“The President of the United States can never admit that”
WATERGATE WAS now more than a botched burglary. Warrantless burglaries and bugs, bald-faced lies obstructing justice, black bags crammed with hush money, B-52 bombings erased by falsified records—whether in the name of national security or the reelection of Richard Nixon—were abuses of presidential power.
Under the rule of law, the Senate Watergate Hearings were not a trial. But the rule of law had been taking a beating of late. The Justice Department and the FBI had been discredited. Few trusted Nixon to clean house rather than cover up the dirt. Piercing the shield of executive privilege that the president claimed would require a sharp force.
So the Senate unanimously commanded the new attorney general, Elliot Richardson,* a Republican stalwart who had run the Pentagon loyally since Nixon’s second inaugural, to appoint a special prosecutor with the independent authority to investigate the president. He chose a man tailor-made to enrage Nixon: Archibald Cox, President Kennedy’s solicitor general. Richardson vouched for Cox’s capacity to handle “the grave, difficult and delicate issues” he would confront. Nixon described the genteel Cox as “the partisan viper … planted in our bosom.”
The prevailing political atmosphere—in particular, the fact that Cox was investigating the president himself—compelled Nixon to make an unusual concession. He agreed that only the attorney general had the power to dismiss Cox. The special prosecutor was an independent force; the president could not slay the viper with the stroke of a pen. Cox requested and received the files of the prosecutors who had put the Watergate burglars in prison—and who were continuing to call witnesses before the federal grand jury overseen by Judge Sirica. They meticulously prepared an eighty-seven-page précis of their findings, listing twenty-seven people who were potential targets for indictment.
Number twenty-seven was the president of the United States. They cited Vernon Walters’s memoranda as essential evidence. The Walters memcons, now circulating among senators and senior Justice Department prosecutors, included the meeting where Walters was told that the president wanted the CIA to shut down the Watergate investigation. The White House tape of that meeting would one day be known as the smoking gun.
The special prosecutor’s power was one among many weapons aimed at the White House that spring.
* * *
Two events took place in Congress that would change history. One was without fanfare, the other without precedent.
First, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was introduced by congressman Clement Zablocki, an unheralded Wisconsin Democrat. Its intent was to resolve the Constitution’s division of military authority between the president and Congress.
The Constitution makes the president commander in chief of the armed forces; it gives Congress the authority to declare war and the responsibility to support the armed forces by appropriating money. The War Powers Resolution said that the president had to consult with Congress about making war; it required a formal declaration of war, absent a national emergency caused by a surprise attack; and it gave the president sixty days to win congressional approval for financing a war. This bill would be passed into law, over President Nixon’s veto, six months later. It would prove a revolutionary act.
Then, on May 11, that tumultuous day at the White House, the House of Representatives voted 219–188 to cut off funds for the bombing of Cambodia.
The transmissions picked up by Sylvana Foa’s five-dollar pocket radio had reverberated around the world. This vote marked the first time the House had passed an end-the-war bill, an act within its power: under the Constitution, all spending bills must originate in the House. Between early February and the end of April 1973, the United States had dropped 83,837 tons of bombs on Cambodia, roughly seven Hiroshimas, at a cost of $159.5 million (about $840 million in today’s dollars). The Pentagon had been caught trying to transfer $150 million from other operating accounts into another three months’ worth of bombs for Cambodia.
Now the House had said no. If the Senate followed suit, that vote would go straight to the heart of the issues raised by the War Powers Resolution. Can the president conduct a war any way he wants? Or can Congress, since it buys the bombs and the war planes with tax dollars, control the president? Nixon could continue the bombing—and he did. But he risked laying his power on the line and provoking a constitutional crisis—and he would.
Nixon had undertaken many of the major military offensives of the Vietnam War without consulting Congress; he had created a three-billion-dollar slush fund, stashed throughout the federal government, for classified military and intelligence operations; he had established scores of secret statutes without consulting the courts—all by invoking a declaration of national emergency first proclaimed by J. Edgar Hoover at the start of the Cold War. A Senate select committee created in June 1972 was slowly and painstakingly uncovering these facts, showing how Nixon had usurped power, unconstitutionally placing the presidency above Congress and the courts.
