United States v. Richard Milhous Nixon
RICHARD NIXON’S seventh crisis lasted seven months. The president’s final battle to save himself began on January 3, 1974, hours after Congress reconvened. That day, White House lawyers rejected the Senate Watergate Committee’s request for more than five hundred tapes and documents.
Still sleepless in San Clemente, the president made another note in his diary at 5:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 5: “Above all else: Dignity, command, head high, no fear, build a new spirit, drive, act like a President, act like a winner,” Nixon wrote. “Opponents are savage destroyers, haters. Time to use full power of the President to fight overwhelming forces arrayed against us.”
When he delivered his State of the Union speech on January 30, he addressed “the so-called Watergate affair.” He said, “I have provided to the Special Prosecutor … all the material that he needs to conclude his investigations and to proceed to prosecute the guilty and to clear the innocent. I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough.”
The special prosecutor quickly issued a stern correction: the president had not delivered a long list of requested tapes, documents, and memos. The White House lawyers immediately responded that they would not comply with the demands.
On February 6, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to begin impeachment proceedings against the president. The grueling process began in the House Judiciary Committee, which had substantial subpoena powers. The committee received a copy of Jaworski’s list of crucial evidence on February 22.
Nixon wrote, “The biggest danger I saw in the year ahead was that both the Special Prosecutor and the House Judiciary committee would begin requesting more and more tapes—always with the disclaimer that each request would be the last. But there would never be an end,” he feared, “until all 5,000 hours of tapes had been requested and surrendered.”
He vowed not to surrender. He believed that if he were driven from office America would be undermined. But he lacked the strength to fight and lose. His beloved daughter Tricia later showed him a note from her own diary, written that winter.
Something Daddy said makes me feel absolutely hopeless.… He has cautioned us that there is nothing damaging on the tapes; he has cautioned us that he might be impeached because of their content. Because he has said the latter, knowing Daddy, the latter is the way he really feels.
Her poignant note is the most powerful evidence of what Nixon knew and when he knew it.
* * *
On March 1, the Watergate grand jury handed Judge Sirica a staggering indictment.* Seven men stood charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice, including the former attorney general John Mitchell, the former White House chieftains Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and Nixon’s amoral adviser Chuck Colson. The charges included lying to the Senate, the FBI, and the grand jury itself.
Richard Nixon was named as an unindicted coconspirator by a unanimous vote of the nineteen-member grand jury. (It was actually a 38–0 decision; each grand juror had raised both hands in unison when polled.) This astonishing fact was kept secret, under judicial seal, at the special prosecutor’s request. Jaworski had political considerations to weigh, no less than Congress’s politicians had legal burdens to bear. He thought it best for the country that a president’s guilt or innocence be established by impeachment and conviction by Congress under the Constitution, not by indictment inside a courthouse.
On March 6, Nixon held a press conference and took a very pointed question. One of the perjury counts against Haldeman claimed he had lied to the Senate by averring that Nixon had said “it would be wrong” to raise a million dollars in hush money. The grand jury had heard the tape. What was the truth?
“I meant that the whole transaction was wrong, the transaction for the purpose of keeping this whole matter covered up,” the president replied. “I directed that Mr. Haldeman, Mr. Ehrlichman, Mr. Dean, and Mr. Mitchell [meet] so that we could find what would be the best way to get the whole story out.” These were two sentences with two bold lies. Fortunately for Nixon, he was not under oath.
Then Jaworski sought sixty-four additional tapes as evidence in the trial of United States v. Mitchell et al. On April 18, Judge Sirica subpoenaed them. That set up a confrontation potentially fatal to Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Among these tapes was the hottest smoking gun of all: the conversation about using the CIA to block the Watergate investigation.
