“LET OTHERS wallow in Watergate,” said Richard Nixon. He fled the miasma of midsummer Washington and spent almost all the rest of August in Key Biscayne and San Clemente.
Before the White House taping system was revealed—and immediately removed on orders from General Haig—Nixon had talked a brave game. Some of the last tapes caught his fighting words.
He vowed to eviscerate Sam Ervin and the Senate Watergate Committee. “I’m going to hit them and destroy them and they’ll be destroyed … absolutely destroyed,” he told Haig in a late-night telephone call. “They don’t realize what they’re up against—this stupid Ervin, drinking too much, and pointing his finger. Ha!”
Calling Kissinger from Camp David, he said, “We’ve been at this for four years, four-and-a-half- years.… [I]t’s virtually the same enemies, isn’t it?”
“The same enemies and now trying to do legally what they tried with riots earlier,” Kissinger replied.
“And in an election too,” Nixon said. “They failed at their riots, they failed in the election, now they’re trying to do it” with the Watergate investigation.
And he told Haldeman before his fired aide appeared before the Senate committee, “As you are well aware Bob, they’re really not after you.”
“Oh, hell, no,” Haldeman responded with bravura.
“They’re after the President,” Nixon said.
But Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell had done themselves and the president no favors in their testimony before the Senate committee. Haldeman, having heard the “you could get a million dollars” tape of March 21, swore that the president had immediately followed that statement by saying, “But it would be wrong.” That was perjury. What was wrong, Nixon had said many minutes later, was granting executive clemency under extortion.
Ehrlichman, who had presided over the Plumbers, was snarling and imperious. He defended the president’s national security powers, even when it came to burglary, to protect state secrets. He confronted the courtly country lawyer Herman Talmadge, a Georgia Democrat, who reminded him of the Magna Carta, the thirteenth-century foundation of Anglo-American law, and its ideal that a man’s home was his castle, and that his castle could be defended against a king.
Q: Do you remember when we were in law school, we studied a famous principle of law that came from England, and also is well-known in this country, that no matter how humble a man’s cottage is, that even the King of England cannot enter without his consent?
A: I am afraid that has been considerably eroded over the years, has it not?
Q: Down in my country we still think it is a pretty legitimate principle of law.
The Senate gallery applauded. Ehrlichman’s jutting jaw dropped. At that moment, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles was preparing a sealed indictment against him for the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, a Plumbers operation he had approved in writing.
John Mitchell was the worst witness of all. He was by then a broken man, destroyed by his devotion to Richard Nixon; the public breakdown of his mad wife, Martha; and his thirst for Scotch whisky. Mitchell lied under oath, attesting that he had undertaken no reelection campaign responsibilities while he was still attorney general. And he said that, in order to protect the president’s reputation before the 1972 ballot, he had concealed his knowledge of what he called “the White House horrors,” in particular the crimes of the Plumbers.
In a moment of truth, Talmadge again stuck in the dagger.
Q: You placed the expediency of the next election above your responsibilities as an intimate to advise the President of the peril that surrounded him?…
A: In my mind, the re-election of Richard Nixon, compared to what was available on the other side, was so important that I just put it in that context.
Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman would face federal indictments in a matter of months, the grand jury handing up the case to the Watergate special prosecutor. But by then the lawyer who held that title was no longer Archibald Cox.
* * *
In the fall of 1973, Richard Nixon faced a legal confrontation that had no precedent in the history of the United States.
On August 29, Judge Sirica ordered a subpoena duces tecum—Latin for “bring it with you”—to be served upon the president. It demanded that he deliver to the court nine White House tapes requested by Cox so that the judge could hear them in chambers; then he would decide if they should be turned over to the prosecutor. No criminal subpoena ever had been enforced upon a president; no court ever had compelled a chief executive to turn over documents against his will.
In a statement issued from San Clemente, Nixon said he would appeal. By September, the Watergate Committee had reconvened hearings in the Senate; Sam Ervin and his investigators wanted the secret recordings, too. Nixon’s counselors considered tossing the tapes into a bonfire; the threat of spending ten years in prison was a stumbling block. They asked themselves: Who would strike the match? King Timahoe?*
By the time a federal appeals court upheld Sirica’s order, the president already had proclaimed that he would not tear down the walls of the White House to comply with Cox or the Congress. He would abide only by a “definitive” decision by the Supreme Court. The president, when asked, would not define what he meant by definitive. He had appointed four of the nine justices; would he heed a divided court? What if the Court said to turn over the tapes and the president said no?