“The balance between the three branches was under attack by Nixon,” said William Green Miller, staff director of the Special Select Committee on Emergency Powers and War Powers, and later the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. The war in Vietnam and “the misuse of power and intelligence in Watergate all are part of the constitutional debate” at the time. “The constitutional balance had to be restored.”
The issues of presidential powers and presidential secrecy had been festering for years. After the War Powers Resolution was introduced, Sen. J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee since 1959, said flatly, “Watergate is the bursting of the boil.”
* * *
On May 17, 1973, Sen. Sam Ervin Jr. brought the Senate Watergate Committee to order, banging a colorful wooden gavel handcrafted by North Carolina Cherokees. “The Founding Fathers,” he intoned, “knew that those who are entrusted with power are susceptible to the disease of tyrants, which George Washington rightly described as ‘love of power and the proneness to abuse it.’”
The committee’s first witness was Robert C. Odle Jr., the straight-arrow administrator of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. His conduct had been flawless, save for one fact: he had hired James McCord as CREEP’s security director.
Odle remembered hearing about the Watergate break-in a few hours after it took place, while he was working on a Saturday morning at CREEP headquarters. “That could never happen here,” Odle told a colleague. “I have this guy working for me named Jim McCord, and he has got this place really tight, and all I can say is I am glad McCord works for me.” At that moment, McCord was under arrest. When Odle learned that, “I was extremely concerned,” he testified. “I mean, here was our security director in jail.”
“How long did you keep Mr. McCord on the payroll after the Watergate bugging?”
“About one minute,” Odle answered.
The next thing he remembered was G. Gordon Liddy standing in the hallway at CREEP and asking where the paper shredder was. “I saw him with a pile of papers, perhaps a foot high,” Odle told Sen. Howard Baker. The stack went into the shredder.
Despite the gravity of the moment, Odle brought levity to the proceedings. “We tried from the beginning to save documents,” he testified, to show that CREEP was a “well-run, fairly thrifty campaign.” Senators, staff, and some reporters started to giggle. “That seems funny now, I know,” Odle said. “We wanted to save the documents because we thought it might be interesting for a scholar to go back in 100 years and…” At this point, the transcript shows, the hearings dissolved into laughter. Senator Baker complimented Odle by noting that when the committee broke for lunch, the television network covering the hearing had returned to its regular program, the popular game show To Tell the Truth.
After hearing detailed testimony from the police officers who had arrested James McCord and his Cuban American cohorts inside the Democratic National Committee, Ervin recessed the proceedings at 5:15 p.m. The next major witness on the following day, Friday, May 18, would be McCord himself.
* * *
Shortly before McCord arrived at the witness table, President Nixon convened a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Among those present was the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H. W. Bush.
After hearing reports on how the rest of the government was faring, Nixon turned to the continued American bombing in Cambodia, the upcoming summit visit of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in June, and Watergate’s effect on the American body politic.
“The problem in Southeast Asia is blown out of proportion because of Cambodia,” Nixon told his Cabinet. “The purpose of bombing is not to get into a war in Cambodia, but to enforce the peace in Vietnam.” There was no peace. At that moment, Kissinger was opening six days of talks in Paris with President Thieu of South Vietnam and his adversary Le Duc Tho of the Hanoi Politburo, trying to salvage the failed cease-fire. The negotiations were fruitless; even Kissinger called them a charade. The war went on.
The June summit with the Soviets would be “a watershed in world history,” Nixon predicted. “Either we move forward on a constructive basis as we began last year, or we stop. If it is the latter, the world will be a dangerous place.… A lot is riding on the visit.” Kissinger had spent May 4–9 with Brezhnev, trying to work out an agenda for the summit. But he found the Soviet leader agreeable to little beyond a grand pronouncement against nuclear war.