Nixon sought a political solution to his legal crisis. He chose the edited-tape gambit—the same strategy that had created the Saturday Night Massacre. Of all Nixon’s many self-inflicted wounds, this was among the worst, confirming an observation Haldeman had made to the president a year before: “It is almost like we have a death wish.”*
* * *
On April 29, Richard Nixon spoke for thirty-five minutes on national television, seated next to a table stacked with binders full of expurgated tape transcripts. He said the binders contained “all the additional evidence needed to get Watergate behind us and get it behind us now.” They would leave “no questions remaining about the fact that the President has nothing to hide.”
The 1,308-page “Blue Book” was published by the Government Printing Office the next day. Long excerpts immediately appeared in newspapers and magazines. The transcripts left the American citizenry amazed and amused and appalled.
The transcripts had been carefully edited to conceal both foul play and foul language. Some of the censored parts were still as compelling as the content. For instance, Dean discussing Howard Hunt’s demands for money with the president on March 21, 1973.
D: You have no choice but to come up with the $120,000 …
P: Would you agree that that’s the prime thing that you damn well better get done…?
D: Obviously.…
P: [Expletive deleted].
“Expletive deleted” entered the American lexicon. By May 1, publishers were printing three million paperback copies of the “Blue Book.” The transcripts read like FBI wiretaps of gangsters plotting a heist, except that these men were sitting in the White House, not a warehouse. Here was the president of the United States talking, in that same conversation.
P: How much money do you need?
D: I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years.
P: You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.… Who would handle it? Any ideas on that?
He did not say it would be wrong. The revulsion of some Republicans in Congress—the people who could protect Nixon from impeachment and conviction—was intense. “Deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral,” said the Senate minority leader, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania.
The White House now drew the line. Nixon would provide nothing more to the special prosecutor than the Blue Book. His lawyers moved to quash Sirica’s subpoena for the sixty-four tapes Jaworski sought. The judge struck back, ordering the White House to produce the tapes forthwith. Nixon defied him. The U.S. Supreme Court, responding to Jaworski’s direct appeal, agreed to take the case on an emergency basis. The High Court agreed that in July it would hear oral arguments in United States v. Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States.
The House committee’s members knew the Blue Book transcripts had been falsified. The committee’s chief counsel, John Doar, had six of the relevant tapes in hand. The White House had supplied them to the federal grand jury under Judge Sirica’s orders; they had served as essential evidence against Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. Sirica took the tapes and conveyed them to the impeachment committee, a perfectly legal if completely secret procedure.
John Doar, who called himself a “Lincoln Republican,” had fought bravely for civil rights as a Justice Department official in the 1960s. As chief counsel, he had been studying the constitutional standards and the legislative history of impeachment since December.* His committee’s able and aggressive staff included a recent Yale Law School graduate named Hillary Rodham.
On May 9, Doar convened the first of eighteen executive sessions of the impeachment committee, presenting a lengthy “statement of information” that could form a template for a bill of impeachment. The committee heard witnesses ranging from John Dean to Leon Jaworski to White House lawyer James D. St. Clair. Considerable political conflict flared within the closed chambers.
The committee’s thirty-eight members ranged from the most conservative to the most liberal representatives in Congress. At the center of this spectrum stood four relatively moderate Republicans and three staunchly right-wing southern Democrats; these seven men were of no one mind. Each article of impeachment might stand or fall on the way they swayed.
The Constitution says a president may be impeached for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Treason was not at issue. Bribery was a touchy subject; many members of Congress performed unseemly favors for campaign contributors. But high crimes and misdemeanors—now, that was rich terrain. The phrase originated in fourteenth-century proceedings of the British Parliament. The history of Anglo-American jurisprudence showed that acts worthy of impeachment included the abuse of the powers of high office. “Abuse of power” was thus a high crime—and another phrase about to enter American discourse, alongside “expletive deleted.”
“Obstruction of justice” was by now common parlance, owing to the criminal proceedings against the president’s men. Nixon had been obstructing justice for two years, since the Watergate burglary, and his continuing defiance of the subpoenas was part of that pattern. Obstruction of justice was a felony designed to disguise a felony. And as Nixon had said more than once on tape: It wasn’t the crime. It was the cover-up.