The nation was in uncharted territory. The only recourse under the Constitution if Nixon defied the High Court was impeachment—an indictment by the House of Representatives and a conviction by a two-thirds vote in the Senate—and no president ever had suffered that fate. The battle for the tapes continued in the courts and expanded rapidly into the political arena. A constitutional confrontation seemed imminent by October.
And October was when the Nixon administration, and the president himself, began to disintegrate.
* * *
Nixon had an ever-shifting set of schemes to avoid turning over the subpoenaed tapes. One was to fire Archibald Cox. Another was to create highly edited summaries of transcripts that might convey the gist of the tapes to the satisfaction of the courts and Congress. Or they might not.
On October 1, Rose Mary Woods took one of the nine tapes—a conversation among Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman from June 20, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in—and began transcribing it using a new apparatus called a Uher 5000, with a foot pedal that would let her stop, start, and rewind the tape without taking her fingers off the typewriter keys. Later that day, by the president’s account, she reported to Nixon that something had gone wrong: after answering the phone with the rewind pedal on, she’d returned to the tape to find a five-minute buzz in the recording where voices had once been.
Nixon checked with Haig and Buzhardt and they reported (wrongly) that the tape in question was not among the nine under subpoena. Nixon put the problem out of his mind and went on a long drive in a White House limousine to talk to Haig about what was really worrying him: Spiro T. Agnew, the vice president of the United States.
Nixon knew all about Agnew’s crooked conduct, having been informed of the facts by Elliot Richardson, the attorney general since May 29, and by William D. Ruckelshaus, the deputy attorney general, recently sworn in after serving seventy-nine days as the acting director of the FBI—a man Nixon called, with apparent sincerity, Mister Clean.
The evidence against Agnew was ironclad, a casebook in corruption. Five construction executives and engineers in Maryland had sworn under oath that, for eight years, beginning in 1964, they had been paying off Agnew (a county executive and the state’s governor before becoming vice president) in exchange for receiving state contracts. These kickbacks, regular monthly payments of up to ten thousand dollars apiece, had continued through December 1972. Agnew at least once pocketed an envelope of cash in the basement of the White House.
For months Agnew had fought a furious battle to dodge the charges. He said flatly that he would not go to prison and he would not face an indictment. He had argued with Nixon and Richardson that the case had to be quashed. If they did not meet his demands, he threatened, he would take his case to the American people—which he did. His rabble-rousing public rants were exactly the kind of embarrassment Nixon did not need at the moment.
At 6:00 p.m. on October 9, the Oval Office gatekeeper Steve Bull announced, “Mr. President, the Vice President.” Nixon and Agnew shook hands and sat down in front of the fireplace. Agnew had given in but, greedy to the last, in return for his resignation he asked the president to help him find lucrative corporate contracts abroad. As they parted, Nixon assured Agnew that he could always count on his friendship. The next day, the vice president of the United States became the former vice president. He stood in a federal courthouse in his hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, and pleaded no contest to a single charge of failing to report $29,500 in income during 1967, when he was the governor. This plea bargain, the judge said, was an unusually generous deal; he generally jailed tax evaders. The resolution was a suspended three-year sentence, a $10,000 fine, and Agnew’s resignation.
On the afternoon of October 10, Nixon said to Richardson, “Now that we have disposed of that matter, we can go ahead and get rid of Cox.” Only Richardson, not the president, had the legal power to do that. Nixon had struck that deal himself; at the time, the arrangement had seemed to him the line of least resistance.
* * *
Nixon had weighed four choices to replace Agnew as vice president: Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, whom he considered a lightweight; Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, whom he disliked; John Connally, his former treasury secretary and trusted confidant, whom he wanted to succeed him as president; and Gerald Ford of Michigan, the Republican minority leader of the House, respected as a decent human being if not regarded as the brightest light in the legislature.
A rapid consultation with the Republican chiefs in Congress made Nixon realize that only Ford could be confirmed, as required under the Constitution, without a struggle.
A peculiarity of the American political system requires presidential appointees to undergo background checks by the FBI. A civic panic began in the quiet city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, as seventy-five FBI agents arrived and began to question anyone who had ever heard of Gerald Ford. On October 15, Bill Ruckelshaus, as the Bureau’s former acting director, booked a flight to Grand Rapids, intending to quell the citizenry. He stuck his head into the attorney general’s office to inform him.