As for Watergate, “It is rough and will get rougher,” Nixon said. “The crap will fly, but don’t think we have to deny every charge.”
“Be proud,” Nixon urged them. “Just say you don’t believe the President is involved.”
* * *
James McCord, not yet fifty, had spent five years at the FBI and nineteen years as a security officer specializing in surveillance and counter-surveillance at the CIA. A trusted friend in law enforcement, Jack Caulfield, John Ehrlichman’s gumshoe, had recruited him as CREEP’s security director.
In his explosive letter to Judge Sirica, McCord had said, “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent” at the Watergate burglars’ trial. McCord had not pleaded guilty or taken hush money. So what was that pressure? Watergate counsel Sam Dash asked.
McCord described three clandestine meetings with Caulfield held during the burglars’ trial, while he was free on bond, in January 1973. The two men talked twice at a parking area overlooking the Potomac River, and once during a two-hour car ride through the Virginia countryside. McCord said Caulfield told him he was delivering messages from “the very highest levels of the White House”: Plead guilty. Stay silent. You’ll go to jail for a year or less. There would be executive clemency to cut his sentence short, financial support for his family while he was behind bars, and a good job when he went free. McCord testified that Caulfield said that “the President’s ability to govern is at stake”; the government might fall if the cover-up failed.
McCord had told Caulfield that he knew the president had his problems, but “I had a problem with the massive injustice of the whole trial being a sham, and that I would fight it every way I know how.” In response to questions from Sam Ervin, McCord said that promises of executive clemency and clandestine caretaking also came from his codefendant Howard Hunt and Hunt’s lawyer; as the evidence would show, these assurances had been extracted from Hunt’s comrade and Nixon’s counselor Chuck Colson.
On Tuesday, May 22, Caulfield followed McCord to the witness table, taking his oath to tell the truth. He confirmed every aspect of McCord’s testimony about their secret meetings, and then he added startling details. In early January 1973, at the start of the Watergate burglars’ trial, Caulfield, the acting assistant director for enforcement at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, was attending a drug conference in San Clemente when he received a telephone call in his hotel room from John Dean.
Dean asked him to leave the hotel and call him back from a public telephone. He told Caulfield that “he had a very important message which he wanted me to deliver to James McCord.” The message was: “1) A year is a long time; 2) Your wife and family will be taken care of; 3) You will be rehabilitated with employment when this is all over.” Point one was an implicit promise of executive clemency; the minimum sentence that “Maximum John” could impose under federal law would be at least one year. Points two and three were explicit offers of cash in exchange for silence.
“I immediately realized that I was being asked to do a very dangerous thing,” Caulfield testified. “I said to Mr. Dean that I did not think it was wise to send me on such a mission since Mr. McCord knew, as many others did, that I had worked closely with Mr. Dean and Mr. Ehrlichman at the White House.”
Despite his misgivings, he met again and again with McCord. “I specifically renewed the offer of executive clemency,” he testified. McCord said no. Dean instructed Caulfield before their third meeting to “impress upon him as fully as you can that this offer of executive clemency is a sincere offer which comes from the very highest levels of the White House.”
Chief counsel Sam Dash had questions on this point: “You do know, do you not, that the President is the only person in this country who can grant executive clemency in a federal criminal matter?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Did you understand when you were speaking with Mr. Dean that Mr. Dean wanted you to transmit the message to Mr. McCord that the offer of executive clemency was made with the proper authority?”
“Yes, sir.”
Millions of Americans were now glued to their television sets.
* * *
At about 4:00 p.m. on May 22, as Caulfield testified, the White House started handing out a four-thousand-word white paper, President Nixon’s longest and most detailed statement about Watergate to date. Nixon had painstakingly rewritten every word of the draft and issued it in the first person—and almost every word of the preamble was false.
I can and do state categorically:
1. I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate operation.
2. I took no part in, nor was I aware of, any subsequent efforts that may have been made to cover up Watergate.
3. At no time did I authorize any offer of executive clemency for the Watergate defendants, nor did I know of any such offer.