After six weeks of deliberation, the committee began drafting formal articles of impeachment against the president of the United States at the end of June. In July—after the Supreme Court heard United States v. Nixon—the debate would begin.
* * *
During a seven-week stretch, from June 10 to July 29, Richard Nixon spent only seven days in the White House.
Nixon fled Washington and began an epic voyage, through the Middle East and Europe, then on to Moscow. He was determined to reappear on the global stage as the leader of the free world, the most powerful man on earth.
The sheer will Nixon showed by undertaking this trip was formidable. He began dictating his diary on tape again, a practice he had dropped for many months. Just before his departure on June 10, he recorded, “The great tragedy is that it seems to be a year and a half almost that is lost.”
On top of the sadness and the stress, he was not a well man. Nixon suffered from phlebitis, a blood clot in a vein of his left leg that caused swelling and suffering. The danger of the disease is that the clot can break loose, flow into the bloodstream, enter the lungs, and create a potentially fatal embolism. The phlebitis flared up just before he took off, and it pained him.
The first stop was Salzburg, Austria, a way station intended to let the president reset his body clock before a grueling week in the Middle East. Nixon was housed at Schloss Klessheim, an imperial building inside a gated park, with a soaring salon, cream-and-gold walls, and glittering crystal chandeliers. One among the president’s huge contingent was a State Department official, Alfred Joseph White, who assisted Nixon’s brief chat with the chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky. “He came out to greet Chancellor Kreisky,” White recalled. “The limp was very noticeable. He had a haggard, grey, drawn, exhausted look and seemed in pain. The agony of his situation was plainly evident. He seemed a bent and broken man in those ghastly few minutes. His Presidency was crashing down around him, and it showed.”
The next stop was Egypt, and the trip was a smashing success for all, owing greatly to dialogues between Kissinger and the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, which had started in November, after the Yom Kippur War, as part of Kissinger’s ceaseless shuttle diplomacy among the Arabs and Israelis.
Sadat was the son of peasants but behaved as if born to the presidency. He was amenable to reestablishing diplomatic relations with the United States, breaking Egypt’s military reliance on the Soviets, and consolidating the cease-fire with Israel. In January, Sadat had formally invited Nixon for a state visit.
On June 12, in Cairo, President Sadat awarded Richard Nixon Egypt’s highest civilian decoration, the Collar of the Nile. The route of their motorcade from the airport to the presidential palace was lined with as many as one million cheering Egyptians chanting Nixon’s name at the top of their lungs. The president of the United States was elated. Nixon and Sadat later traveled by train for three hours to the grand palace of Alexandria. They waved from an open coach to millions more who stood along the tracks, and they were greeted at their destination by mounted lancers in splendid regalia.
By the end of his two-day visit, after viewing the Great Pyramid of Giza and signing an accord with Sadat reestablishing relations, Nixon’s ecstasy at the welcome reception he’d received soothed his throbbing leg and eased his troubled mind.
“The Egyptians, as I saw, went all out,” said Arthur A. Houghton III, a senior officer at the American embassy in Cairo, who witnessed it all. “The President of the United States really was an earthquake to them, the most important thing that had happened for years. They went out of their way to make it clear [that] they wanted us to be a partner in the future. Nixon was—I don’t know what Nixon was.… But nevertheless he served the role that he needed to serve. It was a great ceremonial occasion.”
Nixon’s next stop was far less satisfying. On the evening of June 14 he landed in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and remained for twenty-two hours. King Faisal, then seventy-two years old, had been a principal architect of the recent oil embargo that had crippled the American economy and sent the stock market to a four-year low. The Saudi leader now pledged to be a friend to America—and American oil companies—in days to come. Nixon welcomed the promise of amity and oil. Unfortunately, he made a serious mistake in his toast to the king.