Richardson looked up, his elegant visage a mask of misery.
“We’ve got an even worse problem than Agnew,” he said.
That’s not possible, Ruckelshaus said.
“Yes, it is,” Richardson replied. “The President wants to fire Cox.”
“He’ll never do it,” Ruckelshaus said confidently. “The American people won’t tolerate it.” He was half right. The president’s problem was political, not legal. If he fired Cox, Nixon would wound himself.
Cox wanted to enforce the appeals court’s order for Nixon to produce the nine subpoenaed tapes forthwith. Nixon’s new gambit was to produce edited summaries of the tapes, and the tapes themselves, to the seventy-two-year-old Mississippi senator John Stennis, a highly conservative Democrat and a reliable political ally to the Nixon administration. Stennis would then verify the summaries and turn them, not the tapes, over to Cox.
But this compromise, as Nixon called it, was a calamity in the making.
Senator Stennis was known to be half deaf and in poor health, recovering from gunshot wounds suffered in a mugging months before; moreover, the senator had never agreed to a plan to review summaries, only to read complete transcripts. Three of the subpoenaed tapes could not be transcribed in any fashion: the Dean conversation of April 15 did not exist; a Nixon-Mitchell telephone call immediately after the Watergate break-in could not be found; and worse yet (if there could be worse), the tape Rose Mary Woods had been working on had an inexplicable gap—not just five minutes, but eighteen and a half minutes—made by at least five erasures, an incendiary fact that hinted at foul play.
In a letter that Haig dictated to Richardson on Friday, October 19, Nixon ordered Cox to cease and desist from seeking any more tapes, notes, or memos from the White House. He had a new incentive for this improper demand: John Dean had just agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice. Under the plea agreement, struck with Cox, Dean would go to prison but would first serve as a sworn government witness in any trial against the president’s men or, conceivably, the president himself.
“The President all along intended either to force Cox’s resignation or induce Richardson to fire him,” Ruckelshaus said in 2009. “The reason was simple. Cox was getting too close. In the nine tapes in question, or those subsequently acquired by the Special Prosecutor, were several smoking guns. This was why my earlier assumption about the willingness of the President to fire Cox was wrong. The act of firing Cox was that of a desperate man. Adverse public reaction must have seemed preferable to handing your accuser the still-hot weapon with your fingerprints all over it. Richardson was attempting to work out a compromise that would accommodate all legitimate and honorable interests. The President’s intentions were neither.”
There matters stood on Friday evening. A showdown was certain.
On Saturday morning, October 20, Cox called a press conference. “I am certainly not out to get the President of the United States,” he said, but Nixon had overstepped his powers by obstructing the work of the special prosecutor’s office. The president was not complying with the law or the legal agreement that gave Cox the right to follow the evidence wherever it led. Cox would go back to court to pursue the case. And he reminded his listeners, a nationwide television audience, that the president could not fire him. Only the attorney general had that right.
Richardson, after receiving an angry telephone call from Al Haig ordering him to fire Cox forthwith, requested a face-to-face meeting with the president. The meeting took place at 4:30 p.m. It was short and ugly; Richardson was back in his office before 5:00. He was beginning to describe their confrontation to Ruckelshaus and the third-ranking man in the Justice Department—the solicitor general, Robert Bork, whose job was to represent the president before the Supreme Court—when the phone rang again. Al Haig calling: this time for Ruckelshaus. Their conversation was brief—and brutal, too. Fire Cox now, Haig said; this is an order from your commander in chief. The deputy attorney general declined. Haig then asked to talk to Bob Bork.
“Both Elliot and I had urged Bork to comply if his conscience would permit,” Ruckelshaus remembered. “We were frankly worried about the stability of the government. Bork indicated to us that he believed the President had the power to fire Cox and he was simply the instrument of the exercise of that power. He thus issued the order discharging Cox.”* At 8:00 p.m. on October 20, the White House announced that Richardson had resigned and Ruckelshaus and Cox had been fired. The special prosecutor’s office was abolished by presidential order and sealed by FBI agents.