4. I did not know, until the time of my own investigation, of any effort to provide the Watergate defendants with funds.
5. At no time did I attempt, or did I authorize others to attempt, to implicate the CIA in the Watergate matter.
6. It was not until the time of my own investigation that I learned of the break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and I specifically authorized the furnishing of this information to Judge Byrne.
7. I neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics.
Point one was true. Points two through seven were lies.
Point two: Nixon began trying to cover up Watergate six days after the break-in. He lied to White House aides, high officials of the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, Congress, and federal prosecutors. Four times, on tape, he suborned perjury by CREEP’s second-in-command, Jeb Magruder. He withheld evidence by reflex.
Point three: Nixon twice authorized Colson to promise clemency to Howard Hunt and, as sworn testimony that very day suggested, promised clemency through John Dean to James McCord, the first man to blow the whistle on the Watergate cover-up.
Point four: Nixon, on tape, discussed hush money for Watergate defendants with Dean, Haldeman, Tom Pappas, and Rose Mary Woods.
Point five: Nixon tried to find a way to use the CIA connections of six of the seven Watergate burglars to pin blame for the break-in on the Agency. He authorized Haldeman and Ehrlichman to pressure the CIA into obstructing the FBI’s investigation.
Point six: Dean told Nixon, on tape, about the Plumbers’ burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Nixon did not look into the facts. Arguably it was a felony for Nixon to conceal his knowledge of the crime.
Point seven: Nixon, using Chuck Colson as his point man, spied on the campaigns and campaign contributors of his 1972 opponents, including George McGovern and Ed Muskie. He misused the IRS and the Secret Service in acts of political espionage.
The white paper could have been a chance for absolution. Nixon admitted that he’d authorized the White House wiretaps—but he omitted the fact that the taps never identified a leak. He promised that “executive privilege will not be invoked as to any testimony” at the Watergate hearings—but he reserved the privilege to withhold documents. He admitted the existence of the Huston Plan—but he never said, “I approved it.” In that passage, he had edited out the first person singular.
The first draft had said: “‘I ordered that they use any means necessary, including illegal means,’” Nixon told Haig. “The President of the United States can never admit that.”
The cover-up of the cover-up was the penultimate act in his downfall, an approaching darkness at the end of the tunnel. The white paper would become a template for the first article of the impeachment of the president.
* * *
Yet the flickering genius of Richard Nixon flared two days later, when he gave a fiery speech to the American prisoners of war returned from Vietnam.
Nixon always spoke triumphantly of ending the war. Soldiers with boots on the ground knew better. “There’s going to be a full-blown war starting up after we leave,” said Col. Einar Himma, one of the last American combat officers to take off from the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. “The fighting has never stopped anyway.”
After years of secret negotiating to end the war, and the gradual replacement of American divisions by Saigon’s forces under Vietnamization, what Nixon had accomplished in the end was a straight swap: the complete withdrawal of American combat forces in exchange for the release of 591 American prisoners of war. And on May 24, 1973, he invited every one of those POWs and their wives for a briefing and a reception at the State Department and supper on the White House Lawn. With 1,300 guests, it was said to be the biggest formal dinner ever held at the Executive Mansion.
When delivering his speech for the POWs, with members of the press present, Nixon was steely as a drill sergeant. “There was no plan to end the war” when he first came to office, he said. “Many of you were already prisoners of war. You had no hope.”
Nixon said he had won their release through his strength—and through his secrecy. “I want to be quite blunt,” he said. “Had we not had secrecy, had we not had secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese … you men would still be in Hanoi rather than Washington today. And let me say, I think it is time in this country to quit making national heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspapers.”
“I am going to meet my responsibility to protect the national security of the United States of America insofar as our secrets are concerned … so we can continue these enormously important initiatives for peace” with the Soviets and the Chinese, Nixon said. “The strength to be the peacemaker in the world—it is all right here. It is in America. It is in that Oval Office.…”
“Those first four years in that office were not easy ones for me,” he said. “But looking toward the balance of the second four years, let me say I feel better, because out in this room, I think I have got some allies, and I will appreciate your help.”