U.S. ambassador Jim Akins “had asked the President if he wanted any texts or talking points for his speech,” recalled Hume Horan, the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Saudi Arabia. “Nixon replied, ‘No, I write my own.’ So he got up there and began talking about King Faisal, and how wonderful it was that his father had cooperated with Lawrence of Arabia, the great role he had played in the Arab revolt, and how in his early days Faisal had been to France for the Paris Peace Conference with Woodrow Wilson. Excellent. But Nixon was speaking of the wrong Faisal! He was praising the late King of Iraq—not the Saudi Faisal, whose father had driven the Hashemites from Arabia! Jim’s blood ran cold.”
From there it was on to Syria, where the Hashemites once ruled. But in 1974, Syria was under the iron hand of President Hafiz Assad, the father of the present-day dictator, Bashar Assad, who was then eight years old. Nixon recounted that the young Bashar had seen the June 15 arrival ceremonies in Damascus for the president of the United States on television and had asked his father that night, “Wasn’t that Nixon the same one you have been telling us for years is an evil man who is in complete control of the Zionists and our enemies? How could you welcome him at the airport and shake his hand?”
Nevertheless, Nixon recorded that he “was very impressed with President Assad,” who had “a lot of charm.” Nixon reestablished American diplomatic relations with the autocratic regime. He was all too often more amenable to dictators than democrats.
On June 16, Air Force One flew from Damascus to Tel Aviv, where the president and First Lady were met by Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel, and ensconced in the luxurious Suite 429 of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel was a unique landmark in the history of Israel: the headquarters for British military officers and diplomats who governed the land known as Palestine after World War II. In 1946 a terrorist gang called the Irgun blew up a section of the hotel, killing ninety-one people, most of them British overlords.* The British Mandate crumbled before Israel’s foundation in 1948; the King David’s splendor was restored.
Prime Minister Golda Meir had lost her seat after the military humiliations of the Yom Kippur War, but she still had clout; she was among the toughest of a tough people. Nixon graciously toasted her. But Nixon, the first American president to visit the Jewish state, spent a tense time with the new Israeli leadership during a long June 17 meeting at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The Israelis were not happy that Nixon and Kissinger were negotiating with Syria and Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Nixon was irritated at the Israelis’ attitude. To be blunt: Nixon didn’t like Jews, as he said time and again on the White House tapes.
Hal Saunders, Kissinger’s chief aide during the shuttle diplomacy, explained how the secretary of state skillfully smooth-talked and soothed the Israelis—diplomatic duplicity at its finest. “He stopped being the Secretary of State of the United States, who was trying to mediate an agreement,” Saunders said. “He became Doctor Kissinger, an American professor, serving as a consultant to the State of Israel, who, incidentally, had shared the Jewish experience. This metamorphosis was done in a very impressive, subtle and admirable fashion.” Kissinger—whom Nixon had barred from Middle East negotiations before making him secretary of state precisely because he was Jewish—salved the tensions and salvaged Nixon’s visit to Israel.
They flew the short hop from Tel Aviv to Amman on the afternoon of June 17. King Hussein of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan had for years been a rare friend to the United States in the Middle East. Suave and politically astute, King Hussein survived through the turmoil of his time by making alliances with anyone amenable, especially the United States. America trained and equipped his air force and shared intelligence on how best to survive in a rough neighborhood rife with the fathers and grandfathers of today’s terrorists.
Nixon’s arrival in the wake of the Yom Kippur War was a serious security issue for the king. “This being the first visit of an American president in the Middle East with an extremely unpopular U.S.–Middle East policy in the Arab world, the Jordanians were afraid he was going to get killed,” said Roscoe S. Suddarth, U.S. ambassador to Jordan under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush and a senior political counsel at the American embassy when Nixon came to Amman. “Who was going to be in the flatbed truck following the Nixon car and motorcade? The Nixon advance team wanted to put all photographers and the Jordanians wanted to put all soldiers with submachine guns.”