Cox had the last word: “Whether we shall continue to be a government of laws and not men is for Congress and ultimately the American people” to decide. That statement made the deadlines for Sunday’s papers. When asked what he would do next, Cox’s spokesman James Doyle said, “I’m going home to read about the Reichstag fire.” That ended the constitutional cataclysm of the Saturday Night Massacre and began a political conflagration.
* * *
The battles of Watergate reached a crescendo at the moment a war in the Middle East almost went global.
On October 20, the Yom Kippur War—so called because it had started on the Day of Atonement, which observant Jews devote to religious reflection—had been going on for nearly two weeks. The Arabs attacked the Israelis first. American intelligence on the Middle East, which relied heavily on Israeli intelligence, was caught unaware. Syria and Egypt gained the upper hand in the first days of the war, thanks to the element of surprise and Israeli military hubris.
“All our intelligence said there would be no attack,” the new secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, said at an emergency Cabinet meeting. “Why did Israel not figure there would be an attack?” He answered his own question, as was his style. The Israelis thought “there was no threat. The Arabs are too weak. So they interpreted the intelligence this way. We did the same.”
Kissinger, whose Senate confirmation hearings had been marred by questions over the White House wiretaps, had taken office on September 22. He remained in charge of the National Security Council, working in uneasy alliance with Al Haig, once his underling.
As Nixon sank deeper into the swamp of Watergate, Kissinger gained an imperial power over foreign policy, and Haig behaved like the acting president of the United States.* Nixon was increasingly incapable of playing his role as the leader of the free world. This telephone conversation between Kissinger and his NSC deputy Brent Scowcroft indicated Nixon’s incapacity:
SCOWCROFT: The switchboard just got a call from 10 Downing Street to inquire whether the President would be available for a call within 30 minutes from the Prime Minister. The subject would be the Middle East.
KISSINGER: Can we tell them no? When I talked to the President he was loaded.
That exchange was recorded at 7:55 p.m. on October 11, the fifth night of the war and the day after Agnew resigned.
* * *
The Israelis pleaded for American arms to help repel the invaders. Kissinger, Haig, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, and Joint Chiefs chairman Tom Moorer tried to mobilize a covert airlift of American weapons. Owing to a series of snafus, secrecy was lost, and giant U.S. Air Force cargo planes, their insignias highly visible, landed in Tel Aviv, their arrival caught on television cameras as Israelis cheered.
Both the Soviets and the Saudis had warned the Americans that this war in the Middle East was coming. The Saudis had explicitly told William Casey, the undersecretary of state for economic affairs and future CIA director, that they would use oil as a weapon unless America used its influence to pacify the Israeli army in its continuous conflicts with the Arabs. A few months earlier, Casey’s assistant Willis C. Armstrong had attended a lunch with Casey, the Saudi foreign minister, and the Saudi oil minister. He vividly recalled that the Saudis had said, “If you don’t do something to restrain the Israelis, there’s going to be a war in the Middle East. When the war breaks out, we’re going to have to put an embargo on oil to the United States.” Armstrong remembered: “Casey and I looked at each other after the lunch, and I said, ‘Shall we write that up?’ He said, ‘Nobody would believe us.’ But we were warned.”
The embargo began to take shape during the Yom Kippur War, shortly after the American arms shipments started arriving. The world price of oil quintupled. Soon millions of Americans began spending hours sitting in their cars, waiting in line to fill their gas tanks. Rage at the pump was nationwide.
The Soviets became deeply involved in the Yom Kippur War, resupplying their allies in Syria and Egypt. Brezhnev sent Nixon an increasingly tense series of messages, one proposing they work together diplomatically to stop the war, the second strongly suggesting that a joint U.S.-Soviet military task force serve as peacekeepers. A brief cease-fire had stopped the war, but then the Israelis broke it. The third message from Moscow was a threat: the Soviets might act unilaterally, militarily, in the Middle East to end the war.
The threat was real. American intelligence sensors in the Dardanelles, the narrow strait connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, detected Soviet ships carrying nuclear arms. This startling fact was confirmed thirty years later by David Michael Ransom and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, NSC staffers under Kissinger, though Ransom was at that moment serving as an intelligence watch officer at the State Department.
“The Soviets were shipping warheads to Egypt,” said Ransom, later an American ambassador in the Middle East. “That sent Kissinger into an extraordinary series of moves to bring the fighting to an end.”