That day marked the last time that Nixon talked at length about the war during his presidency. It was striking that he spoke to such an extent about the secrecy and the solitude of his office to hundreds of men who had suffered in silence and isolation for so long.
* * *
After midnight, in the wee hours of May 25, Nixon unburdened himself to Haig on the telephone. He sounded exhausted, drunk, or both. The steel was gone. He talked bluntly about resigning: “Wouldn’t it be better for the country, you know, to just check out?” Haig laughed. “No, no, seriously,” Nixon said. “You see, I’m not at my best. I’ve got to be at my best, and that means fighting this damn battle, fighting it all-out. And I can’t fight the damn battle,” not with bad news hammering him hour after hour. “The goddamn thing has gotten to me.… And you get to the point that, well, if you can’t do the goddamn job you better put somebody in there that can.”
But no one could at that moment—and no one saw that fact more clearly than Nixon.
He knew (as very few did) that Vice President Agnew might soon face a federal indictment.* Next in the legal line of succession were two Democrats: the Speaker of the House, Carl Albert of Oklahoma, an alcoholic who spent two months in rehab later that year; and the president pro tempore of the Senate, James Eastland of Mississippi, a doddering plantation master and notorious racist. Neither was fit to serve. Fifth in line was the secretary of state. Nixon was about to nominate Kissinger—born in Germany and thus disqualified under the Constitution.
So Nixon had to fight the damn battle. The summer was going to be swallowed up by the Watergate hearings, though the committee was in a temporary recess and no major witnesses were scheduled for the next three weeks. During this lull, John Dean kept the press well fed, each story cutting away the president’s credibility. Dean was to testify in June; Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman throughout July. The Senate’s inquisition would run into September.
The number of people privy to the deeper secrets of Watergate grew as Al Haig brought new lawyers and staffers into the Oval Office. Among them were two who learned that Nixon had had the White House wired. Nixon knew what would happen if that secret got out—and if Cox or Congress got their hands on his tapes.
On June 4, Nixon began listening to his taped conversations with John Dean, taking notes in preparation for Dean’s public testimony, “so that we can strategize whipping this son of a bitch,” as Haig put it. Steve Bull, who had succeeded Alexander Butterfield as the deputy assistant to the president overseeing the taping system, struggled to find the right reels; the tapes never had been catalogued. Nixon spent nine hours that day listening to his talks with Dean from March, telling Haig it was the hardest work he’d ever done in his life. He avoided the “cancer on the presidency conversation,” remembering well that he had said he could raise a million dollars in hush money, recoiling at the prospect of hearing himself say it again.
Then came a shock. On June 6, one of Nixon’s new in-house counsels, J. Fred Buzhardt, a highly intense lawyer imported from the Pentagon by Haig, had a meeting with Special Prosecutor Cox. Buzhardt returned to report to Nixon that Cox wanted evidence from the White House—specifically, “a tape of a conversation that you had with Dean on the evening of Sunday, April 15.”
Nixon was flabbergasted.
How could Cox suspect that this tape existed? As it turned out, he had three sources: one was Henry Petersen, chief of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department; the second was John Dean; and the third was Richard Nixon himself.*
When Buzhardt raised the subject the next week, Nixon said flatly: “I have no tapes.” It wasn’t the first time he’d lied to Buzhardt, and it wouldn’t be the last.
In a talk with Rose Mary Woods on the morning of June 12, the president became unglued. Brezhnev was arriving in four days for a weeklong summit meeting. Dean was supposed to take the stand two days after that.†
Watergate had been a tightening noose for a year. “It’s almost a miracle that I’ve survived this,” Nixon said, “this brutal assault, brutal, brutal, brutal assault, day after day after day.… That impeachment crap. That’s the saddest of all.” Rose Mary Woods, who loved Richard Nixon, said, “You’re killing yourself with the job.”