This part of the trip was dispiriting. Nixon was exhausted: he turned down a palace lunch with King Hussein. He was anxious: the news that he had been named as an unindicted coconspirator in United States v. Mitchell had leaked, and the Senate Watergate Committee was about to release its final report. Nixon looked “like a waxen Madame Tussaud effigy,” Ambassador Suddarth said. “He just wanted to be alone and worry about Watergate.”
What Nixon really wanted right then was a long rest at Camp David, away from it all in the peace and quiet of his mountaintop retreat. He flew back to America over a two-day trip, stopping in the Azores, an Atlantic Ocean archipelago about 850 miles west of Portugal, where the United States had a well-equipped air force base. The dictatorial leader of Portugal, António de Spínola, flew out to greet him after his eight-hour flight, and following some diplomatic niceties Nixon was abed by nine. Flying home across the ocean, greeted on the White House Lawn by Vice President Ford in the late afternoon of June 19, he then made brief televised remarks to the American people. Borrowing a phrase from Eisenhower, he said that waging peace was harder than waging war.
The next day, he took his helicopter to Camp David for a three-day vacation. A hard week lay ahead, including a summit with the Soviets that held few hopes for ushering in a more peaceful world.
* * *
First, Nixon flew to Brussels to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed after World War II, at the dawn of the Cold War, as a military and diplomatic alliance of the United States and Western Europe against the Soviet Union and its satellite states. The great leaders of that era (Eisenhower, Churchill, de Gaulle) all had died in the past decade. Their successors were by comparison second-rate.
Donald Rumsfeld had risen to become the American ambassador to NATO. Rumsfeld’s counselor for political affairs, James E. Goodby, received the president at the Brussels airport. Nixon had “a face carved out of wood—no expression,” Goodby said. “It was quite a shocking experience to see a president of the United States looking like that.”
Nixon, in his formal address to the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s decision-making body, said that he and Brezhnev had put an end to the Cold War—the struggle that was the sole rationale of NATO’s existence. This bald assertion shocked leaders such as Helmut Schmidt, chancellor of West Germany, who had Communist troops garrisoned on his nation’s eastern border and tens of thousands of American soldiers stationed in his country.
And then Nixon returned to Moscow, where Brezhnev jovially escorted him to a lively welcoming festival and a state dinner at the Kremlin. A year before, in a telephone call to his daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Nixon had described an animated conversation with the Soviet leader while riding on the Sequoia in Washington. “My god, he really thinks I’m the greatest friend he’s ever had,” Nixon said. “The thing is with all this wallowing in Watergate, my god, Brezhnev and I are deciding the future of the world. These bastards have got to understand that.”
The fortunes of the world were unaffected by the summit. Nixon and Brezhnev still spoke of their friendship, but their nations were now at odds on nuclear arms. SALT had stalled, and they could go nowhere on arms control until the treaty was resolved. “SALT—this is the most difficult of all,” Nixon said to Brezhnev on July 28. “In terms of an overriding runaway nuclear arms race, agreement on offensive arms is crucial.”*
Nixon continued: “If we are unable to reach agreement or to make progress in reaching agreement in the future, inevitably the reaction will be, on our side, to go forward with our offensive nuclear weapons program; and, of course, the Soviet Union will do likewise; it is inevitable. So the question we have is whether to control the nuclear arms race before it controls us. I wish I had the solution.”
On June 29, Brezhnev took Nixon and Kissinger to his dacha on the Crimean Sea, still hoping to solve the problem of MIRVs undermining arms control. “We suggest that the U.S. be limited to 1100 MIRVs and 1000 for the Soviet side,” Brezhnev said the next day. “This means 100 MIRV missiles more for the American side.”
Kissinger responded that “this was impossible.” He continued: “We will have to stop our MIRV programs next year, but the Soviets will continue for four more years at their maximum capacity. This will be represented in the U.S. as our freezing while permitting the Soviets to catch up.”
Nixon saw they were getting nowhere. He proposed a ride on Brezhnev’s boat. “I agree,” Brezhnev said. “It is time to go out on the water.” The voyage was less joyous than the sail on the Sequoia. Nixon returned to Moscow downcast.