The extraordinary moves began, one hundred hours after the Saturday Night Massacre, in the White House Situation Room. The principals at the meeting were Kissinger, Schlesinger, Moorer, Haig, and CIA director Bill Colby. The president was not present.
“Nixon was in his family quarters,” Sonnenfeldt said. “There were rumors that he was drunk.” They were not rumors.
This midnight conclave was recorded only in the diary of Admiral Moorer, declassified in 2007. Until then, the meeting remained one of the more mysterious events in modern American history.
Moorer’s diary of the night of October 24 had—to use a phrase Kissinger favored—the unpleasant odor of truth. Its record begins at 10:30 p.m., when Kissinger’s high-ranking aide Larry Eagleburger called Moorer for an urgent meeting in the Situation Room.
The diary begins: “We had just received a real piss-swisher from Brezhnev regarding the Arab/Israeli Conflict.” (Piss-swisher is navy slang; its polite equivalent is pot stirrer.)
“The Brezhnev letter proposed that the USSR/US urgently dispatch to Egypt, Soviet and American military contingents to ensure implementation of the Ceasefire and, further, containing the threatening sentence: ‘… it is necessary to adhere without delay. I’ll say it straight. If you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally.’”
All agreed that what the Soviets proposed in the Middle East was a potential disaster. If U.S. and Soviet soldiers started landing in the middle of the battle, each side standing with its allies, it could look like the opening day of World War III.
“This would not be a NATO war,” Moorer wrote (his italics are verbatim). “Any direct confrontation on the ground with the Soviets would be very difficult. In short, the Middle East is the worst place in the world for the US to get engaged in a war with the Soviets.” No one disagreed.
“The big question then became Why did the Soviets suddenly reverse themselves and without any warning all day then ‘bang’ we receive the Brezhnev threat?” Nobody had any clear answers. But they all surmised that the Soviets were responding to Israel’s breaking the brief cease-fire. The Israeli violation of the agreement broke the camel’s back, Kissinger agreed.
Kissinger had bigger thoughts, recorded word for word by Moorer: “the Soviets were influenced by the current situation the President finds himself in … if the Democrats and the US public do not stop laying siege to their government, sooner or later, someone will take a run at us.… Friday the Pres US was in good shape domestically. Now the Soviets see that he is, in their mind, non-functional.… The overall strategy of the Soviets now appears to be one of throwing détente on the table since we have no functional President, in their eyes, and, consequently, we must prevent them from getting away with this.”
In the absence of a functioning president, these five men, led by Kissinger, decided to send strong signals to the Soviets to back off. They raised America’s global nuclear alert level to DEFCON III, one step short of imminent nuclear war. They dispatched three warships to the Mediterranean, alerted the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, and recalled seventy-five B-52 nuclear bombers from Guam. Since that entailed the immediate movement of many thousands of American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, Moorer said the decisions would immediately be leaked—which was not a bad thing, since the Americans wanted to signal to the Soviets how seriously they took the threat.
“At 0400 we went to bed to await the Soviet response,” Moorer’s record ended, save for one last thought: “If the Soviets put in 10,000 troops into Egypt what do we do?”
The United States might have gone to war—or it might have done nothing. As Larry Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under President George H. W. Bush, later noted, “One of the things that I recall now with a great deal more equanimity than I did at the time is what was never really understood: the degree to which the Watergate crisis, particularly in its final months, meant that if we had been put to the test somewhere in the foreign policy arena, we would not have been able to respond. We were a ship dead in the water.”
Through good luck and, perhaps, blind fortune, Moscow and Washington backed away from the specter of a Third World War. Kissinger, to his great credit, began a three-year attempt to try to negotiate peace in the Middle East. To his discredit, when word of the nuclear alert leaked, as it did almost instantly, he deceived the press, saying the president had saved the day, when Nixon had spent the night in a stupor.
The other question raised by reporters was how a handful of unelected officials could raise a global military alert, mobilize the Eighty-Second Airborne, and send nuclear bombers aloft in a secret midnight meeting without consulting Congress or, as it became evident, the president. In the charged atmosphere created by the Saturday Night Massacre, it looked like the Nixon administration might indeed become a government of men, not laws.
It seemed worse to Elliot Richardson, the sacked attorney general: “A government of laws was on the verge of becoming a government of one man.”