“I don’t mind killing myself…,” the president said. “I would expect to kill myself, and I would do it.”
* * *
He won a brief respite—very brief—when the leaders of the Senate announced that John Dean’s testimony would be postponed in deference to diplomacy. General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev arrived in the United States on June 16 for his weeklong summit meeting with President Nixon. They held six talks, in Washington, at Camp David, and in San Clemente. In a one-on-one conversation with Brezhnev, taped in the Oval Office on June 18, Nixon said, “We must recognize, the two of us, that I for 3½ more years in this office and the General Secretary, I hope, for that long or longer, we head the two most powerful nations.… And the key really is in the relationship between Mr. Brezhnev and myself. If we decide to work together, we can change the world.”
But they could not work together that week. Compared with its predecessors in Moscow and Beijing, the summit was a bust. Though the two leaders signed agreements on trade and other issues, the proclamation of the prevention of nuclear war was pabulum, and they made no progress on the strategic arms limitation treaty. The reality of arms control under Nixon was best expressed years later by James Schlesinger, who served as both defense secretary and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, in charge of building America’s nuclear arsenal: “I think that I still have the record for producing the most nuclear weapons in one year, that would have been 1972, of anyone in history.”
Nixon and Brezhnev found no common ground on the pursuit of peace in the Middle East, which the Soviets thought was the most urgent issue of the time. At 10:30 p.m. on June 23 in San Clemente, Brezhnev woke Nixon out of bed with an urgent demand for an unscheduled talk—an argument about the imminence of an Arab-Israeli war. For two hours, well past midnight, Brezhnev tried to bully Nixon into signing a joint statement for peace negotiations. The United States and the Soviet Union were as contentious over the basic issues as the Israelis and the Arabs; such a pact seemed a pipe dream. Nixon thought Moscow was angling for the advantage of its allies in Egypt and Syria. The president was unmoved.
There was no talk of “the spirit of San Clemente” at the summit’s end. Nixon stayed secluded at the Western White House while John Dean took the stand for a week in Washington.
* * *
Dean looked very young—he was thirty-four—and very respectable as he took the stand. He spent a full day reading a 245-page prepared statement and spent four days answering questions. All three major networks covered every minute of his testimony, and public television rebroadcast it every night. As many as eighty million Americans watched at least part of Dean’s command performance.
He methodically shredded Nixon’s white paper, point by point. He meticulously reconstructed their March 21, 1973, conversation about the metastasizing cancer in the Oval Office. He described in detail a corrupt administration committing crimes under the cover of national security. This portrait was composed by a man who confessed to coordinating the cover-up for the president.
Nixon realized, too late, that “we would never recover” from this portrayal. “It no longer made any difference that not all of Dean’s testimony was accurate,” the president wrote in his memoirs. “It only mattered if any of his testimony was accurate. And Dean’s account of the crucial March 21 meeting was more accurate than my own.”
Senator Baker, as the ranking Republican on the Watergate Committee, said that the outcome of the investigation rested on one question: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Dean pointed to his talk with the president on September 15, 1972—the day of the Watergate burglars’ indictments—as the moment the cover-up began. Since Nixon had denied meeting Dean before 1973, this seemed a definitive point. And Dean hammered it in by disclosing that the president himself had offered prosecutors “a tape of a conversation” with Dean recorded on that April night before Dean became a government witness. If there were tapes, Baker’s question could be answered in full.
At 5:30 a.m. on July 12, two days after he returned to the White House from San Clemente, Nixon awoke in excruciating pain, every breath a stabbing knife in his chest. The diagnosis was viral pneumonia. The president spent the next week at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, outside Washington.
The following afternoon, Friday the thirteenth, two Watergate staff investigators, Scott Armstrong, who worked for the Democrats, and Don Sanders, who worked for the Republicans, conducted a preliminary interview with a potential witness: Alexander Butterfield, the deputy assistant to the president during Nixon’s first term, the gatekeeper to the Oval Office. Butterfield, recently appointed as head of the Federal Aviation Administration, was one of seven people who knew about the tapes at the time, outside of the Secret Service technicians who handled the recording system. Butterfield had resolved that if he were asked a direct question about the tapes, he would answer truthfully.