“Sophisticates in the press and political world [will] zero in on the fact we were unable to get an agreement on further limitation of strategic arms,” he told Brezhnev on July 2 at their last formal talk. “Some of the critics, we have to recognize, will jump on this and say this summit was a flop.” Nixon in fact thought that the summit, the fanfare notwithstanding, had been in large part a failure.
Air Force One took him to Loring Air Force Base in Caribou, Maine, the easternmost military outpost in the United States, and then directly to Key Biscayne for the July 4 holiday. As much as he loved his role as world leader, he longed for another respite. When he returned to the Oval Office on Monday, July 8, he knew his judgment was at hand.
* * *
That was the day the Supreme Court heard United States v. Richard Milhous Nixon. Leon Jaworski and James St. Clair were granted three hours for oral argument, thrice the Court’s standard—but this was no ordinary case. Eight of the nine justices were present. William Rehnquist, having served in the Nixon administration, recused himself.
The sole issue before the Court was Nixon’s claim of executive privilege to shield his tapes from the special prosecutor. The president did not argue that he was protecting secrets of state (a stance that could have carried considerable strength), but rather that the sanctuary of the Oval Office kept presidential conversations confidential.* Congress and the courts had no right to hear them.
Jaworski’s argument to the justices went directly to the High Court’s earliest ruling on the separation of powers under the Constitution, the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison, which stated that the duty of American judges was “to say what the law is.” The president had placed himself above the law by defying the subpoena for the tapes. St. Clair, by contrast, said that the Constitution commanded that only by impeachment could a president submit to the power of another branch of government; the secrecy of the tapes was a political controversy beyond the reach of the Supreme Court.
Justice Lewis Powell, appointed by President Nixon in 1972, cut to the heart of that argument. “Mr. St. Clair,” he asked, “what public interest is there in preserving secrecy with respect to a criminal conspiracy?”
St. Clair’s reply was straight out of Alice in Wonderland: “The answer, sir, is that a criminal conspiracy is criminal only after it’s proven to be criminal.”
But the subpoenaed tapes were at the center of the criminal case against Mitchell and his codefendants—in which the president was an unindicted coconspirator. On one of the tapes, Henry Petersen, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, discussing the legal problems that might face Haldeman and Ehrlichman, had presciently and precisely explained where the president now stood: “For example, I am indicted. You’re an unindicted co-conspirator. You are just as guilty as I am.”
St. Clair stood by his guns. Impeachment by the House and conviction in the Senate was the only recourse—and even then, executive privilege could protect discussions of presidential conduct on the tapes. Justice Thurgood Marshall, appointed by President Johnson in 1967, thought this ludicrous.* “How are you going to impeach him if you don’t know” what was on the tapes? Marshall asked. “You lose me someplace.”
St. Clair had lost more than one member of the Court. After Justice Powell’s death, his private papers on the Court’s deliberations in United States v. Nixon were placed in the archives of the Washington and Lee University School of Law in Virginia. They show how the Court achieved consensus in the case.
Chief Justice Warren Burger was Nixon’s confidant and the Court’s most conservative member (along with the recused Rehnquist). He sometimes met in private with the president, which was injudicious. The chief justice wanted an acknowledgment that executive privilege existed. He also wanted to write the opinion of the Court in his name.
The Court’s liberal justices crafted a compromise in two weeks. They convinced the chief and his conservative colleagues such as Powell that the president could not use executive privilege to usurp the Court’s duty to say what the law was. They invoked the words of James Madison from the Federalist Papers, a foundation for the Constitution: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The decision satisfied the chief’s desire to establish a legal principle of executive privilege—and the Court unanimously ordered Nixon to hand over the tapes.
* * *
Since July 12, Nixon had been isolated at La Casa Pacifica, the “House of Peace,” his home in San Clemente, huddled with a few close aides waiting for word from the Supreme Court and the impeachment committee. “I suppose it could be said this is our Seventh Crisis in spades,” he wrote in his diary on July19. “We can only hope for the best and plan for the worst.” On July 23, he learned that one of the conservative Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee was going to vote for impeachment.
