hopes of surviving a Senate trial were gone. He could remain in the presidency, and force the Senate to convict and remove him. Or he could surrender his presidency. Nixon chose to put country and family first and end the agony.
On Thursday, the day Nixon would go on national television and tell the nation why he was resigning, Dick Moore took me to lunch at the Metropolitan Club. We drank martinis, which I never did during working hours. It was 3 p.m. as we walked back to the White House past Sans Souci. In front of the restaurant, I spotted a member of the press corps laughing and gesticulating at what was about to happen to Richard Nixon. Stunned at suddenly seeing me but a few feet away, this Nixon hater changed his tone and cooed sympathetically, “Pat, isn’t this terrible?”
The President spoke to the nation that night. The next morning, Friday, August 9, 1974, Shelley and I were late arriving for the President’s valedictory address in the East Room. We stood among the TV cameras to watch him deliver it. Said the man to whom we had devoted so much of our lives: “Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” Shelley and I stood on the porch above the South Portico to watch him depart. With a wave of his arm and then his “double V” sign, Richard Nixon flew off aboard Army One for Andrews and San Clemente.