They sat in a cluttered basement room of the Senate’s offices. Sanders had a document that Nixon’s counsel Fred Buzhardt had given to the Republican staff as a means of cross-examining John Dean. It was a single sheet of paper, a verbatim transcript, with a P for “president” and a D for “Dean.” The investigators slid the document across the table and asked Butterfield what he made of it. That wasn’t a direct question.
“I thought to myself that this had to come from the tapes—the very thing I’m worrying so much about,” Butterfield remembered. “So I just hemmed and hawed.”
Then Sanders, a former FBI agent, took over. “You had mentioned the Dictabelt,” he said. Nixon dictated letters and memoranda on the device, and Rose Mary Woods typed them up. “Apart from the Dictabelt, was there ever any other listening device in the Oval Office?” That was a direct question.
During a 2012 symposium with Dean and Armstrong, Butterfield recalled:
I knew it would be the end of my career, certainly in Washington. I just knew that. Nixon was so set on this thing being an absolute secret—and it was an absolute secret for all that time. We know that from what’s on the tapes. So, I said, “I’m sorry you asked that question. Yes, there was, and that’s where this document had to have come from.” And then we spent forty-five minutes describing the system. I felt reasonably sure that they had not heard that from any previous witness. That secret of Nixon’s was too closely held.
Armstrong ran to see the chief counsel, Sam Dash: “I blurted out, ‘Sam, Nixon taped all of his conversations.’” Butterfield testified to that on Monday. It was the biggest bulletin of the year. “NIXON BUGGED HIMSELF” was the tabloid headline in the New York Post.
Sleepless in his hospital room before dawn on July 19, Nixon scrawled a note on his bedside pad: “Should have destroyed the tapes.” But he had not. Instead, he decided, in a state of self-delusion, that “the tapes were my best insurance against an unforeseeable future.”
In retrospect, Nixon wrote, “from the time of the disclosure of the tapes and my decision not to destroy them, my presidency had little chance of surviving to the end of its term.”
* * *
On July 23, Senator Ervin and Special Prosecutor Cox subpoenaed a handful of tapes. Ervin wanted five for the Senate committee; Cox demanded nine for the Watergate grand jury. The president refused, citing executive privilege.
The battle was joined in Judge Sirica’s court. Looking to the Constitution for guidance on executive privilege, and finding none—the Framers had rejected the idea that one branch of the government had dominion over another—the judge began to draft an order. Sirica said he would rule by the end of August on whether the president had to obey the subpoenas.
Awaiting a decision, Nixon addressed the nation on August 15. Though defiantly defending himself, he appeared to promise to regard the rule of law. “The time has come to turn Watergate over to the courts,” he said. That did not mean he would turn over his tapes.
While sticking by every word of his white paper, Nixon conceded that Watergate was “not just a burglary and bugging of party headquarters but a whole series of acts that either represent or appear to represent an abuse of trust.”
But, he continued, Watergate also involved “a number of national security matters,” including “my efforts to stop massive leaks of vital diplomatic and military secrets.”
“Many have urged that in order to help prove the truth of what I have said, I should turn over to the Special Prosecutor and the Senate committee recordings of conversations that I held in my office or on my telephone. However, a much more important principle is involved,” the president insisted. “This principle of confidentiality of Presidential conversations is at stake in the question of these tapes. I must and I shall oppose any efforts to destroy this principle, which is so vital to the conduct of this great office.”
That same day, after years of struggle, by order of Congress, and over Nixon’s veto, the United States ceased the bombing of Cambodia. By law, the legislature was cutting off funds for the war in Vietnam. The passage of the War Powers Act was imminent. For the first time in history, the elected representatives of the people of the United States were forcing the president to sheath his terrible swift sword.
Richard Nixon, having failed to end the Vietnam War on his terms, now faced his final crisis.