* * *
That one man had reasons to drink himself to sleep on the night of October 24. The president had said that day his enemies would assassinate him; Nixon told Kissinger that they wanted “to kill the President. I may physically die.”
Real threats faced the president along with his roiling fears.
Hours before the Situation Room meeting, the House of Representatives, for the first time since 1868, began formal proceedings to impeach the president of the United States. Then Nixon’s constitutional lawyer, Charles Alan Wright, announced that the White House would at last turn over the subpoenaed tapes to Judge Sirica. And Nixon caved in to demands from Republican leaders in Congress, responding to the overwhelming outrage of their constituents, to reestablish the special prosecutor’s office.
The new sheriff in town was Leon Jaworski, a prosecutor of Dachau concentration camp commanders and a past president of the American Bar Association. He also was the 1972 chairman of Texas Democrats for Nixon. That fact did not immediately endear him to Cox’s army of investigators, but Jaworski told them he would follow the evidence wherever it led, even into the Oval Office. Congress wanted to hear him say that explicitly.
Q: You are absolutely free to prosecute anyone; is that correct?
A: That is correct. And that is my intention.
Q: And that includes the President of the United States?
A: It includes the President of the United States.
Archibald Cox’s files had been preserved, most of his staff stayed on, and the restoration of a government of laws began.
* * *
The Internal Revenue Service had discovered that Nixon had paid $792 in income tax in 1970 and $878 in 1971.* With a salary of $200,000 per year, he should have been paying considerably more. In 1969, Nixon had donated his pre-presidential papers to the National Archives and received a huge deduction, but his lawyers had backdated the deed of gift to dodge a change in the tax laws. The disclosures about his taxes were damaging; the response from the president on November 18 was disastrous.
“I am not a crook,” said Richard Nixon, a retort that did not resonate among the American people.
After the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon needed a new attorney general, his fourth in five years. He chose one of the Senate’s own, William B. Saxbe, an Ohio Republican and former state attorney general, calculating he would be quickly confirmed. Saxbe was, by his own description, “a wild hare,” an unorthodox Republican, but he was more than willing to take the job; he found the Senate stultifying. He went to the White House; he found the atmosphere like a hospital ward. His interview was short; Saxbe had one question. He wanted to know if the president was in any way implicated in Watergate.
“Nixon lied to me,” Saxbe said.
On November 21 came the revelation in Judge Sirica’s courtroom that two of the subpoenaed tapes could not be found and that the third had essentially been obliterated by the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. Moreover, the gap had two distinct tones: five minutes of white noise, which could be explained by Rose Mary Woods’s human error involving the foot pedal. But that noise was followed by an entirely distinct sound, like a distant whirlwind.
Called to the stand by the judge, Haig testified that only three people had had access to that tape, which recorded Nixon and Haldeman roughly seventy-two hours after the Watergate burglars had been arraigned. Those three were Rose Mary Woods, Steve Bull, and Richard Nixon. Electronics experts, including National Security Agency technicians, established that the foot pedal was not at fault. Haig suggested to Sirica that an unseen sinister force had erased the tape. The judge suspected that Nixon was the force in question. But there the mystery ended, unsolved.
And in truth what was not on the tapes was immaterial. What mattered was what was on the tapes.
By December, under orders from Judge Sirica, the special prosecutor, his investigators, and the grand jury had custody of three tapes. And the first they heard, dated March 21, 1973, was the conversation about the cancer on the presidency, highlighted by Nixon’s assertion that he could get a million dollars in hush money.
“I for the first time realized that President Nixon was involved and culpably involved,” Jaworski recalled in an oral history. What he could never grasp was why anyone—in particular, the president of the United States—would preserve such vividly self-incriminating evidence on tape.
Nixon now reversed his earlier private pledge to congressional leaders that he would transcribe selected tapes and make the texts public. He consulted his White House lawyers, some of whom had started to suspect that they had a crook for a client. He saw how deeply they doubted he could weather the rough passages the transcripts would reveal. But he also knew that, one way or another, through the courts or through Congress, his words on tape might soon be inscribed in counts of an indictment or articles of impeachment.
Alone in his study at San Clemente at 1:15 a.m. on January 1, 1974, the president took out a yellow legal pad and began to put his thoughts on paper. “Do I fight all out or do I now begin the long process to prepare for a change, meaning, in effect, resignation?”
He paused to reflect. He picked up his pen.
“The answer—fight.”