“Well, Al,” he said to Haig, “there goes the presidency.”
He tried to draft a speech that night, but he was overtaken with hopelessness. In the margin of his legal pad, he wrote, “12:01 a.m. Lowest point in the presidency, and Supreme Court still to come.” He could not sleep until 2:30 on the morning of July 24. The Court handed down its ruling four hours later.
Haig awakened him. “It’s pretty rough, Mr. President.”
“Unanimous?”
“Unanimous. There’s no air in it at all.”
“None at all?”
The House began its hearings against the president that evening. The drafting of three articles of impeachment went up to the last minute. The debates over the charges against the president lasted through three long nights before the first vote was taken. Nixon would not return to Washington until it was tallied.
The hearings, televised in prime time, had moments of rambling diatribes but also some reasoned discourse. Forty million Americans received an education on the principles of the Constitution, along with a bill of particulars on the high crimes and misdemeanors of a president.
The tapes were transcribed, as commanded by the Supreme Court, and prepared for publication. These words could not be deleted; they were indelible.
* * *
On July 27, by a vote of 27–11, with six Republicans joining all twenty-one Democrats, the committee passed the first article of impeachment against the president. In a preamble, it said that Richard Nixon, by obstructing justice, had violated his oath of office to defend the Constitution and to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
The bill of particulars listed his high crimes. The president had lied. He had withheld evidence. He had counseled his aides to present false testimony. He had stonewalled the Justice Department, the FBI, the special prosecutor, and Congress. He had approved paying hush money to criminal defendants, thus “rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.” He had tried to misuse the CIA to obstruct the FBI, a fact derived from the meticulous files of Gen. Vernon Walters. And he had “made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation had been conducted” into Watergate.
“Wherefore,” the article concluded, “Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”
Nixon had been swimming in the Pacific while the yeas and nays were tallied. He was changing at the beach house when Ron Ziegler called. And there, looking out into the ocean, barefoot and wearing a blue windbreaker emblazoned with the presidential seal, Nixon began to realize that he might have to resign. The full House would surely pass that article—and, as Nixon was learning from his dwindling band of allies on Capitol Hill, a vote of conviction by two-thirds of the Senate was increasingly likely.
Monday, July 29, was his first full day back in Washington after more than two weeks in San Clemente. The second article of impeachment came down with an even stronger vote, 28–10. It read like a criminal indictment: the president had abused his power by interfering with the lawful conduct of the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the Justice Department, and the special prosecutor. It made special note of the White House Plumbers, whose work was “financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions.” And it cited the 1969 White House wiretaps as unwarranted “electronic surveillance … for purposes unrelated to national security.” The second article concluded, “Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
The third and final article passed the next day—like the first, by a 27–11 vote. Following the patterns of fact laid down in United States v. Nixon, the committee accused Nixon of defying lawful subpoenas, and thus usurping unto himself “judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.”
Nixon could not sleep at all that night. Noting the time and date atop his legal pad—3:50 a.m. on July 31—he weighed three choices: resign, fight until impeached by the full House, or struggle through the trial before the Senate. Dawn had broken before he concluded, “End career as a fighter.”
And then he showed Al Haig the “smoking gun” tape transcript. The words of the president recorded on June 23, 1972, were evidence of his obstruction of justice in the Watergate break-in. There they stood in black ink: his order that the CIA must tell the FBI, “Don’t go further into this case—period.” By command of the Supreme Court, those words would be a matter of public record in a few days. Nixon himself had said that obstruction of justice was an impeachable offense. Haig thought the smoking gun was fatal; Nixon feared the same. If he fought his impeachment, he could be convicted by the Senate. He would no longer be his own judge and jury. He would stand alone.
On August 1 the president told Haig he would resign within a week. Every preparation for the transition of power was to be conducted in complete secrecy, with one exception. Nixon instructed Haig to tell Gerald Ford: it was time for him to steel himself to be sworn into office. Ford, on the day before the vote on the first article of impeachment, had made a rousing speech in Indiana proclaiming the president’s innocence. He was about to be disabused.
Then, on Tuesday, August 6, Nixon, incredibly, held a full-dress Cabinet meeting and, with a straight face, said that in the best interests of the nation he would not resign. He then launched into an exposition of the economic policies that the White House would propound for the next six months. Attorney General William Saxbe was appalled. “Mr. President,” Saxbe said, “don’t you think we should be talking about next week, not next year?” In dead silence, Nixon arose from the table and left the room.
* * *
At 9:00 p.m. on August 8, 1974, the thirty-seventh president of the United States made his thirty-seventh formal televised address to the American people. He came quickly to the point.
I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter, I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation will require.
I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interests of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.…
Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
The following morning, everyone working at the White House, from the uniformed women who vacuumed the carpets to the military officer who carried the briefcase with the launch codes for nuclear war, gathered in the elegant East Room of the White House to await the president’s last words.
Nixon came out of an elevator and started walking down the corridor slowly, as if in a trance. His military aide put his hands on Nixon’s chest, bracing him, telling him where he was, who was in the room, and what was about to happen. The atmosphere was overwhelmingly emotional. Many people were in tears.
Among the hundreds who saw Nixon’s farewell was NSC officer David Michael Ransom, the marine veteran who had detected Soviet warheads heading toward Egypt during the Yom Kippur War.*
“There was a hush as he went up to the podium,” Ransom remembered. “People cheered and tried to cheer and applaud. He gave a speech that I could only describe as pathetic.”
I remember my old man. I think that they would have called him sort of a little man, common man. He didn’t consider himself that way. You know what he was? He was a streetcar motorman first, and then he was a farmer, and then he had a lemon ranch.… And then he was a grocer. But he was a great man, because he did his job, and every job counts up to the hilt, regardless of what happens.
Nobody will ever write a book, probably, about my mother. Well, I guess all of you would say this about your mother—my mother was a saint. And I think of her, two boys dying of tuberculosis, nursing four others in order that she could take care of my older brother for three years in Arizona, and seeing each of them die.… Yes, she will have no books written about her. But she was a saint.
The president concluded, “We think that when we suffer a defeat that all is ended.… Not true. It is only a beginning, always.… 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.”
Ransom remembered: “I felt relief about his resignation, but I also felt a deep running admiration for a man who faced adversity so courageously. Sometimes, when you are a soldier, the enemy might overrun you; you then have a choice between surrender and fighting. My heart has always gone out to the men who keep on fighting.”
The morning was cloaked with clouds. A helicopter awaited on the lawn. Nixon left the White House, said farewell to Gerald Ford, and walked to the chopper. Ransom stepped out onto a balcony to watch Nixon fly away. Two other people stood beside him. One was the White House chef, wearing his white uniform. The other was Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, smoking his pipe.
“Nixon flashed his double-armed signal of departure with two fingers raised in a ‘V’ sign and then he turned and entered the helicopter,” Ransom said. “It began cranking up very slowly. Finally, there was a deafening sound. The chopper lifted off, pivoted, and disappeared into the gloom of the morning. It was almost a haunted scene.”
As the helicopter faded into the fog, the three men looked at one another. Schlesinger took his pipe out of his mouth, banged it on the railing, emptying the bowl, and said, “It’s an interesting constitutional question, but I think I am still the secretary of defense. So I am going back to my office.” He looked at the cook and said, “What are you going to do?”
The cook said, “I’m going to prepare lunch for the president.”
“I thought, ‘Of course. The king is dead. Long live the king!’” Ransom said. “The cook had it right. This wasn’t a matter of abstruse argument over constitutional privileges. Our state was going to carry on and the president would want lunch in about an hour and a half. So, the cook went off and prepared it.
“I’ve always thought of that as something very important about our country. We may stumble but we don’t fall.”